Autumn in a nutshell

This autumn has been a bit special as the weather has been fantastic till few days ago (brittsommar, to be specific). I have then taken the occasion to work a little bit extra outside, apart that there is the usual extra pile of stuff to do, also because it has been very beautiful to be out.

A bit earlier than usual this year (just before the end of August), I started the apple harvest. As usual it is a mess. The apples are ready in different times on the trees, I don't manage to store them, most rotten and few get saved in some emergency apple mousse, apple pie, kids eating them randomly....
The worse occurs for the ones that are picked up during the early September.
The later types have better chances to survive, but possibly because of the warmer weather, they have fallen in huge quantity and most of them have got damanged and have had problems to not rotten while waiting to be delivered to Sövde Musteri.

One of the first batches of apples

We have now brought there about 560kgs of apples, but we still have more. The amount that has been thrown is probably the same. It would be great to have the possibility to do one own must here, so possibly we would save the time of driving (though, we would have to spend an ocean of time making the must, handling the rests and fixing bottles?!)

I managed also to made some small progresses on the poolhouse frames.

Sadly, still a long way to go and I am not sure I am willing to paint in the cold as I have done some other year. 

I have just painted the frame

It took some time extra as the frames were already a bit damaged and I tried to made a decent ground work, for once.

Let's see if I have done a decent job next year...

One layer more to go for having this finished

This spring, with the help of the kids, I planted some tuber that would bloom in the late summer/early autumn. Around the pool there is plenty of potential, but unfortunately, planting those and few other plants, didn't help out as ground elder took over and with it, a lot of other annoying weeds.

I have started to clean up a bit the area and by going to different plants nursery (thanks also to a nice goodbye present from work) I managed to fill in the stock and fix some parts of that flowerbed.

The plants I bought with the present

I definitely didn't manage to finish the cleaning off (and all the stones are completely covered by weeds as well) and when doing that I couldn't even find all the flowers I had planted!? 

A beautiful old style Dahlia with amazing autumn light

Another Dahlia variation

The bee and the gladiolus

The ones that came out properly bloomed amazingly and I really enjoyed being surprised by their colors and shape. 

Sadly, now, a few days of real cold just arrived and in order to save everything up I had to take in all the tubers. With the cold also the legal time came and that means that I had really few hours of light to work on this.

Working in the dark

At the end, I ended up working with the torch of the mobile phone, trying to see what I was digging out....

Last days of a sunny autumn

This autumn, after a windy start, has brought some very beautiful and warm days to continue the unusual heat wave that hit us during summer. As I have had the luxury to have some days off, I have had the opportunity to do a lot of things, although, as always, time has not been enough for everything.

I have for example, finally retouched one of the windows that I had finished maybe one or two years ago. Sadly it is not finished. I should have taken care of the inner frame when summer was at its best, but I ended up prioritizing probably very wrong here...

The putty has detached itself from the glass. Some pain had then fallen off due to the humidity. I tried to seal that again

As our pool house is not yet completed, I have also tried to move forward in that project.
Waterspouts are some of the missing parts.
We have chosen a metal material so that we could paint it quite easily. This is called aluzink in Swedish. When making these choices there are always a lot of parameters to be taken in consideration. Already during the roof renovation we had discussed a lot what kind of metal one should have, what is best to paint on and so on, and we have learnt few things on the way.
Now, this is possibly not the best material anyway ever, but I decided that we should take a risk as at least it is a cheap material and if something goes wrong we can just change it.

Squeezing the eaves in the car

So, some of the parts we could order them standard (I hope they will work... I fear that). Some though didn't exist in aluzink. I had then to drive to Hässleholm, to our trustworthy beater (wonder if that is really the word in English) to get this piece. The road there was one of the most boring ones ever...

Finally, this was not really my doing, but there has been some progress in the garden.

One of our apple trees got a big broken branch. I blame Mattias putting all his weight on the hammock that was hanging there, but the branch was most likely already in a bad state and his weight and the apples weight just gave it a final blow.

