kareina

I sent the below email this morning. I had fun writing it in flowery language, so am copying it here for your amusement. 

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Greetings to our beloved King Sven and Queen Siobhan, and to your hard working Seneschal Tova and Crown Tournament Event Steward Susanna from two of your Potential Heirs, Keldor and Kareina.**********

In other news, our heater has been having issues.  It is a combination heater from 1979 that can create heat and hot water for the house from electricity, or from burning wood, or from burning oil. For a week or do now the electricity option hasn't bern working, so we've been burning wood to have hot water for washing, and, now that it is feeezing at night, warmth in the radiators. I have tried finding someone who can fix it, and/or give me a quote for replacement, and haven't had much luck, till today, when I got an email from a guy who had gotten an email I sent elsewhere forwarded to him, saying give him a call. Do I did, and spend a good half hour or so talking about options. He will email me a list of alternatives, their costs, advantages  and disadvantages. It will be interesting to see the numbers. 

I just upated our renovation log. We have made progress on the house on 55 different days since buying it Thursday before Christmas, during which 207.6 hours elapsed. However, often both of us were working, so if someone had hired us for the job we would have billed 372.8 hours (if I was billing, as I enter real time into a spreadsheet; if Keldor was billing it would be more--his company rounds up to a full hour, even if it was a 15 minute job). This means that if we were being paid 500 SEK per hour the bill (so far) would be 186,391.67 SEK. Add that to the 325,000 SEK I paid for it, and the house is now worth (to me) 511,391.67 SEK (before we consider the cost of materials we've used for renovation). However, with the way the housing market looks right now if I sold it tomorrow I could get more than that...

So, where do we stand?

attic
* not really touched, other than hauling away a bunch of cardboard boxes the previous owner left, and putting up there to deal with later a few of his things that we are keeping and a few of my things thst logically live in a attic when not in use (empty suitcases, instrument cases, etc.)

upstairs
* The bedroom is done
* The office still needs the list between the paint and the walpaper (half way up), and the craft supplies that are waiting to be unpacked into the cupbords need to do that, so we can add more sets of drawers where those boxes sit.
* The bathroom is completely useable, and may get revovated later
* The kitchen is completely useable, and may get revovated later
* the little room by the kitchen has been cleaned and a cabinet put in for a pantry space. It will need renovating layer
* The livingroom is completely useable, but needs all the smoke damage (the previous owner used the fireplace without opening the chimney vent) washed from the walls and ceiling plus repainting and/or wallpaper

basement
* the ventilation hatches in every basement room has been unblocked, so, hopefully, the basement will not have problems with humidity anymore and the walls will cease to crumble their plaster.
* the hallway has been cleaned and a freezer and some storage cabinets put in to hold our stuff, but the walls and floors need repair and paint.
* pavilion closet is completely cleaned, walls patched with lime plaster and whitewashed, shelves and floors painted. However, we need to fix and strengthen the shelf that I cracked when I put the pavilion on it, so the shelves are still mostly empty till we do that
* the other big closet (intended to be a cool food store room when the house was built) is still full off all the car parts and other stuff it had when we arrived, plus other things we found in other parts of the house that we might want to keep, so we set it there to think about later
* the guest room had been emptied of tires and car parts and the floor and walls cleaned, but then we piled all of the furniture and knicknacks that came with the house thst we probably don't want to keep, but we haven't had the time to try to sell yet. Once that stuff is gone we will need to fix the walls and floors and repaint it before it becomes a guest room and, probably a workout area.
* the laundry room has been cleaned and is usable. We need to move the washer and dryer closer to the main door, and extend the wall by the garage door and put in a toilet, sink and shower in the newly created smaller room
* the garage has been 70% cleaned of junk. We need to get rid of the tires and all the stuff on the window ledge and clean and fix yhe walls and floors and paint it.
* the furnace room has been 40% cleaned and a useable workshop area has been set up. We need to finish the cleaning, take out the old, huge, oil cannister thst is no longer used with the furnace and add more storage, as well as fixing walls and floors and painting.
* the under the stairs cupboard hasn't really been touched

Since last I posted we have made good progress on the house. Now both the bedroom and the office have their new floors and their walls painted. We've set up my bed and put back together the pair of free standing IKEA closets that David didn't want to keep. We've finished cleaning the kitchen, and have unpacked most of my kitchen stuff, and the clothes I'd used as packing material. We have emptied the big room in the basement and cleaned the floor, so it is now ready to store all the extra stuff the house came with that we don't want to keep, untill we manage to sell it, doate it, or otherwise get rid of it.

We even slept at the house on Friday and Saturday nights. Last night we drove back to Skelleftehamn and stayed at his Dad's, and this morning I drove north as he went to work.

The drive was so pretty, with a very full moon out, making the icy snow covered fields glitter (we have had quite a few days in a row with temperatures just above freezing, and now it has dropped to just under freezing again).

I worked a partial day today, and will work a full day tomorrow and Wednesday, then work however many more hours Thursday as are needed to get me to the equivalent of three day's work this week (since last week was two days) before I head south again.

Now I am curled up on a friend's couch with a book. Having just reached a chapter break I am debating either unpacking the computer or the nålbindnig...

Today we were back at the house for an 8 hour work day.

The kitchen is now nearly done. All of the cabinets and drawers are now clean and such of the previous owner's kitchen stuff that we will keep (or make use of until we bring the rest of my stuff here) is washed and back in the cupboards, along with such of my stuff as is already there (the things I had kept at David's after packing everything else because I use them often and he didn't have an equivalent). I've scrubbed the wall raditor and (on hands and knees) most of the floor (he made me stop for the day because it was getting late and he wanted to come to work to get some scrap metal plate to make new thresholds for the two doorways into the kitchen to replace the damaged wooden ones. The new ones will be much easierfor that robot vacuum cleaner we don't have yet).

