The floor guy has done his thing and left, and finally the building works here are done.

In the living room we opted for soap treatment only, like we have in the other rooms downstairs. I love the smell and feel of soap treated pine floors! The floor is getting its initial treatment here, with Adrian wetting the boards and Eric scrubbing in the soap. (I did the mopping up afterwards, when I wasn’t taking photos.)

The kitchen floor is going to get so many spills of all kinds that it needs more protection, so we went for a the most matte varnish available. The end result looks and feels much more pleasant than I had expected: very matte, quite different from all other varnished floors I have seen before. If varnished floors can be this discreet, maybe it wouldn’t have been too bad to varnish the floors in the other rooms as well? It will be really interesting to see how this ages.

I love the cute little ancient toolbox that the floor guy brought with him, along with his giant sander and whatevermajig in the background.

I feel like I’m living in a used furniture warehouse.

Eric trying out a new pillow.

Eric came back from visiting friends in Hälsingland, with lots of fresh redcurrants.

I love redcurrants, but they are impossible to find in shops. So now I will gorge myself on them for the next few days. Redcurrants for breakfast, lunch and dinner!

The house is a total mess, and I am heartily tired of it.

The kitchen floor is waiting to be finished, and we’ll give the living room floor a new finish at the same time. (It’s yellowed and scratched and scruffy, who knows how old the varnish is.) We’ll need to empty the kitchen and the living room for that. We’ve known that this is coming up “soon” for a while now, so some things that we packed away to make space back in May (such as most of Adrian’s things) are in boxes that are stacked in various places around the house. For three months now.

And all the rooms are swapping places – our bedroom moves, Ingrid moves, Adrian gets a room of his own – which means more boxes. And furniture and rolled-up carpets and paper bags of stuff, piled up here and there.

The floor guy has been on vacation so this has dragged on. But early next week the floor will finally get done and then we’ll have turned the corner and we can finally start putting things in order instead of making the mess worse.

We’re moving things around in the house, making space for Adrian to have his own room. While we’re at it, we’re also sorting through our library and getting rid of some of it.

I still love reading actual paper books, and I like to have lots of books easily accessible so that I can walk up to a bookshelf and pick something that I feel like reading or browsing. But there are books that, realistically, I will never read again.

Some I simply didn’t like at all, and maybe didn’t even finish. Those are easy to get rid of. I am very sure I will never want to read Sarah J. Maas again!

Others I enjoyed once, but not enough to read them again. Life is short and the world is full of books that I haven’t read yet. For me to re-read a book, it has to compete against all the possible new books I could read.

Still others I have re-read already and discovered that they didn’t age well – they were better in my memory than they turned out to be when I picked them up again.

Eric and Adrian are away, at a friend’s country house. It’s just me and Ingrid at home. The house feels unusually calm.

It’s good for all of us to get away from the rest of the family at times. Four people doesn’t sound like much of a crowd, but it sometimes feels like one to me.

Now we’ve had quiet meals, and we’ve played Minecraft together, and we can just hang around and read in peace and quiet.

Several red admirals fluttered by, as I sat in the garden this afternoon. They kept landing in a bucket we keep around for gathering up the fallen, overripe, bird-pecked cherries – just after I thought that maybe I should empty that bucket. Then I read that adult admirals drink from flowering plants and from overripe fruit, and left those cherries right where they were. I also read that their primary host plant is the stinging nettle, and felt better about all the nettles that keep coming up along the edges of the garden.

Fresh strawberries and Swedish plums. This will be a delicious breakfast.