Building new and discover old

In few months we have actually been getting going with few things. Starting up projects is always pretty easy.
One of them was planned for later on in time. But the occasion and opportunity arose as I got in contact with an italian conservator and thought, why not getting also this ongoing (after all, we have nothing else to do...)
The task here is try to recover the old (original, I suppose) wall in the entrance that has been covered now by some structured wallpaper. As it turned out from the traces one can found, the wall has been covered at least since 1958 (wallpaper from the late 50s and the one from the 70s were visible).
First step has been to see how removing the wallpaper would be.
If the painting would be completely destroyed out of that, or if it would be savable.

Removing the first bit of wallpaper

Last piece of that piece of wall

It was easier than one could imagine, though depending on how much glue was applied, some pieces of the colors have been tore away with the wallpaper.
I guess it has been covered since for adding electricity on that wall, they had to destroy the wall and recovering it would have been too much of a work.

How the painted wall looks today

While we dig into old walls in the house, we are "modernizing" the pool area with an extra building.

Especially with the thought in mind that kids would become teenagers and have friends over swimming in the pool, I have realized that having them running over the lawn and entered full of freshly cut grass and dripping water in the house would tickle my patience.

For their survival, we have been then planning to help everyone out by building a toilet + changing room.

But this I have mentioned before...

First layer of bricks

Designing the house has been an interesting process - also because, of course, we are not expert in the field and I was wondering if this would have worked at all.

One of the thought has been to not use leca blocks, but old bricks and get as closed as possible to build in the "old ways".

We almost managed, I guess.

The structure of the house is in place

We recycled the same tiles we have been using for the house roof and, last year, we went and pick up some windows and doors from an historical house that got tore down (Villa Stighill, Baltiska Villan). 

I didn't of course think that I would have to add many items to my already crowded list of "windows renovation tasks".

So, right now the windows are a bit in pause. The frames are though in the house, painted with the base.

One of the windows frame was in poor shape

This gave the chance to Mattias to proof his carpenting skills. One of the windows frame had been eaten in the bottom piece by some worm/insect. He cut it off the piece and put a new one together.

Good precision job!

I was imprecised with the communication with the building company who is performing the job and they mounted the old frames with a modern technique, instead of using wedges in the wall. That is something I still have to fix, because I have now to patch the holes and glue the piece of wood that got broken in the process.

This was not exactly how I thought the frames should be mounted

Lessons learned is to be very precise on how you want to have things done. Hard when you are not aware of how many different ways there are to do things.

The house seems quite "huge", but we were not sure of what proportions to have. Though, I think it turned out pretty good with the roof height.
I was hoping we could have the same gable as the garage one, but this didn't work out as expected either. 

The roof is being mounted

The roof under construction

View from above

The base of the house was possible to add, instead. Maybe a bit too high, especially if one compares with the garage one, but still working pretty good with the proportions of the house.

I would have preferred to be able to think thoroughly around the paint. I knew (know) what I wanted. But it was not possible to get. And we simply messed up the color of both the facade and the base. Not a disaster, as anyway it melts with the house, but still. It was something I wanted to handle differently. (Lessons learned again...)

Now the facade is painted. I would have thought something a little more beige than this

Also the base is painted. That color maybe was better on the facade. We were aiming at something greyer and with more contrast for the base.

From the original plan we have specified few things more and added some on the way. Some possibly can be questioned as they are not much "old house" feeling, but they have elements that we have found in the house, at least.

We have refined the rooms with some extra tiling. Those blue small tiles have fallen from the well. The previous owner had put them there, but it seems they didn't want to stay there at all.
We have saved them and now we thought we could use them in this project.

We refined the floor with some list of the same tiles (in slate, as we have around the pool) and we made a band of the blue tiles

We had found in the house some other tiles. A zodiac mosaic. We never know what were they supposed to be used for, but they must have been planned for some outdoor thought as they have a built in sundial.

Might be not very much jugend or past century style, but maybe it works in a pool house construction!?

The zodiac mosaic

The house with the zodiac mosaic on the pool side

As we are amazing in being unclear, we have spent some time trying to get to the details with some drawings. It is sometimes very hard to define those before hand, as a lot of thoughts come up while a project is ongoing.

One of our drawings

I am sure there are still things that we give for granted and that instead we should have learned to pinpoint as soon as possible.

Another add-on has been to have a sort of inner roof, to cover up the modern wooden supporting beams. The current plan is to paint it, but I guess with the amount of windows and painting that we have to deal with it is not a highly prioritized task.

How the inner roof look. The ventilation hole is visible here

A minor detail is the ventilation hole. We have one for each room. For this purpose I went to Byggfabriken and bought something old style looking.

Another item to paint?

The grid for the ventilation hole

Finally, we need some down pipes and similar. As we have spent some time in the past around this subject, at the time we renovated the roof, we are at least familiar with materials and style.

So, we knew what we wanted style wise and after a quick search, I promoted aluzink as material.

The down pipe is waiting to be mounted

Aluzink should be reasonable to be painted and this will allow down pipes and gutters to have the right colors as the house is having. Let's see how it will look like after they get mounted.