a little adventure
Apr. 29th, 2023 02:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kareinaA year and a half ago, when Keldor and I were looking for a house to buy, one of the ones we considered was at Hökmark 30, which has its for sale info page here). The day it had a viewing was one wherein I couldn't make the trip down from Luleå, so Keldor went to visit it, and reported that it was really cute (jättemysigt). However, before we even had a chance to discuss if we wanted to put in a bid, someone bought it directly from the seller. A week or two ago I saw an ad for the same house, for sale again, so, of course, since I didn't get to look then, we decided to go look today.
He was right, the house is really cute, and the most recent owner did some nice cosmetic renovations in the 1.5 years since Keldor looked at it last. The kitchen is more spacious than ours. The living room is a little narrow, but the full lenght of the house (ok, it is kinda two rooms, but open to one another, so it would work well to have one end for office and crafts, the other open for acroyoga or relaxing in front of the fireplace (which looks like it runs on gas). There are three small bedrooms upstairs, the smallest of which would be very easy to make into a large SCA garb and project closet. while both bathrooms are small, there are already two toilets in the house, which is one things this place really lacks (we are going to install one in the basement, but it won't happen in the next few months).
I love the enclosed on two sides, and roofed balcony upstairs. It would make a great outdoor cat space, which would be easy to close off the open wall with a solid net or something so they didn't get out, and there is another balcony over the front door.
The house is on the side of a rocky hill, which is covered in blueberry and lingon bushes, and previous owners have done some nice landscaping to make a bbq terrace (which needs a little re-working now, but it would only a weekend's work to dig up the concrete blocks that have sagged, fill in with a little sand and gravel, and put them back, good as new. The area where there is an old trampoline frame still standing would make a lovely spot for a hot tub.
The house is a little smaller than ours, but not painfully so, and it is reasonably well laid out. Had we bought it 1.5 years ago we would have been happy with it.
The downsides: the cellar has issues with moisture, so that the foundation needs help. The old brick chimney is in really bad shape, and the outside of the house needs some of its boards replaced before the house gets a much needed paint job. It wouldn't surprise us if a new roof is needed, but we didn't look into the attic crawlspace (which is accessible via a ladder from the outside of the house--we saw two small doors to it, one of which is over the balcony over the front door).
There are two outbuildings, both in need of some serious loving care. The larger of the two had been a very sturdy timber building, with timbers at least 20 cm thick, and a concrete floor. Sometime, decades ago, someone added an extension to it (also timber, but more modern thickness of lumber, pretty much doubling the space, but they cut away most of one original, thick wall when they did, and the left a bare dirt floor on the new half, which was a good bit lower than the concrete floor, which had been poured over a thick layer of rounded river stones, which was a great way to do it, when the floor went all the way to the wall edge. however, when they took away the wall, they failed to provide support to the floor edge, so, over the years, with freezing and thawing, the rounded river rocks under the floor have started shifting into the open space, and the concrete is cracked, and segments of the floor are now slightly tilted. A problem that would have been so easy to avoid, if the people who did the expansion had been thinking a bit more long-term and took steps to reinforce the floor edge.
Another downside, from my perspective, is that it is in the middle of the village, quite tight up against its neighbours. There are houses on three sides (no houses on the hill, but most of the hill is owned by someone else, so there is no guarantee that none will ever appear). There is one house directly across the street behind which is a big building, which used to be a bread factory, but today houses a more modern industry. Somehow I doubt that a rubber recycling plant makes as nice smelling a neighbour as a bread baking factory. (That is the only industry building in the village, and the nearest shops are in Lövånger, where I currently live, 7 km away.)
After we looked at the house we drove out to the village of Vallen, only another 10 km away, to see how the smithy there looks. It is in good shape, so Keldor decided that he is going to spend the day there playing at the forge. I would have been tempted to join him, but I have a thesis to write. So he took me home and packed up some tools and supplies and went back out.
Given that I am currently so busy with writing up my thesis and trying to finish my degree, I am just as happy that the house we looked at today has enough downsides to make me not really interested in bidding on it--it would be a dreadful time to try to move.
Speaking of my thesis--this week's progress report: Keldor was home from work this week with symptoms that ranged from an unhappy digestive tract to headaches, and occasional light fever. I haven't had any physical issues at all, so I have kept working, though, perhaps, fewer hours than I would have done if he'd been going to work, since I took more breaks to spend time with him (and beat him at games of Qwirkle), but I did manage 12 hours on Thursday.
Over the last seven days I have written 2,227 more words in the thesis itself (bringing the total so far to 24,454 words), plus an additional 2,449 words worth of figure captions (bringing the total captions word count to 9,049 words). I am nearing a breaking point with Chapter 5. I have decided that as soon as I am done expanding the captions for the currently existing figures, and filled in the descriptions of the handful of quarries that never got written up, I will set this chapter aside and start writing Chapter 3, the one on Swedish steatite artefacts. If I don't get the funding I applied for I will be able to get the whole thing written this spring/summer, with a note saying that the data processing required for trace element composition maps for 33 samples was way beyond the scope of a Master's project, but the list of which additional analyses had been done are being included to have a record of what is available to kick-start future work in this field.
