Last half a year

I have to remind myself to not wait for eternity before making a blog post about the small things we are doing around the house. Finding the pictures or a sense in the pictures that can be found become quite an activity.

During the past half a year, there hasn't been any major makeover, purchase or discovery however, we haven't been inactive and we have accomplished many small and medium tasks, or at least some have been started.

Spring and summer (and part of the autumn) are the months where I get some itchy sensation and, a part from wanting to clean everything possible, having major plans that will never take place, I try to spend as much time as possible outside, sorting out the mess that is our garden.

This outdoor season was spent pruning some apple trees (next year I will not touch them and if I do it will be in the summer!) and cleaning out the compost area which was a scary operation. At a certain point we found some plastic sacks and we were afraid what the content of such would be (luckily it was just soil... but why!??!?!).
One of the things I manage to dig out from the nassle jungle was the old original gate which unfortunately, by being abandoned there, will be probably be used just as "inspiration". Most of it is rotten.

Original wooden gate from 1906

After cleaning out the area from the worse (still incomplete task), I did cut the hedge and some of the beech hedge had become quite some tree and required my intervention with the chainsaw.

The chainsaw solves most of the issues in a overgrown garden

Probably too late, we have started also our major tasks. Mattias should paint/fix/repair the metal sheet while I try to take care of the windows.
For the metal sheet, we got a very good contact and after a very informative meeting, Mattias got all the equipment he needed and he started the operation. I think this will last at least other 30-40 years considering the speed ;-)
Jokes apart, it is never easy to start something completely new and the first time one puts the hands in something like this, everything is very slow and one is wondering if he is doing right or what.
Anyway, at least during the spring, this should go a bit smoother.

Removing the first rusty layer with a rotative metal brush applied to the drill machine

Our metal sheet on the cornice looks awful. Most likely many tinsmith would try to make us change that, but the expert we got was not that dramatically impressed and told us it is fixable.

Brush a little

Cut a little

Apply a special tape that will "melt in" with the metal

Now the metal sheet is patched and one can paint over it. We bought Isotrol, although we first wanted to use järnmönja 

We decided to go for Isotrol for the infinite amount of recommendations we have heard, although possibly it is not exactly the correct thing to do, since this is not the traditional way to fix a metal sheet. But fixing the metal is not exactly so easy anyway... I think a practical "shortcut" which is though still compatible with a proper way of handling the metal sheet is absolutely ok to embrace.

We have even used it for trying to save our railing (which hopefully will receive more attention next year).

Saving the railing 

I took care of our windows, once again. Pity I started too late with the operation, so, although we are completely off season, I am still working on windows (!!!). Luckily, this has been a mild(er) autumn.

I had very big plans when I started. I haven't yet finished.... These two windows are in not very good state.

The putting has fallen off from most of the sections and the bottom part is rotten. 

We have renovated the door with the droppnäsa a couple of years ago, I was hoping I had just to paint it red...instead also the door had surprises

This has been a lot of scraping, and I haven't finished yet!!!

The window frame of this window was rotten in the corner, the bottom part of the window too. Luckily the rest was ok, but I managed to crack two glass in the window when scraping it.

When scraping this door frame, I could study all the layers of color. Some green, a couple of white and the red, the original beautiful red color.

Auch, this corner of the door is rotten too! 

Nice patching of our window frame

Still, work in progress with the windows....

Something is finally happening

It seems like we have been under the hood for a while, and partially it has been like this in the past half a year.
We have had many guests, we have travelled and we haven't done anything major with our house, although, we are always busy with small and medium activities and plans.
 One of such activities has been to enhance our pool with a roof. This should bring us few advantages:

• Keep the pool warmer (and in Sweden this can be an issue, especially when the breeze over the warmed water is ice cold)
• Keep it cleaner (and yes, our pool is smartly placed under a big tree. You can easily figure out how much chemicals we use and how much time is spent in mechanical removing crap)
• Keep it safer (although we have two kids who have learnt their way around the pool, you never know...)
• Keep it protected under winter (and avoid to use an enormous balloon that needs to be blown up with a very noisy machinery and that has tons of holes everywhere)

The thing is that although the purchased went relatively well, we thought it would have been feasible for us to mount it. Yes, in our perfect days made by 80 hours where the kids are not arguing/can eat by themselves/change their own diapers).

First. It arrived in a very handy format. And this happened in May.

A small truck blocked our street for some time. Our neighbour were thrilled by this.

It was very practical to get that big package out of the truck. 

Luckily, we made use of some of our guests to help us out, otherwise we would be still there. 

Finally, starting to unpack some small parts.

The different components of the pool roof came together with a tiny book: the mounting instructions. Tiny is of course a sarcastic comment. The book is almost as big as the Lord of the Ring and complex as a book about astrophysics. 

