Finally Spring!

 It is finally spring. Which is great as finally there is some sunlight, it is getting warmer and the garden starts to be colored by the different flowers blooming in waves.

If there is a bright side of the medal, there is also a downside, which is that there is a lot of gardening and similar to do - and in reality, it is not a bad side either as I actually do like to work out in the garden. The main problem is that time for doing all of this (and all the rest) is scarce and my level of frustration around the ocean of things I see that should get done and never do increases.

Luckily, at least for the gardening I have got some good help so at least some task get sorted out.

Ivy grows a little bit too much everywhere, so at least the trees should get some oxygen and breathing chances. 

 

The ground elder is a serious problem I have a bit everywhere in the garden. In this "raspberry alley" I have tried to put some stones with flat small cute plants, which sadly died. Now the area is completely clean. I would like to continue with the stones and plants in between, but maybe we should first cover the patch to not have ground elder growing for a while?

Still between the stones on our "eating place" there is always a lot of weeds growing in between. Quite annoying and they can be also growing quite high. This time we caught them as early as we could and now I am trying to fill in the gaps with some special sand that we are testing. This sand is also supposed to not be great for letting weeds grow so maybe it will be a bit harder. 

According to the instructions we should have been vibrating the area after putting the sand, but we can't really do this as the surface is not flat, so we have just to hope for the best and check how this will turn out.

Those pool house windows

 We have had the pool house now ready for few years. We have even bought a mulltoa, but we have not been able to install it since we have not had windows or doors. 

The work around those windows or doors has taken simply forever. 

But we did manage to get some minor progresses on one of them, thanks also to the support of one of our neighbours. The holes were the old hinge were all messed up, so the only thing to do was to try to remove that piece of wood and put a new one. 

It seems a pretty easy task, if you have the right tools. That is where the neighbour came in place. He did have the right tool (and hence he did the job... :D)

After the neighbor's intervention

Did we cut the piece of wood right?

We put a lot of glue...

We glue

We cross our fingers. 

Now, the window is waiting patiently since forever for the next step....

Maintenance

 There is always lots to do in our house that it is general maintenance. Let's not talk of the cleaning, painting, whatever we would have to do to keep things in order, considering that everything always break.

Anyway, we need also to do some preventive cleaning/maintenance, that should be done at least seasonally.

A typical "autumn" activity should be to clean the gutters. This because when all the trees lose the leaves, we need to secure that the water flows properly through the pipes, considering that there should be rain/snow during the winter season.

Now, the thing is that autumn means often also storms, dark, cold, so doing this job after the trees have lost the leaves is completely uninviting. Hence, we often end up doing it in spring/summer time.

Professional cleaning (Mattias)

Our house is also incredibly practical when all of this needs to be done. So, as the gutters are about 6 mothers high from the ground, it is just a pleasure to climb of the ladder and hang there with a water hose and a brush and hope for the best...

Finally we can lock the bathroom door

 All our doors are hanging not straight, in a way or in another.

This has been generally ok except for one of the bathroom doors. It made it impossible to look, with of course the inconvenience of not having some privacy when in the room. 

How the door is hanging not really straight

The lock with the plate. 

It was not that many centimeters, possibly just one, but enough to not let the mechanism for locking work.

A bigger picture of the plate

One idea was of course to put more washers on the hinge, to hope that the door would lift itself up a bit, but after a quick inspection I noticed that the trick had been already used (ineffectively) and that I would have needed to put many many washers. 

The hinge

The decision was then to move the plate to match the lock. This revealed some different paint color under the bright white that we have painted most of things with. 

The hole and the signs for moving the plate

It did require some minor "digging" of the wood to move down the plate one centimeter. 

The plate after being moved. 

This took some hours of work. It was not as easy as I thought initially that it would have been. Now, finally it is at least possible to lock the bathroom door - I wonder how did the owner before us did for some many years. 

What a satisfaction when the kids try to open the door and I am locked inside! Peace!

Old fashioned

There are so many ways to be old fashioned and I think we top it on many aspects. 

One of the last things we tried to revive is our CD collection (or mostly mine, although most of my CDs/cases are in Italy). 

Media and entertainment section. Board games, vinyls and now the CDs.

Sorting the CDs out

 Since we moved in into an apartment, I had actually searched for a good place for having all the CDs, and we had bought some awful IKEA shelf that we moved from apartment to apartment and eventually landed also in the house. 

It was not really fitting though and it was soon sold - hard to sell though, not so many people these days have CDs or even DVDs. 

I did manage to find a CD tower that has a quite good look and I then unpacked all the CDs that we had around since I had put them in portable cases - it was also easier to have them in the car, back then.

The problem I see is that even if this is a quite big tower, I have so many CDs still to place that they won't fit! 

This will be a new "problem" to solve.

Said that, CDs are having a bit of second life, although vinyls have become pretty popular again. 

Good for me that had quite some nice CDs (also quite some crappy). The only disadvantage is that there is no time to put a CD and listen to it. I mostly listen to music when cleaning and therefore th phone or a speaker becomes more handy.

The grind is done

This is the final result. I think it is pretty nice, it feels like it is melting in the hedge. 

Our window carpenter thought that red was nice as it was fitting with the windows, but I think this will match the windows metal one day and it feels more connected to the garden.

The final result

After painting it with järnmonja I had to paint a couple of layers of green. Having a red base is usually good with green as the green becomes deeper, as a final result.

From another point of view

It is also not super easy to cover though and, to be honest, painting the grind was not very easy either. One wants to avoid to clog the paint in the curlycues, as it looks horrible, like raisins skin, when one uses linseed paint, ot to have it too light - and it is not easy to see under all the whirls. 

The result is that of course, after I was "done", I noticed few spots were I didn't really cover the metal or the red paint properly.

Shining pine cone

Curlycues after one layer of green

The little grind

 We have a little grind, between where we park the cars and we could sit having dinner. Something that probably the owner just before us installed in the garden. 

Last year, we found one of the decorative pine cones on the ground and we realized it was very much high time to fix this little grind. 

I can't right now find the picture of how it looked then. Nevertheless, the blacksmith came and took the grind with him. He told us to try to sand the pillars and fix them up, thing that we didn't really exactly managed to do. Time but also skills have been an issue. 

The gate is back and the pillars are sanded

This august we finally got back the grind. I then begged the blacksmith to try to help us with the pillars and he did something with one of them, after reinstalling the pine cone on it. 

The pine cone

I had very much hurry then to at least apply a first layer of paint with some protective rust paint (järnmönja) but of course, the weather was not on my side: rain was forecasted.

I went in the evening out and with the head lamp on I applied, as best as I could, the first layer of paint. We then left the sun umbrella open, hoping it would not blow away, for avoiding the rain to just destroy everything I had done. 

It actually worked!

Night paint

End result for the first layer