So our house is ugly on the outside, and has lots of wasted space inside. What are we going to do about it? Quite a lot.

Regarding the wasted space, we’re doing some major reshuffling on the inside.

• The large bathroom and the small entry hall will switch places, so we will have a larger and more useful hall, but a small bathroom.
• The “weird room” will become smaller and will be reachable from the hall, so it will become a walk-in closet/wardrobe.
• The laundry function will move from the bathroom and the “weird room” to the pantry/mud room.
• And finally, the long useless hallway will expand to both sides and become a proper room, a second living room. It will gobble up part of the bathroom, the space now filled by the long row of wardrobes, and about half of the veranda.

On the outside, the main idea is to try to make the extension feel less like a shoe box, and to make the house blend in better with the rest of the neighbourhood’s 100-year-old houses.

• The extension will get a hipped roof.
• The various windows on the western side will be unified – the two tiny windows replaced with one normal-sized one, and the hall window (soon to be the bathroom window) moved up to be level with the kitchen window.
• The shaky-looking veranda at the rear will be torn down. It will be replaced by a simple wooden deck.

At the same time there will be more technical improvements with no visible effect.

• All the old electrical wiring will be replaced with new, grounded wires.
• The pantry/mud room/laundry room gets proper insulation. The walls currently leak heat so badly that during our first winter here the temperature there actually went below freezing. (We quickly installed a thermostat-controlled mini heater there.)

One thing we’re not touching is the kitchen. The project is large and expensive enough as it is, so the kitchen will have to wait. It may be a bit ugly and the craftsmanship is substandard and the layout could be better too, but it works, so it stays for now (even though the new floor plan below shows some changes there). The wall between the kitchen and the living room, which you can see in the original floor plan, is already gone.

Here’s the old floor plan and the new one (unfortunately with the text rotated 180 degrees but you’ll figure it out):

As I’ve briefly mentioned, we’re remodelling our house. We took the first step already almost two years ago, when we’d barely lived here half a year, by tearing down the wall between the kitchen and the living room.

The house was originally built in 1907. Then in 1973 the enterprising taxi driver who owned it at the time built an extension. What he really wanted was a large garage for his taxi firm, and the only way he could get planning permission for that was if it was attached to the house. The old house sits on a hill so he built a garage next to and below it, and joined the two parts by adding one storey on top of the garage, level with the original house.

To me it looks obvious that the planning and design of the extension was done on a shoestring budget. It is a butt ugly box on the outside, with a weird, impractical floor plan inside. I am pretty sure that no architect was ever involved in the creation of that thing. Whenever someone asks which house is ours, I tell them it’s the yellow house on the hill with an ugly, boxy extension.

The north facade of the house is the worst, really showcasing its boxy nature. And just look at the windows: the bathroom window (the small one nearest the old part of the house) is bisected by a pole! That wasn’t an error by the builders or a later change, that’s the way it looks on the original drawings.

Inside we have:

• one nice large well-lit bedroom;
• one reasonably large but ugly bathroom;
• a weird room reachable only from the bathroom, originally meant as a sauna but never furnished or equipped as one, now used to store stuff and to dry our laundry;
• a long useless corridor with lots of built-in wardrobes – so narrow that we removed the bathroom door because it was blocking the corridor.

On the floor plan, the old part is to the left, and the extension to the right. (The floor plan doesn’t match the current state of affairs to 100% but it’s close enough.)

Ugly on the outside, lots of wasted space inside. We’re going to change that.

I should blog about our remodelling project, but it looks unlikely that I will find the necessary time and piece of mind. We’ve had builders in the house since Monday morning, and they are noisy. Crowbars, reciprocating saws, and a screaming baby together make it hard to concentrate. So this post will have to do for now; details and photos will have to wait.

After weeks and weeks of scorching heat and almost no rain, this is what 90% of the ground in our garden looks like… There are some partially green patches in the shade of the house on the north side, and the raised beds in the kitchen garden are also green due to daily watering. But most of the grass is totally dead.

On Midsummer’s Eve we finally moved into the upstairs rooms.

Downstairs has a kitchen, a living room, a large bedroom, a bathroom, a weird room behind the bathroom, and two hallways. Upstairs has two smaller rooms and a toilet. Until now we’ve really only lived downstairs. One of the upstairs rooms has served as a library, with bookshelves along all walls, and also housed many of the plants that we brought with us from London. The other room has basically been a transit warehouse for unpacking and sorting books, but it’s occasionally doubled as a guest bedroom. (We tend to refer to it as “the room with the boxes”.)

We know we will have to vacate the downstairs bedroom for the refurbishment some time later this year. It’s not imminent (we haven’t even got planning permission yet) but it is certain to happen some time within the next half a year. We also think that Ingrid might get more and better sleep if she doesn’t have to share a bedroom with a (possibly rather noisy) baby.

