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...