Result, after buying additional equipment that should help to "prepare" the pool area and the first items to be mounte and after spending ocean of time, removing weeds from the tiles (which anyway needed to be done, though) all the components have been lying distributed on our garden, waiting for a miracle to occur.

Or in reality, waiting for the only person we know that could help us out to be available.

Finally, our miracle - after promising he would find some time in August - appeared few weeks ago. 

And I then came to the conclusion that we really need to make sure we know what we are buying and how to mount it, because no way in the planet we would have ever fixed this by ourselves.

We do even have to build a small underground wall on which to secure the whole construction!!!!

The work has now finally started:

The first wall preparation

Overview

Let's see how much time this is going to take...:)

Meeting the Ingemanssons grandchildren

Axel Ingemansson (I wrote a bit about him here) was the son of the stonemason Anders Petter (1839 - 1899) and Christina Charlotta (1849 - 1893). He was born 1876.
He married Anna Nilsson 1897 who was two years older than him. She was from Malmö as well and was daughter to the master painter Jöns Nilsson ( 1845 - 1923) and Elna Nilsson ( 1846 - 1922).

Axel and Anna as a young couple

Axel started worked as bank treasurer and in 1906 he decided to move from Lund to Åkarp after purchasing a piece of land and building an house. The house is Villa Bellevue. The area that belongs to Villa Bellevue was hiven off Möllegården's land. Möllegården is one of Åkarp farm (Åkarp #6) and was at the time owned by Pehr Pehrsson, who was a parliamentarian and very active in Åkarps community in many different ways. He and Axel, together with others, will start up 1914 Åkarp Municipalsamhälle, the municipality of Åkarp.

A picture of Axel when he was treasurer at Sydsvenska Kreditaktiebolaget

They moved into Bellevue 29/07/1911, together wtih Axel's brother, the fourtheen years old Anders, and one piga (maid), Hilda Persson.
During the construction phase, the ryktare Per Johansson was living here. He was poor and he was moving from house to house in Åkarp doing all sort of jobs. Possibly, he had the opportunity to leave here and monitor the building phase?
They were having also two children, Greta, who was eight at the time and Hans, who was just two.

An happy mother: Anna Nilsson with her kids Greta and Hans (1907)

 After searching a little, I contacted one of Hans' grandaughters (Helene Ingemanson) who kindly put me in contact with Greta's son, Bertil and Hans' daughter, Eva. We had finally the pleasure of meeting them about one month ago.
They brought with them a big photo album: what a fantastic dream! For days I just did go through most of the pictures without stopping looking at them. The picture from this post comes mostly from the photo album.
There are a lot of details in all the pictures, not only the ones related to our house, that are interesting and there are few pictures displaying some other villa in Åkarp.

A postcard reached Villa Bellevue

Life in Åkarp must have been quite special. There were just a big bunch of new houses newy built and it became natural to become friends with the neighbours. There were no cars yet and it was possibly not very convenient anymore to live in Åkarp when Axel became Lund Handelsbanken bank director and therefore he moved back to Lund, for then living just directly above the bank building.
1914 it is the year of the Baltic Exhibition, but also the year of the First World War. It is then that they sell Bellevue to the Nilsson family.

In Villa Bellevue there was surely a lot to do and the house chores were mostly handled by maids. The interesting fact is that the Ingemansson changed maid as frequent as possible (possibly everone was having maids for very short periods?).
After Hilda Persson came Ida Elisabet Olssen, Ida left Bellevue 13/11/1909 overlapping with Ida Nilsson for about 7 months.
1910 also this Ida was substituted by Emma Elizabeth Kornelia Persson and again, after one year came Alma Svensson.
It seems they finally found somebody reliable in Emma Kristina Haj who worked for them from the 14/11/1912 for at least a couple of years.
The maids were most likely having a room on their own, just above the kitchen (in theory, in the worse side of the house, but back then it was surely very warm since the kitchen oven must have been active during most part of the day) and they could access the room directly from the kitchen serving entrance, a little corridor which is today part of the kitchen.

Bellevue, 1909, the whole family is in front of the house.

I am so grateful to have the opportunity to stare at the pictures of the house when it was built. We can see and understand how it looked originally.

Here it is very well visible how the two chimneys were looking like.. The front chimney had a crown - which we have seen also in other postcards. The back chimney instead didn't have any metal sheet (which instead we thought was there based on some other picture). Only in this picture it is visible a "dansare" (dancer).

Here we can see the original windows (some of which we luckily have still up in the attic). The color of the frame is dark and we know that it was red. One can see that they had some form of decorations on the windows and a lot of curtains.

One can look very carefully at the roof and notice that: the cornice metal sheet was definitely lighter in color than the half-moon dormer windows one. The downpipes were having a sharp angle - and they had them until 1976 for sure. It is a pity that now we don't have them any longer. One can also see the tiles. Most likely they were normal clay tiles, double waved and folded. 

