home improvment projects
This weekend (and the week before it, too), have been busy ones on the home improvment front. We have painted one of the walls in the downstairs room a lovely dark blue (and now need to find a source for some silver metalic paint to decorate it, so if you have any suggestions on that part please let me know--bonus points if the source is in Sweden). While at it we also painted the inside of the door to the downstairs water closet the same dark blue, and it looks MUCH better (it had been a dreadful shade of greenish brown before getting scratched up and dammaged looking, and I have been wanting to do something about it since we moved in). That tiny room had been painted a pale baby blue by some previous house owner, and the tiles behind the sink are a similar shade of dark blue, so the blue door looks like it was all meant to go together with a minium of effort on our part. (note: I wouldn't have chose the baby blue, but since the room is only large enough for a sink and a toilet it doesn't look so bad, and I can live with it for however many years elaspe between now and when that room makes it back to the top of the priority list.)
Then we painted the floor of the downstairs room a dark grey, nicely covering all of the white spots from where we had filled in the holes in the concrete where the raised floor (that we took out due to mold) had been attached. Once that dries we can put things back into the room and have it as a useable space again--and more useable than it was before we ripped the floor out, too, since there is no mold left in it.
But most of the weekend was spent outside, enjoying the nice weather and moving strawberries. When we bought the house one of our neighbous had some strawberry patches on our field, and when he heard that we had plans smooth out the field he moved most of them to another property, leaving behind two small patches he didn't want anymore. Since the large rotating tool that we had planed to use on the field was broken last summer those patches were left where they were, and I happily ate (and froze for later enjoyment) strawberries for much of the summer. But this year that tool has been repaired, so when we go fetch the tractor that will come along too, so the berries had to move. Therefore we made a new home for them up on the hill closer to the house, right behind the shed:
Some of the raspberries that surrived winter after their late-autum transplant from a friend's yard to ours are also visible. I suspect that I will like hanging out in this corner of the yard later this summer when the berries are ripe. Must put in a bench...
One can also see the stump of the tree that we had to cut down. Last summer we noticed that it had a few dead branches, which, when we cut them off saw that they were soft and rotted already. Therefore, when none of the branches put out leaves this summer we were not so surprised. When we cut it down we could see that the tree hadn't actually finished dying--there was still water in one small quadrant fo the trunk, but the rest of it was in bad shape. So it is better to have taken it down now, rather than leaving it to fall on its own, especially as it was growing quite close to the shed (which, as you can see, is rather in need of repair and paint, but there are so many other projects on the list we may not get to that this year).
Today and tomorrow lord_kjar is in Stockholm for a class for work, so I have been continuing making progress on the list on my own. Since dropping him off at the airport this morning I fueled the car, washed it and vacumed and cleaned out the interior, did the final coat of paint on the above mentioned floor, spent an hour working on the walkway to the earth cellar, harvested some nettles which were growning too near the smultrons, cooked them up and put them into silicon muffin cups to freeze so that I can add them to recipies later.
Then we painted the floor of the downstairs room a dark grey, nicely covering all of the white spots from where we had filled in the holes in the concrete where the raised floor (that we took out due to mold) had been attached. Once that dries we can put things back into the room and have it as a useable space again--and more useable than it was before we ripped the floor out, too, since there is no mold left in it.
But most of the weekend was spent outside, enjoying the nice weather and moving strawberries. When we bought the house one of our neighbous had some strawberry patches on our field, and when he heard that we had plans smooth out the field he moved most of them to another property, leaving behind two small patches he didn't want anymore. Since the large rotating tool that we had planed to use on the field was broken last summer those patches were left where they were, and I happily ate (and froze for later enjoyment) strawberries for much of the summer. But this year that tool has been repaired, so when we go fetch the tractor that will come along too, so the berries had to move. Therefore we made a new home for them up on the hill closer to the house, right behind the shed:
Some of the raspberries that surrived winter after their late-autum transplant from a friend's yard to ours are also visible. I suspect that I will like hanging out in this corner of the yard later this summer when the berries are ripe. Must put in a bench...
One can also see the stump of the tree that we had to cut down. Last summer we noticed that it had a few dead branches, which, when we cut them off saw that they were soft and rotted already. Therefore, when none of the branches put out leaves this summer we were not so surprised. When we cut it down we could see that the tree hadn't actually finished dying--there was still water in one small quadrant fo the trunk, but the rest of it was in bad shape. So it is better to have taken it down now, rather than leaving it to fall on its own, especially as it was growing quite close to the shed (which, as you can see, is rather in need of repair and paint, but there are so many other projects on the list we may not get to that this year).
Today and tomorrow lord_kjar is in Stockholm for a class for work, so I have been continuing making progress on the list on my own. Since dropping him off at the airport this morning I fueled the car, washed it and vacumed and cleaned out the interior, did the final coat of paint on the above mentioned floor, spent an hour working on the walkway to the earth cellar, harvested some nettles which were growning too near the smultrons, cooked them up and put them into silicon muffin cups to freeze so that I can add them to recipies later.