The mess in the hallway: for real, not staged

We’re back. In fact we got back yesterday shortly before midnight, but I was too tired to do any blogging.

I haven’t been able to post anything during the vacation because the hotel had – shockingly – no Wifi available in the rooms. I will be posting some already-written posts in the next few days, as soon as I clean them up. Keep an eye out for backdated posts just below this one.

Just before leaving we emptied the living room and the kitchen of all loose items so the builders could move out all the furniture and then go to work on the wiring in those rooms, and also put drywall in place on the walls and ceilings. Then unexpectedly on Wednesday the new windows for those rooms arrived, so we agreed that they’d install those as well. Might as well get it done while the rooms are empty. This of course made the work take longer, and even though they had worked late on Thursday, they were nowhere near done, and had to continue work there today.

So today the house was almost uninhabitable. The only almost-usable rooms were the bathrooms and the two upstairs bedrooms. Even those were very cramped due to the extra stuff we’d had to put there temporarily while emptying the bottom floor. We had a picnic breakfast on the floor of Ingrid’s bedroom, since that’s where we found the largest free floor area: just large enough for Ingrid and me to both sit (Adrian was on Ingrid’s bed), with a tray perched on an archive box acting as a table between us. Cereal, milk and juice was the only thing I could access, so breakfast for me consisted of dry cereal.

My plan was to spend much of the day outside, but when the freezing winds were complemented by snowfall in the middle of the day, I gave up, and asked friend/neighbour P to shelter me and Adrian for a few hours. We took a walk together in the afternoon, I picked up Ingrid slightly too late from preschool, and by the time we got home the builders were almost done cleaning up after themselves. Now we just need to move everything back, and vacuum up the gypsum dust that’s gotten between and under everything. No shortage of work for the weekend.

The living room this afternoon

Yesterday I got Ingrid to go to her dance-n-play thing in the afternoon by promising that I’d be sitting right outside all the time. And I did. And she came to the door about 10 times, twice to cry about a bumped knee, and the rest of the time to announce that “we’re now playing follow the leader” or “I got to be the bear in the sleeping bear game” and so on. But at least she took part in the whole thing this time and didn’t want to leave early.

Ingrid’s obsession with not throwing anything away flared up yesterday. She got very upset when I emptied the small bin on the desk into the large one in the kitchen, and took it all out again. Then she told me “I wish there was no waste bin! I want to take it all!”

Today I went to meet some Sjalbarn mums again, like two weeks ago.

The builders have now demolished not just everything inside the extension, but also the old veranda outside. Inside, a lovely old window was uncovered, on what used to be the outside wall of the old house but is now inside between the to halves of the house. I’d have loved to keep it visible somehow but it’s right where we’d planned to have a wall, so it’s probably just going to get buried again.

Adrian, again, stuffy-nosed and clingy during the night. We managed to take a nap together later in the morning, despite the noise.

The builders demolished most of the interior in the new half of the house. It feels like a ballroom in there now. The new room is going to be wonderfully spacious.

The water to the new bathroom froze again. That’s the third incident this winter. The builders spent a fair amount of time walking around with thermometers, but even after all that they looked puzzled and could not say where or why the pipes froze. We will have to put in some sort of heating in the boiler room (which was where they found the coldest spot today) but nobody knows whether that will actually fix the issue since we don’t know what the issue is.

Temperatures this morning:

• Outdoors: –16°C
• Kitchen: 16°C
• Bathroom: 12.5°C
• Kitchen floor: 10°C

Ingrid still insists on staying with me rather than going to preschool, and really is at her best behaviour almost all day long. It’s worked unexpectedly well.

She is starting to miss her friends, but as she pointed out herself, all but one of them are in a different group at preschool anyway, so she wouldn’t get to meet them much even if she did go there. I’ve decided to take her there anyway on Wednesday so I can go to playgroup with Adrian – bigger kids are not welcome there on baby days.

In the morning, a trip to the clinic for Adrian’s 5-month vaccinations and the inevitable weighing and measuring. (8.2 kg and 68.5 cm.) Then to the pharmacy to pick up a cortison cream for a patch of eczema he has, plus some cream against his cradle cap, which isn’t bothering us in and of itself, but it’s covering his eczema and making that hard to treat.

In the afternoon, grocery shopping and a visit to the library.

A contractor was scheduled to come here today to start put up scaffolding, so the builders can start working on the new roof. But this weekend we got the builders’ estimates for the remaining tasks. (We’ve been nagging at them since before Christmas about this. I guess paperwork and estimating isn’t their idea of fun.) And the roof came in at about twice their original back-of-the-envelope estimate, so we cancelled the scaffolding immediately. With the sums we’re now talking about, the new roof is not going to happen. Not because we don’t have the money but because it’s not worth it. As an investment, it would never pay for itself – we’d never get that money back if we had to sell the house. Had it been cheaper we could have done it anyway, just because we ourselves would be happier with the house that way, but not for this kind of money. We can think of many better ways to spend it. So it looks like we’re stuck with our shoe box of an extension. Sigh.

Forgot to mention yesterday: I submitted my UK tax return. This year I am reporting 0 pounds income so hopefully I will not have to do one next year. (Last year I reported some minor interest income from our remaining UK bank account.)

Today was a relatively quiet day. Took the bus to Vällingby to buy a new fleece suit for Adrian (he’s almost outgrown the previous one) but couldn’t find any in the right size for a reasonable price. Will have to look at Tradera.

The builders erected a temporary wall across the living room. Looks pretty nice actually – they do solid work. The living room is a bit smaller now, and we’re squeezing in some furniture from the rooms we’ve had to empty, so it’s a bit tight, but not too bad. Cosy. Messy, too, for now. One of our windows ended up on the other side of that wall (intentionally, since it’s going to be moved and replaced) so it’s a bit dark, though.