The cut branch

The apple tree without the branch

What was cut down 

Now, we have plenty of stuff to throw - but that has to wait as we are in "picking apples season".
At the same time, some of the flowerbeds have got to be freshen up.

The front flowerbed after some care (and a piece of my thumb, I guess)

There is always a lot of meat on the fire

This could actually be the standard title of almost all the posts, as there are always a lot of things ongoing and all of different nature. One has to be simply allover the place.

1) The garage. The garage had an amazing hole in the wall. The theory states that the previous owner had the secret wish to make a door out of a window and started to smash the wall there. Luckily, he didn't succeeded. See this old post.
As we had some good mason around, we took the chance to make them patch, after who knows how many years, that wall.

Patch on the garage wall. Now this looks dried and camouflaged with the rest

As the garage is almost looking decent (except the attic, that is still in need of care), we have started the "decoration" of it with some of the items found during the different cleans up.

Details from some old car are now hanging on the walls

2) One of the two windows in the attic.
Thanks to the mild autumn (I bet that now that I write this, there will be the coldest storm ever appearing tomorrow), I have managed to do some of the painting work that I should have rushed more during the summer.
One of this is related to the metal sheet we mounted back. Mounting back was not exactly as easy as one could think.
The inclination of it has to be accurate so that the water flows out. However, although doing that, the wall around it is not "sealed" around the metal.
This is a problem that we need to address or we will have water issues anyway.

That metal should be hooked in the wall

When there is simply a big glitch between wall and metal

3) The garden.When finding 2 minutes of peace, I try to read some magazine (I have of course an infinite long pile that will never end) and the one that has been on my nighttable for few months is about gardening.
The garden requires a lot of planning. Taking care of. And neither one or the other thing has yet happened really, except some occasional saving from our gardeners, who at least take away the worst weeds.
Anyway. I saw this hanging chair and dreamt that it would be accessible price wise and hence purchasable (?) one day...

The hanging chair

Wouldn't it be nice to have the chair for spending those 2 minutes there reading all those magazines? Yes. Of course. We have the hammock too....I should be happy with that :) But....(There is a follow up to this for the next blog post!)

Painting in different formats

Metal sheet and windows are usually among our favorite subjects when we want to "show off" how much we know about how to handle such things in old houses. Not that we can really compete with the real experts, but at least we can pretend to.

As we started the painting of the metal sheet in the roof this summer, we have seen some progresses.
We have got all the base paint done (well, almost, some details have casually got out of the plan) and a first layer of paint all around the cornice plus some details in the other shade of green.

Around the window it is dark green, while the cornice is lighter

As we have found out when going arond the roof last time, the cornice should have a stripe of pale yellow on the lower part. But I guess the exakt right color for the exterior of the house can ben analyzed for the next round of paint in 10 years time.

This is not the only painting that is getting partially done! This summer for some completely weird reason I haven't managed to make big progresses on the painting of the windows. Despite the good weather. I can only blame myself to it. I don't know where time has flied.
Anyway, since it was already more than a year that on a window in the attic the windowsill was missing because the frame was rotten and we had to remove it all, I thought it was about time to avoid getting more water in the walls, considering the autumn is usually a very mild season (no storms, no violent rain, no wind.... or rather, the opposite).

Mattias is studying the situation and trying to understand what to do

The first thing we did was getting the plaster under the metal. When we removed the plate, half of it went off.
Then, I took care of do some rust protection procedure for some rusty spot of the metal and Mattias finally had the chance to have few months for planning when to hammer all together.

High concentration for making this job right

I then took occasion, while he was hammering the metal, to paint the outside part of the frame on the other window. After all, it is just two years that that window has been missing and maybe it would be good to have it fixed before winter comes.

There still a layer to go and I have still to fix the inner part of the frame (and the window, of course)

When the hammering was over, I painted the first layer of rust protection on the new mounted metal. Next step is the next layer plus painting the first real layer of paint on the outer frame.

The day was possibly on the very tail of summer

Now, one has just to find few days in a row where it doesn't rain too much...