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kareinaWe had a couple of delightful couch surfers the first part of this week. They arrived Tuesday afternoon and stayed through to Friday morning. She is from California (grew up in Santa Cruz, went to UC Berkeley for undergrad, and is now at UCLA for a PhD studying butterflys), and her boyfriend/traveling companion is from Portugal--they met because he wrote some code to make a camera follow a butterfly in a wind tunnel). We brought them with us to Choir on Tuesday, which turned out to be a very good thing, since she since soprano, and if she hadn't been there we would have had only one soprano, and they both had fun. Wednesday they cooked us dinner and we stayed up too late chatting, and Thursday we took them to the Frostheim arts and science night, which they also enjoyed. (He had never heard of the SCA--she had heard of us, but never been to any SCA activities--if any of you know people in her area that might be a good SCA contact let me know and I can forward details to her.)
They left Friday during the day, and Friday night we finally got around to starting dealing with the one major issue with the house that we have known about since the inspection before we bought the place. One of the rooms downstairs has a raised floor, which had mold growing under it. The rest of the basement has painted concrete floors, and no problems. We are fairly certain that the mold under the raised floor didn't start growing till the previous owners switched out the old wood stove heating system for the down hole heat exchange system (which is what wikipedia says is the English term for "bergvärme")--wood stoves dry out the air much better than the mix of electric and geothermal heating we now have. We have been meaning to take out that floor since moving in, but hadn’t gotten to it till now, since there were plenty of other things higher on the priority list.
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lord_kjar took off the top layer of that floor—a not too bad looking fake wood floor that is actually only a few millimetres thick, and came off with ease. Under that there is a red fake tile layer that looks like it may well date to 1966, when the house was built. It is harder to pull off, and below that is a layer of plywood held up by boards which have layers of insulation between them. That is where the mold is growing. He got the top layer off and did a bit of removing a corner of the rest, to see how tough it is going to be. It will be doable, but not easy, and it was getting late, so we shut the door to that room and went to sleep. Even with the door shut the rest of downstairs was smelling of mold the next morning, so we opened the window in there (on this occasion it may be a good thing that the winter has been so darned mild—with the temps above zero, again, this week, it isn’t a hardship to leave that window open) and covered the under-door crack with cloth from the rag bag. With luck we will get a chance to finish removing the rest of that stuff and clean the underlying concrete with bleach to get rid of the last of the mold before we paint it.
Saturday morning we went into the city center for the Frostheim annual meeting, where I was disappointed to discover that just because I can understand everything in Swedish at my SFI course does not mean that I can follow everything said in a Shire business meeting. Ah well, I did catch more of it than last year, which was more than the year before. Eventually it will all make sense.
After the meeting we met up with some of the folk from our Choir for some random drive-by performances. We went into one of the malls, found a nice spot near the escalators, and sang a song, then quickly left, went into another mall, found a nice spot and sang a song, and then again at a third mall before deciding we were done for the day. While most people passing through the malls paid us no attention, we were pleased to note that at each stop there were at least a couple of people who paused to listen.
After the performance a number of us went back to our house, where we baked home-made pizza and cookies. Yum! The good news is that the six of us were enough to finish all of the cookies straight away, so I am not tempted to eat left over cookies. The better news is that there was left over pizza, so I didn’t need to cook today.
Saturday evening our next set of couch surfers arrived. These two live in Uppsala, where they are PhD students. She comes from Solvania, and he is French. They have a conference in town this week, and wanted to come early to do some sight-seeing and ice skating. They actually flew in Saturday morning, but wanted to have time for adventures, so they walked from the airport to the city, stopping to play on the ice along the way. Sadly for them, spring is seriously early this year, so the ice was kind of went and not so good for skating, but they did find the kick-sleds the city provides, and enjoyed those.
This morning I got up early and walked into uni to do some photocopying. Our couch surfers slept in a bit later, such that they were walking to uni, with the plan to visit Teknikins Hus (the cool science museum on campus) as I was walking home, so we stopped and chatted a bit before heading our separate ways. We met up again in the evening at the Folk Music session in Gammelstad—they enjoyed listening to the music as much as I always do, and they also enjoyed watching a bit of our folk dance class, but they went out and explored Gammelstad for the second half of class and then rode home with us, where they gave us some gifts for hosting them--a photocopy of a book on nålbindning for Uppsala (part of the reason she sent us the request is that she also likes nålbindning) and a wooden needle she had made.