If I do get the funding, I should still work some on the archeology stuff already this spring, but I can do that and take regular pauses to do one sample at a time data processing now and then while writing the other chapters over the course of the year the funding covers.
He was right, the house is really cute, and the most recent owner did some nice cosmetic renovations in the 1.5 years since Keldor looked at it last. The kitchen is more spacious than ours. The living room is a little narrow, but the full lenght of the house (ok, it is kinda two rooms, but open to one another, so it would work well to have one end for office and crafts, the other open for acroyoga or relaxing in front of the fireplace (which looks like it runs on gas). There are three small bedrooms upstairs, the smallest of which would be very easy to make into a large SCA garb and project closet. while both bathrooms are small, there are already two toilets in the house, which is one things this place really lacks (we are going to install one in the basement, but it won't happen in the next few months).
I love the enclosed on two sides, and roofed balcony upstairs. It would make a great outdoor cat space, which would be easy to close off the open wall with a solid net or something so they didn't get out, and there is another balcony over the front door.
The house is on the side of a rocky hill, which is covered in blueberry and lingon bushes, and previous owners have done some nice landscaping to make a bbq terrace (which needs a little re-working now, but it would only a weekend's work to dig up the concrete blocks that have sagged, fill in with a little sand and gravel, and put them back, good as new. The area where there is an old trampoline frame still standing would make a lovely spot for a hot tub.
The house is a little smaller than ours, but not painfully so, and it is reasonably well laid out. Had we bought it 1.5 years ago we would have been happy with it.
The downsides: the cellar has issues with moisture, so that the foundation needs help. The old brick chimney is in really bad shape, and the outside of the house needs some of its boards replaced before the house gets a much needed paint job. It wouldn't surprise us if a new roof is needed, but we didn't look into the attic crawlspace (which is accessible via a ladder from the outside of the house--we saw two small doors to it, one of which is over the balcony over the front door).
There are two outbuildings, both in need of some serious loving care. The larger of the two had been a very sturdy timber building, with timbers at least 20 cm thick, and a concrete floor. Sometime, decades ago, someone added an extension to it (also timber, but more modern thickness of lumber, pretty much doubling the space, but they cut away most of one original, thick wall when they did, and the left a bare dirt floor on the new half, which was a good bit lower than the concrete floor, which had been poured over a thick layer of rounded river stones, which was a great way to do it, when the floor went all the way to the wall edge. however, when they took away the wall, they failed to provide support to the floor edge, so, over the years, with freezing and thawing, the rounded river rocks under the floor have started shifting into the open space, and the concrete is cracked, and segments of the floor are now slightly tilted. A problem that would have been so easy to avoid, if the people who did the expansion had been thinking a bit more long-term and took steps to reinforce the floor edge.
Another downside, from my perspective, is that it is in the middle of the village, quite tight up against its neighbours. There are houses on three sides (no houses on the hill, but most of the hill is owned by someone else, so there is no guarantee that none will ever appear). There is one house directly across the street behind which is a big building, which used to be a bread factory, but today houses a more modern industry. Somehow I doubt that a rubber recycling plant makes as nice smelling a neighbour as a bread baking factory. (That is the only industry building in the village, and the nearest shops are in Lövånger, where I currently live, 7 km away.)
After we looked at the house we drove out to the village of Vallen, only another 10 km away, to see how the smithy there looks. It is in good shape, so Keldor decided that he is going to spend the day there playing at the forge. I would have been tempted to join him, but I have a thesis to write. So he took me home and packed up some tools and supplies and went back out.
Given that I am currently so busy with writing up my thesis and trying to finish my degree, I am just as happy that the house we looked at today has enough downsides to make me not really interested in bidding on it--it would be a dreadful time to try to move.
Speaking of my thesis--this week's progress report: Keldor was home from work this week with symptoms that ranged from an unhappy digestive tract to headaches, and occasional light fever. I haven't had any physical issues at all, so I have kept working, though, perhaps, fewer hours than I would have done if he'd been going to work, since I took more breaks to spend time with him (and beat him at games of Qwirkle), but I did manage 12 hours on Thursday.
Over the last seven days I have written 2,227 more words in the thesis itself (bringing the total so far to 24,454 words), plus an additional 2,449 words worth of figure captions (bringing the total captions word count to 9,049 words). I am nearing a breaking point with Chapter 5. I have decided that as soon as I am done expanding the captions for the currently existing figures, and filled in the descriptions of the handful of quarries that never got written up, I will set this chapter aside and start writing Chapter 3, the one on Swedish steatite artefacts. If I don't get the funding I applied for I will be able to get the whole thing written this spring/summer, with a note saying that the data processing required for trace element composition maps for 33 samples was way beyond the scope of a Master's project, but the list of which additional analyses had been done are being included to have a record of what is available to kick-start future work in this field.
If I do get the funding, I should still work some on the archeology stuff already this spring, but I can do that and take regular pauses to do one sample at a time data processing now and then while writing the other chapters over the course of the year the funding covers.