Circumstances led to it all happening on Midsummer’s Eve. We were recently given a child bed that Ingrid’s cousins have outgrown; we recently found time to sort through the last few boxes of books; we had guests coming for a Midsummer barbecue whom we could ask for help carrying the beds upstairs.

Unfortunately carrying our king-size bed upstairs turned out to be impossible: it just won’t fit up the staircase. Eric and I ended up sleeping on our guest mattresses instead. It all felt like a makeshift camp: us sleeping on mattresses on the floor, Ingrid sleeping next to piles of boxes and a bunch of plants that we haven’t gotten around to moving yet.

And, after bravely promising she’d sleep on her own in her own room, Ingrid tottered into ours at about 2 o’clock. Then she proceeded to toss and turn and climb around for what felt like an eternity. I guess everything felt strange and out of place. After a while Eric gave up and moved out to Ingrid’s room; after about an hour Ingrid finally settled in, too. All in all, it was the worst night’s sleep we’ve had in many months.

Tomorrow we’re going emergency bed shopping. (IKEA was closed today because of Midsummer’s Day.) Then we’ll do some cleaning up in Ingrid’s new bedroom, to make it feel less like a warehouse. But the new master bedroom is going to feel like a camp for the next half a year, or however long the refurbishment will take. After all, we will have to squeeze in all the important parts of a bedroom in addition to all the bookshelves that are there now.

Does anyone need/want a wooden base spring mattress (resårbotten)? IKEA Sultan something or other, 160cm, medium hard, bought in 2002, only rarely jumped on.

I love having a garden. I love our garden. Even though I don’t spend much time there every day (because our evenings tend to be busy, and because we have no evening sun in the garden), I love having it nearby and around me.

I love being surrounded by greenery rather than houses, cars or people. Looking out through the kitchen window during breakfast and seeing green grass, trees and blooming lilacs. Being met by growing things when leaving the house in the morning, and when coming home in the evening.

I love the quiet. Which is not a direct effect of having a garden, really, but a neighbourhood with gardens mean less dense housing, which in turn means more quiet.

I love the air and the smells. I like to end my day by walking out onto the balcony when brushing my teeth and just inhaling the garden. Just a few moments’ exposure makes a big difference.

We will hopefully have home-grown tomatoes this year. (That’s assuming the rest of the experiment turns out as successful as the first week.)

While there are still patches of snow here and there in the garden (and a huge heap of it on the north side, where Eric dumped the snow from the roof) the crocuses are already blooming, the scillas are well underway, and in the warmest and sunniest spot, I spotted a hyacinth blossom.

The birds are ignoring our feeding table so I took it down today. I guess there are enough insects around for them. The tits and sparrows who were hanging around all winter now rarely show themselves. Instead the wood pigeons and thrushes are back from wherever they spent the winter.

And this afternoon I even noticed the year’s first butterfly. (On the neighbours’ roof.)

The moment the snow disappeared from parts of our garden, green shoots appeared. They must have been ready already under the snow, because this was all under snow just two days ago, and I think it would take more than 2 days for the shoots to come out. I like the way they come right through the rotten leaves, due to snow holding the leaves down I guess.

The white stuff around the shoots is not snow but some kind of weird mold that appears to have thrived under the snow.

Spring is in the air. Well, it is still –10°C outside, and there is still half a metre of snow in the garden… but the sun is up well before me, and the birds are chirping and twittering much more actively.

Other creatures are, apparently, also getting that spring feeling. Here’s the sight that met us behind our house yesterday morning, where the snow had lain more or less untouched the previous night:

Hare tracks everywhere! Must be that March madness coming on.

I’ve never actually seen the hares visit our garden – just their tracks and some droppings underneath the bird feeder. (I guess they won’t say no to some seeds when they’re desperate.) Eric’s spotted them lurking in the lilac hedge at times.

The bird feeder has also attracted the interest of a couple of roe deer. (Look at how deep that snow is around the doe’s leg! I expect we’ll be reminiscing about the Great Winter of ’09 for many years to come.)

As with the hares, they’ll take peanuts and sunflower seeds when that’s the only thing on offer. We have very deliberately not put out any more suitable feed for them: we don’t want them to think that this neighbourhood is a good place for them to hang out. They should really stay in the nature reserves well away from here. Here they risk getting run over, and of course they are rather unpopular with most homeowners since they tend to eat parts of the garden that people would rather keep. Tulips, I’m told, are a favourite food in spring.

We haven’t planted any tulips, but I am hoping to see a lot of snowdrops, crocuses, scillas and daffodils.