Sliding doors

Despite the large amount of space the cats gained when we moved from the apartment, Pico has never been enjoying being "locked" down on two floors during night.
The choice has been forced on him, because during night, if he sleeps with us, although the doors are opened, he starts to scratch nighttables and random doors because he wants to be accompanied down to eat food.
Since sleep has become pretty limited with the kids arrival, we thought that Pico would survive just fine like that.
Anyway, he has been always frustrated and he had therefore found out that he could open one of our sliding doors to come up during the night.
At first, in order to prevent him to do so, we thought to put a newspaper on the side of the doors.
One morning, though, I forgot about it and when I opened the door, the newspaper got engulfed in the void behind the doors.

After some little time (just three years at least), a little piece of metal which secures the doors to slide and stop in the middle of the door opening, could be unscrewed and the newspaper freed from such miserable destiny.

Door blocker

There is where the door blocker is.

The funny thing is that with this, we found out that there was not only our newspaper disappeared in the black hole behind the sliding doors, but at least from 1958 few items belonging mostly to the Edler family had been vanishing there.

What there is behind the sliding doors

One of my favorite among the findings is definitely the flying ticket to USA from Malmö Bulltofta. Very interesting to see all the stops the plane had to make to reach destination!
Other items have been some medical scientific paper, some paper brochure for Duka, some letter about the great value of Eternit and so on and so forth...

Not everything was in mint conditions. Maybe some mouse had a party?

Yes to Eternit!

All sort of papers ended up there. Also a page from a notebook of Bengt Svensson

The flying ticket to USA

Now, this was just one of the sliding doors. The other one still need to go through the same treatment. Will we find some other archaeological item there?

Bookshelf saga

From our empty wall we have made good progresses. But it has been a painful road.
Despite all, we are quite satisfied of the final result.

We start with June. When we finally got the first part of the bookshelf mounted. This implied few days of a carpenter home with us (almost literally) mounting the pieces together.

PIcture by Gunilla Carsten

Wood strips. Picture by Gunilla Carsten

Bottom is put together. Picture by Gunilla Carsten

For my side, everything look quite beautiful and melted in the room very nicely, as we would have hoped. 

However, (if we discard the fact that we were having a person  more around us all the time, more than we expected) there were some few things unclear. For example, although it was obviously not a problem for us, the bookshelf was not ready and I didn't understand it until that moment. Doors and shelves were still needing to be painted or finished or whatever so we would have visitors yet another time.

Sadly, the mounting of the shelf collided with also my handover at work - communicated all suddenly and so I couldn't really plan differently.

Result: I couldn't be home and so the last day, when the finishing paint was supposed to be done (or at least, that was part of the finishing touch)  I came home and  realized I had few questions about the job and especially the paint.... 

What's that grey stuff?

This was supposed to be the finishing paint

Almost not a single surface was free from shadows

Basically, our carpenter took the instructions from Ottosson linseed paint literally and didn't think of finishing the painting, rather stating that three layers were enough (and this was not clear from the form of contract we had). I did obviously expect a finished product, she was trying to climb on the windows (or on the bookshelf!) for stating she would not fix that.

Obviously, something went wrong in the drying process, otherwise that lovely effect wouldn't have been there. And that, me, an amateur in linseed painting, had understood clearly it couldn't look like that.
After a couple of weeks of discussions (not exactly friendly all the time) and plenty of stress, we managed to find an agreement. I would have to find someone else to fix the paint and of course, we would get the end of delivery done (with some extra time, just to be sure that the paint would be done properly).
Let's not talk of the chaos with boxes and books that had already got two months of dust and cat hair in the other room... I was not really keen to get some extra time on this at this point in time.

Key detail

The doors have been mounted. Picture by Gunilla Carsten

Since the painting needed to be redone, the shelves couldn't be put on. Picture by Gunilla Carsten.

In the end of August we finally got the shelves and the doors. 

The shelves did lie vertically on the wall next to the bookshelf for a few months more though. This because first we would have needed to paint, then to dry and then finally we could start to put everything in order.