Tomorrow it is back to class and back to work. We don't have any any more couch surfers scheduled--after getting three requests in a row so quickly I have set my status back to "no" so that we can focus on project and work for a bit. But they were all such nice people hopefully I will remember to turn the status back to "maybe" in a few weeks or so.
They left Friday during the day, and Friday night we finally got around to starting dealing with the one major issue with the house that we have known about since the inspection before we bought the place. One of the rooms downstairs has a raised floor, which had mold growing under it. The rest of the basement has painted concrete floors, and no problems. We are fairly certain that the mold under the raised floor didn't start growing till the previous owners switched out the old wood stove heating system for the down hole heat exchange system (which is what wikipedia says is the English term for "bergvärme")--wood stoves dry out the air much better than the mix of electric and geothermal heating we now have. We have been meaning to take out that floor since moving in, but hadn’t gotten to it till now, since there were plenty of other things higher on the priority list.
Friday
lord_kjar took off the top layer of that floor—a not too bad looking fake wood floor that is actually only a few millimetres thick, and came off with ease. Under that there is a red fake tile layer that looks like it may well date to 1966, when the house was built. It is harder to pull off, and below that is a layer of plywood held up by boards which have layers of insulation between them. That is where the mold is growing. He got the top layer off and did a bit of removing a corner of the rest, to see how tough it is going to be. It will be doable, but not easy, and it was getting late, so we shut the door to that room and went to sleep. Even with the door shut the rest of downstairs was smelling of mold the next morning, so we opened the window in there (on this occasion it may be a good thing that the winter has been so darned mild—with the temps above zero, again, this week, it isn’t a hardship to leave that window open) and covered the under-door crack with cloth from the rag bag. With luck we will get a chance to finish removing the rest of that stuff and clean the underlying concrete with bleach to get rid of the last of the mold before we paint it.Saturday morning we went into the city center for the Frostheim annual meeting, where I was disappointed to discover that just because I can understand everything in Swedish at my SFI course does not mean that I can follow everything said in a Shire business meeting. Ah well, I did catch more of it than last year, which was more than the year before. Eventually it will all make sense.
After the meeting we met up with some of the folk from our Choir for some random drive-by performances. We went into one of the malls, found a nice spot near the escalators, and sang a song, then quickly left, went into another mall, found a nice spot and sang a song, and then again at a third mall before deciding we were done for the day. While most people passing through the malls paid us no attention, we were pleased to note that at each stop there were at least a couple of people who paused to listen.
After the performance a number of us went back to our house, where we baked home-made pizza and cookies. Yum! The good news is that the six of us were enough to finish all of the cookies straight away, so I am not tempted to eat left over cookies. The better news is that there was left over pizza, so I didn’t need to cook today.
Saturday evening our next set of couch surfers arrived. These two live in Uppsala, where they are PhD students. She comes from Solvania, and he is French. They have a conference in town this week, and wanted to come early to do some sight-seeing and ice skating. They actually flew in Saturday morning, but wanted to have time for adventures, so they walked from the airport to the city, stopping to play on the ice along the way. Sadly for them, spring is seriously early this year, so the ice was kind of went and not so good for skating, but they did find the kick-sleds the city provides, and enjoyed those.
This morning I got up early and walked into uni to do some photocopying. Our couch surfers slept in a bit later, such that they were walking to uni, with the plan to visit Teknikins Hus (the cool science museum on campus) as I was walking home, so we stopped and chatted a bit before heading our separate ways. We met up again in the evening at the Folk Music session in Gammelstad—they enjoyed listening to the music as much as I always do, and they also enjoyed watching a bit of our folk dance class, but they went out and explored Gammelstad for the second half of class and then rode home with us, where they gave us some gifts for hosting them--a photocopy of a book on nålbindning for Uppsala (part of the reason she sent us the request is that she also likes nålbindning) and a wooden needle she had made.
Tomorrow it is back to class and back to work. We don't have any any more couch surfers scheduled--after getting three requests in a row so quickly I have set my status back to "no" so that we can focus on project and work for a bit. But they were all such nice people hopefully I will remember to turn the status back to "maybe" in a few weeks or so.