He took down painted the boards that go along the base of the office wall and cover the floor edge while I took all of my things that have been stored in the bedroom to the office, so that tomorrow we can start painting in there.


A friend of the previous owner's daughters came by today and picked up a trailer's worth of tires and (possibly) car parts from the basement. So tjere is that much less to deal with.

Today is the day I go buy a house. Well, start the paperwork, anyway. Even though some weeks will elapse between now and when the last of the necessary paperwork from the previous owner's estate goes through so that the title can be transferred to me, the heirs agreed that I can get the keys straight away so that Keldor and I can start the great cleaning project.

It will be interesting to see if we can get the cleaning done and the things sorted into piles for keep, sell, donate, and trash before the title is in my name. Of course, I don't plan to actually sell anything till the transaction is complete. Once it is, you can expect a few DYI posts comming your way as we start renovating...

Today has been a busy day. I worked from home yesterday as I didn't want the bother of going anywhere on the day I had a video job interview, but I knew that I should go to the office today, to let my colleagues know how the interview went. As luck would have it I arrived at the same time as Christina, so I was able to fill her in on the interview straight away. She confessed that she has been so busy with teaching and meetings that she had forgotten to send in the recommendation she said she'd write. I assured her that it was probably fine to get to it later this week, since they said they had a few more interviews to do before making up their minds, and that could take a couple of weeks.

Then I settled in to work, and after posting about the literature stuff I did this morning, I suddenly felt inspired to start looking again at the results from the SEM work I had done in Durham last autumn. I should have dealt with it straight away after returning (and had started to so so), but then I got the call to go to Seattle for mom's last days, and then after my return I found out about uncertainties in my job, surgery, job applications, etc. all of which made picking that part of the project back up seem kinda bothersome.

But today it was fun to work on that stuff, and I have made good progress, and am well set up to continue tomorrow. I wound up working today till 16:00, when it was time to drive David to the shop to pick up his car, which is finally repairs (for way too much money, but the list of things they replaced is huge). Afterwards we both drove to the house, he packed up the spare mattress to take to the apartment for houseguests there this week, and he drove me back to uni to get by trike and pedal home.

I had hoped to harvest the garden vegetables straight away when I got home. It dropped to +1 C last night, and my phone thought it would drop all the way to 0 C tonight and tomorrow. I wasn't certain if it would actually get cold enough long enough to do any damage to them, but I didn't see any point in risking it.

However, when I got home I was tired enough to need to curl up on the couch with a book and some popcorn first. When I had recovered enough to head out it was already 19:00, had gotten pretty dark out, and even started raining. So I put on my coveralls, grabbed the really big bucket (big enough to soak the trays from the food dehydrator) and went out.

I pulled the purple carrots first, and put them in the bottom of the bucket. Then the beets, and finally the kale. The carrots and beets completely filled the bucket, and the kale I just bundled together and brought in, roots and all. I then spent the better part of three hours cleaning it all. I wound up with two large bags full of kale leaves, one large bag of beet greens, one large bag carrot tops, one very large bag of beet root, and one bag of purple carrot. I will do something that freezes well with the greens tomorrow, as they won't last, and probably turn the beets into beetloaf this weekend.

As I worked I listened to a Swedish audio book I have listened to before whilst reading the text version at the same time. While much better in Swedish than I have been, I still prefer to have seen the text at least once before trying to listen to an audio book without reading at the same time. Since I was often running water to get dirt off of veg, I put my hearing aids onto mute.

After getting the veg into the fridge and the scrap out to the compost bin I did my yoga, and the audio book finished just as I was finishing up yoga, so I turned my hearing aids back on and started getting ready for bed. After brushing my teeth when I went out to turn of the lights I noticed that there was a faint sound coming from somewhere. It reminded my vaguely of the alarm the UPS on the server has if we have had a power outage, only much quieter. So I went downstairs, but the sound vanished as soon as I went through the curtain and started back down.

Having grown up with a hearing problem I don't have a lot of points in "which direction does the sound come from?", but after wandering around and listening various places I finally determined that was loudest in the kitchen. It was kind of hissing, and kinda squealing, kinda high pitched, and just barely loud enough to be heard, even with the hearing aids. I wondered if there was some problem with one of the electrical appliances, and went around unplugging everything I could find, but the sound didn't stop. Then I called David to ask if he had any suggestions, and, of course, he first suggested everything I had tried. Then, about the same time, we both remembered that when we got the house insurance one of the things they gave us was a small moisture sensor to put under the kitchen sink and report if there was ever a leak.

So I opened up the cupboard under the sink, pulled everything out, and found a small alarm that was, in fact making noise. I figured out how to turn it off, and set it aside whilst i cleaned up under the sink. It was, in fact, wet in there. While I had tried to be careful when washing the greens and roots it seems that while using the lift out spray nozzle that I managed to get some water down the hole where the nozzle comes out. oops! I have no idea how long the alarm had been going off. It was just barely audible (but very annoying) after I turned the sound on in my hearing aids, but while they were set to mute the outside world and pipe in the audio book there was no hope of my hearing it.

Now everything under the sink is clean and dry, and I have recorded today's adventures for posterity. Now I think I will head to bed as I had planned. Tomorrow I will return to the office to work (no choice about that really--I left my work computer there when I came home this evening, as I knew I would be too busy to do any further work today), and I hope I continue to make such good progress.

It has been three years and four months since I moved to Sweden. Today was the first power outage I have seen since arriveing, I am totally ok with this level of reliability.

The power went shortly before we walked out the door to go to choir and was not only back on when we got home 2.5 hours later but the microwave clock was claiming that it was 01:50 at that point, so it couldn't have been out much more than thirty minutes.