Plenty of space to store a lot of stuff. Finally!

Painted better, right? :)

I was thinking that finally, with patience because we would have to wait some extra time to paint and dry, we could have this finally solved and out of our way. We could finally put all the books up, clean the room and enjoy this wonderful bookshelf.

But of course. I was optimist.

Few mounted shelves

Yes. I did manage with some hassle to put most of the shelves. Not exactly straightforward or easy. A bit unnecessarily complicated in a sense, since one has to push them down with a special move and hope they fit.
I was hoping for a bookshelf that should require some flexibility (yes, you never know I want to change how the shelves are depending on the books we put!) it wouldn't require a lot of cursing to move things around.

One of the nasty shelves didn't want to fit in at all

Obviously, not everything had been measured/tested properly (I bet the fault is that the shelves have been lying around instead of being mounted immediately) because there were few shelves that didn't fit the second block of the bookshelf. Few broke in this, we had to glue them (!) and at a certain point we gave up.

Will we ever finish this project?!?!?

Manga collection

Enough is enough and I was tired of waiting to clear the adjacent room from all our crap and I wanted to see books IN the bookshelf, finally!
So, with the help of Isabella, most of the shelves finaly got filled with books. And finaly, not only Mattias' books. Most of my stuff is here as well! My manga, my books, my university books, my notebooks....
There is still plenty that should come, one day, but I am pleased to see them "closed by" and have few things accessible for the kids.

Work is ongoing. Almost finished!

While putting up things in order, I have noticed another side issue... It seems it is obviously very hard to think that the doors height needs to match. Mattias thinks that this is a needed shrewdness because of our floor, which is not exactly flat.
I simply think it is something else that didn't go fine...

Hard to make doors?

We took control of the shelves - first we tried to grind them, but that didn't help so much. Then I begged my "master" for help (thank God we have this reference figure, although far away, among the constellation of carpenters which we deal with) and got the hint  to use a japanese saw.
And after buying that, Mattias enjoying finally refining these shelves. For some even 0.5 cm went off, which I think it is not an acceptable margin of error considering the type of work we have requested here.

Slicing up shelves

Anyway. We did it! Or better, Mattias did it! 

The shelves went up, the extra shelves have been put away. All the books are in order.

What satisfaction!

Finally, it is "done!"

But wait... isn't this too good to be true?

Of course it is!

We tried to unlock one of the doors and... *SBANG* the key broke. 

Mattias tried to unlock it with another key and... well, anyone can guess the result of this. 

Broken key :(

We are now trying to get hold of the keys from the German webshop, but answering to our request seems optional.

And of course, even with a key, it is almost impossible to lock that door again. Let's not comment on this...

Apples, apples and more apples (and plums...)

This year we have just had abundance of all sort of fruit. First it was black and red currants, with gooseberries.
They are all frozen and await to be cooked somehow.
They had to wait, because while we were at it, we were covered by plums - that got transformed in plum jam.

The first apples and the last plums

The fruit marathon had just started. Luckily, I couldn't find any trace of hazelnuts this year, or I would still be out picking up stuff..

All apple trees, even the ones that never get sunlight or are half dead, decided to produce a quite good quantity of apples. 

Starting in august, I picked up the last few days ago. All possible free time has just been used for picking up, storing apples and throw away all the bad ones.

Everytime an apple was falling I was afraid for my life

Storing them in the basement didn't work that good

The first load to Sövde musteri

As every year, we have picked up mainly with the goal to go to Sövde musteri to bring the apples and to buy, at a reduced price, the apple juice that they produce.

The oldest apple tree

Branches full of apples

After four trips, we have finally delivered everything possible (without counting that the first two boxes of apples has become apple cream) for the sum of 1127 kg. My estimate was of about 1200 kg, so I am pretty satisfied of my guess :) 

The receipts

A small sample of what we got

Now that this task is over it feels as all of a sudden I have got a lot of free time...
I am though hoping and counting on the fact that next year it will be a very bad apple year :)