The house name. Now we have the right font :) It's interesting to see that the the name was visible just on the southern facade and not also on the western one, as it appears to be in later pictures (around the 20s). 

Of course, among the different events that they hosted in their house there were dinners with neighbours and friends from Lund, as well as also garden activities and games.
Among the people in Åkarp they connected to one can see in the pictures Anna and Elsa Lysell, who owned Maryhill (Backebo, today, Kullavägen 10) and one family, the Fredins, that first rented an apartment in Maryhill but then moved to Solvik 3 a little bit more central in Åkarp.
After the Ingemanssons moved back to Lund, they were still meeting the Fredins in several occasions, especially since one of the kids was having the same age as Hans.

The guests have arrived. They were welcoming then in the stairwell room. The niche under the stairs has still the little benches, but instead of velvet it is clear that the seats are in leather. Among the guests one can see the Lysells.

Our dinner room was their dinner room. However, beautiful wooden panels were covering the walls and a set of windows was diving the room from the veranda.

Same dinner, different point of view. The sliding door was in a darker color and I can get a glimpse of the "tower room" walls. Over the door there is a beautiful jugend textile. From this pictures I can see that the ceiling gips decorations are still the same. It is fantastic that at least those have been spared! 

Ah, the original windows! 

It has been amazing to have the possibility to view some interior pictures. They must have not been very common back then. 

Possibly Jöns Nilsson sitting in the stairwell room. They were maybe spending Christmas together? A beautiful lamp sticks out from the niche under the stairs and one can obsserve that there is not a radiator under the big windows. The lower windows are not colored, but normal ones.

Possibly Anna's mother, Elna, sitting in the stairwell room as well. I believe that the floor was a parquet and in this picture one can be amazed by the door. That door is still in the attic and I am pretty sure one day or another it will be back there where it belongs!

The house must have been going to some minor and medium refreshing before the Ingemanssons left. First, that chimney dancer had a very short life on our roof! But also the red color on the windows disappear just after 6 years.
Will we repaint as well everything in white after we will paint everything in red?

Bellevue, possibly 1909 - 1910. A decoration is visible on the balcony. There is not the name written above it. The veranda looks exactly as it does today, just with a bit less ground in front of it.

Meeting Fredin's wife in Maryhills' garden. There are trees. but not the forest there is today! Picture must have been taken 1912, after painting the windows white.

For a garden archeologist these pictures must been very helpful in order to visualize how the garden looked like. 

I must say that the front flowerbed is very beautiful and I am also fond of the fact that there is not an overgrown forest around the house.

Still 1909. There are no big trees yet. One can see how Maryhill looked like then.

Visiting. It is unclear which is the house in the background. The west facade now displays the name as well. The back garden was planted with tons of trees. Apple trees? 

For what concerns Bellevue, there is not so much more info or picture. But I do believe this is already a treasure considering that some pictures are 100 years old and that some question marks have been finally resolved.
To the next chapter of Bellevue history...

Switching the door handles

When we moved in our house three years ago, we noticed that there was an high variety of handles for the different doors.
Some are possibly the original ones, some other got exchange with more modern handles during the years. Why, it is a mistery, but nevertheless, the strangest handle we had got was in the bathroom we had just renovated.

Bathroom handle

A part some slight issue in closing properly the door, the bathroom could not get locked (we had no key).

Additionally, we had problems with the handle in Oscar's bedroom door which was falling apart every now and hand and once removed, shown that the door was half broken around the handle itself.

Oscar's door handle

Oscar's door handle

We change Oscar's handle with one that is similar to most of our handles. We bought the new handle and the toilet lock mechanism at Byggfabriken. We were a bit in hurry to change the handles because we would have guests for many weeks and we were expecting Oscar. We started to fix this in December 2013 and a first carpenter made the switch possible.

Detail of the new handle over the brittle wood in the door

A new handle for Oscar's bedroom door (trycke pärlrand)

However he refused to fix the brittle wood of Oscar's door, stating it was not possible and hence we asked a second opinion., During spring 2014 a second carpenter fixed the broken wood, although with some minor imperfections, which generated more work for us.

The work done by both carpenter was not completed or "perfect" and hence we decided to try to polish the approximative work.

The bathroom door handle is waiting for a beauty treatment.

More tape

It was finally few days ago, that I started to complete the job. We have been having tape over the metal details of the handle for over an year!

Treament is completed

The toilet is free!

For the bathroom door it was necessary to apply some putty around the handle and after polishing everything, I had to paint.
For Oscar's bedroom door instead, the problem was that some paint had been leaving drop marks. I had to scrape them off a little and after a light polishing I painted over. I was not able to get otherwise a decently homogeneous surface.

The door is finally repaired