The living room

Tried a mum & baby yoga class today, with mixed results. The yoga was nice, and it was nice to do something new. But trying to get anywhere on time with Adrian is always a challenge; having him awake and happy when we get there adds another layer of planning. Basically I had to plan all my activities from 8am onwards with the aim of making it to the class at 11. The class turned out to be an hour and a half long, which was way more than Adrian could take, so we got out after about an hour. And since I spent no more than half my time there doing yoga (the rest went to breastfeeding, nappy changes, and other baby management activities) I didn’t really think it was worth the time, or the effort, or the money. Not going back next week.

All my days recently have been filled with either boring long walks to keep Adrian happy, or exhausting planned activities. I need to find a middle ground: activities that keep us both reasonably occupied, without having to follow a schedule or be on time. Museums, perhaps.

The builders blocked off the kitchen and the living room and then tore out the ceilings. It’s a good thing I wasn’t planning to spend the day at home: it was dust and noise and reciprocating saws and plastic sheeting all the way.

Now that it’s finished, Eric has moved essential furniture back into the living room. Non-essentials are relegated to the basement, since we will need all the space we have for the stuff we currently have in the newer half of the house (which will be blocked off completely pretty soon). My immediate reactions are: (1) those extra 30 cm of height make a big difference, and (2) how nice to have an uncluttered room. When this is all done, I will try to have less stuff and less furniture in each room.

The builders are back, after a pause of more than a month. They started by installing (or whatever it’s called) a new window in the new bathroom, to replace an old one.

When we began the remodelling we inventoried the windows of this house. Between the 9 full-sized windows, we had 7 different sizes. They were also at different heights, even when on the same wall. Today the builders discovered that they had also been installed differently: some in line with the outside of the wall, some set back about 10 cm from the facade.

Now that they’ve replaced on the of the windows, at least the two windows on the same wall are of the same height and at the same height. On the other hand, the new window is of a completely different style and colour than all the others. So while in the long run it will all look better, in the short run it is actually getting worse.

Bought some nice clothes from the second-hand shop at Spånga torg. Most of their stuff is slightly too conservative for my taste, so I rarely venture inside. Now I saw a top + skirt from Desigual in the window, and once inside I also found a simple red velvet dress, nice and soft. Bought them all without trying, since I had Adrian in the sling, and only tried them on in the evening. Luckily all 3 fit me. I like buying 2nd hand clothing (and selling or giving away stuff I no longer wear) – it feels good to give things a 2nd life.

Watched part 2 of Band of Brothers with Eric in the evening.

New on the left, old on the right

It is nice to have a week of peace and quiet, with no builders around.

But it will be nice to have them back, too. Then they can look at our water heater, which is not doing its job well any more. We used to think that perhaps it was too small: there wasn’t enough hot water for two showers back to back. Now it’s almost worthless. Something seems to have happened when our pipes froze, or perhaps it has just broken independently of the cold. In any case, I can now get barely one shower out of it – and that’s assuming I turn off the water while I’m shampooing and soaping, and don’t turn on the full flow. Even then the tail end of the shower is less than hot. Today I wanted to give Adrian a bath and ran out of hot water after filling the tub a quarter of the way up.

I actually managed to combine dinner and Adrian’s bedtime. Bean stew. I kept Adrian awake while I did all the steps that required actual human intervention at the stove, then left it on low heat while I put him to bed, counting on him falling asleep in less than half an hour. The stew was pretty much done when I came down. Perfect!

Optimistically offered my help to the developer behind One Hundred Pushups, because I think the site lacks some essential features. It remains to be seen whether I will actually find the time for it.

We made two important decisions early on in this project. 1: We will get an architect to help us. 2: We will get builders to do all the work, and a general contractor to co-ordinate it all.

We’ve seen with our own eyes how bad the results can be when you don’t engage an architect. All we need to do is look at the newer half of our house, the one we’re now redoing so extensively. If you’re going to spend a lot of resources on a project (building or otherwise) it makes no sense at all to skimp on the planning.

And we’re busy people, Eric and I. Neither of us has any particular expert skills or experience in the construction industry. We don’t want to spend endless weekends and evenings doing a bit of painting here, a bit of sanding there, all the while living in an unfinished house – or coordinating between the various specialists we’d inevitably need anyway for electricity, plumbing etc. We’d rather pay an expert to take care of it all.

I’m very happy with both these decisions. The architect came up with ideas we’d never have thought of. On our own I suspect we’d have tweaked the house a bit here and a bit there, but he could take a step further back, view the whole thing with fresh eyes, and propose more radical changes. And he can easily throw out lots of quick alternative solutions to any area we discuss, whereas I myself would probably have locked onto one path early on and found it difficult to step far away from it. At the same time he is good at listening to our needs and opinions. If we say we don’t like x, or don’t think that y would be useful, he has no difficulty accepting that.

The builders are equally good at what they do. We’ve had no hassle at all. The right people are in the right place at the right time, with the right materials and tools. The right things get done the right way: no skimping, no shortcuts. And, last but definitely not least, they clean up after themselves! They protect the floors and the furniture as needed, they vacuum after themselves, and have even mopped the kitchen floor after doing something particularly messy.

We found both the architect and the builders via friends and family. It seems that this is the only viable way of finding good builders: we’ve heard several nightmare stories from people who have found theirs some other way. The architect was recommended by friends of ours who live just three houses down the road, and they had nothing but praise for his work. The builder has worked for various relatives of Eric’s.

The architect is Hans Dahlgren. I’d link to his web site but it is not at all confidence-inspiring; I’d never have contacted him if that was the only information I had. He is much better as architect than as web designer.

The builder is Bygg-Anton. That’s him in the photo, hard at work laying floor tiles in the new bathroom.