There is always something new broken

For everything we fix, there is always at least one new item/part/element/whatever that gets broken. 

I do realize that we are supposed to keep ourselves very busy, but sometimes I would like a bit of mercy to be able also to have some progresses, especially right now where everything is languishing due to the pandemic.

That the stairs would give up soon, it was just matter of time. We saw it coming and it took forever to find a company that could handle the job. Then, thanks to corona, they didn't have time for us anymore this spring so we booked the fixing of the stairs up for this autumn.

Stairs have collapsed

They have come for a short inspection and they will patch the stairs so that we can use them to the moment that they will redo them for us.

Smaller, but still significative damage, was done by me while trying to handle the regular thousands of liters of cat pee that I find sprayed there and then in the house. 

I usually use vinegar for handling the pee and I took the bottle from the basement. Sadly, it wasn't properly closed, so while walking on the platform from the stairs to the kitchen, I manage to spill some of it on the concrete, probably original floor. 

Good job, Arianna!

I didn't think about it there and then as I was rushing through the cat pee cleaning operation for then starting the day and when I thought of going and check how it went, I realized I had destroyed the floor.

I am not trying to threat it with some special oil, but the result so far is no good.

Just oiled, that looks good. Sadly, not the same result when it get dried..

Mostly, the sundial

I have spent the last hour digging into our pictures for finding one of the photo of Villa Bellevue's sundial. I couldn't find a single one, not of when we moved in and found it behind the bushes, almost thrown away, on the back of the garage, neither of when we moved it from that hidden place, to the back of the house (although we knew that that was the wrong place to have it, if we think of its original placement) nor the one that I had sent to Maria, our painter, when I asked her if she could restore it.

So, let's make a long story long.

The first traces of the sundial can be found in the pictures of the Persson family (who lived in Bellevue 1944 - 1952). I can then guess that the sundial is at least from their epoch. 

We have a quite decent picture coming from the Edlers (1958-1974).

Pictures from the Edlers'. 

The position is the same as the previous owners had it, just in front of the house.

Replacing it there would mean that we can't go with the cars conveniently as we do today. I suppose that at that time anyone had possibly just a car and their size was considerably smaller than ours.

From that picture one can also see that the circle with the hours is golden and the rest look quite pale in the color (although which color exactly is unclear).

This is the sundial before I gave it to Maria. This is how we found it.

What we got instead was a rusty piece painted in black, with handpainted cyphers on the time circle. The black paint was just flaking and it was definitely not in a good state.

Details

Rusty and flakes

With the only decent picture we had, Maria had the mission to restore it to something closer to that picture, hopefully that it is the original one. We chose also to pick up a bit the shades of the metal sheets on the roof and hence one of the colors is a variant of a light green with some blue in it.

Before starting to paint, she made some tests and simulations to see if I thought it would work out fine.

Originally she thought we would have wanted it painted black again, so she had prepared the ground work for having that kind of color (e.g. by using some paint with graphite in it), but when I showed her the picture she understood that she had to adjust and the job got harder as we didn't really have a real palette to copy from.

Simulation #1

Simulation #2

Test #1 for the right nuance of green 

Test #2 still finding the right mix

There was not even anything online (a similar sundial?) to get inspiration from. It seems that we got something that is a bit different from the standard (I am not really surprised as for this house nothing looks standard...).

What I like of the job she did is that she just didn't paint it with a pre-packed color and that was it.

She meticoulosly prepared the right ground for then painting with the right color and she asked many times how I wanted to have the cyphers painted (and my standard answer was "as close as what we had before").

The gold is shining through

The arrow looks a bit more red than it is in reality in this picture

I waited patiently to get this back - I was hoping to have it home during the autumn, but Maria came with it during a very nice sunny day, so after placing it in front of its pedestal, we could talk a bit about byggnadsvård while sipping a tea in the sun.

The sundial is home. Now we have to wait to move the pedestal a bit more central (it is central in relation to the house, but just behind a bush and hence well hidden) and then to mount it back on it.

The final result! 

You can easily see what time it was when I took this picture, can't you?

Parallel to this process, we have had also the mission to get some plexiglass sheets to match some part of the walls we restored last year. The surface is very delicate and everytime someone just look at it it gets ruined. And with kids (but even adults!) that are not always very considerate, I usually get some temporary heart attack.

We have spent the whole autumn basically discussing with a company that work with plastic and we have made measurements for months, where my grey hair became even whiter.

To get a correct measurement seemed impossible and we just had to do the best of the approximations and add some margins. 

Corona didn't help as the company had some staffing issue, but then, finally, after confirming the measurements one more time, the sheets were ready.

Please, pray with me and hope that we haven't messed up the measures... please?

Anyway, we went and pick them up on a windy day (not the best to deal with light stuff) and we were lucky as we could put the biggest sheet just precisely on the trailer floor.

Looks! It fits just fine

    

We have done wrong so many times so Mattias wanted to secure things for once...

Doing some acrobatics

Now the sheets are waiting to be mounted. I would like at least to check if the size is correc,t but I think it will be cumbersome so the best is probably to just mount them to the walls. 

I guess that will take some decades too... 

Flying pool roof during Easter time

 We have just had our Easter vacation which got concluded with a real crazy April weather. In Italy, that would be a crazy March weather. 

Snow, hail, sun, snow, hail, wind. All at once, almost. 

Snow for the day after Easter

We managed during the few days off from work, where the weather was decent, do to some minor work with our projects to recover from the pool roof flying last year. 

Mattias is keeping a decent tempo in repairing the different parts, so that the section that he was working is back on the pool. 

One section is back on the pool

Testing if it rolls fine

Putting it back was not exactly trivial, but it was good to see that it was rolling fine on the tracks that got repaired. 

While he kept working on another section, I was busy recovering the boule track from all the weeds that had grown, as in a green house, under the pool roof. 

Weeds all over the track

All of this doesn't move completely smooth all the time. On saturday, while he was working on another section, he asked Isabella's help to hold it, while I was inside the house a while and it was very windy. Isabella got the the heavy section on her head while the wind took it down and she couldn't it hold it anymore. The roof kept falling few times, also breaking a chair that Mattias used optimistically for holding it. 

But progresses, at least and at last.