What has happened lately

December is always a quite intense month. Christmas is what is dictating the rhythm and, despite corona and the cut of most of events, maybe due to the darkness, things have been moving with a heavy step focusing on the advent and Christmas preparations.

Chloe has discovered immediately the tree

We started to decorate Villa Bellevue directly from the 1st of Advent. We have a plastic Christmas tree (second hand one!) and, knowing that the kittens would have had great fun with it, we decided to limit the decorations on it and exclude the balls. That was a wise choice. 

After few weeks the lights were broken, branches kept falling and the few decorations were thrown allover the house. 

Just before Christmas Eve Mattias started a big restoration and since then it has at least looked decently.

The restored Christmas during Christmas Eve

Eventually, despite the days running too fast, I pushed Mattias to put up yet another shelf that I bought at an auction, to end up in Isabella's room. I am not very convinced of the position, but I guess we will have to live with this until some more drastic change occurs. 

Her previous shelf got crowded quite soon and we knew that she would get a new load of books to devour.

Her room with the new shelf just hanged

The new shelf

After we had got the walls in the entrance restored, we have had the thought of try to protect them.

In september I managed to get in contact with a company that could prepare plexiglass sheet shaped as we wanted. 

We took the measures. And we took them again. And then again. Bah, the walls never seemed straight, so we decided to make a template. But we didn't have the right material for it, so we had to order it and then to find the time to fix the template.

Eventually, again under coercion, we spent an evening trying to sort this out. It had just pasted three months since I was in contact with the company... 

Mimmi is helping

Or maybe she isn't

Ok, I am not sure of the result

Once again, this project had to be put on hold, because even though we had the template and new measures, the company wanted to wait few months as they are understaffed right now.

So, let's wait few months more for this.

Finally, Christmas came. The Eve was spent mostly preparing the last things and for me it meant finally having the time to bake. 

I can imagine that Bellevue has been seeing a lot of Christmas baking during all its years...

One tray of gingerbread cookies

Lucia cats (Lussekatter) 

Two types of fudge

An orange sallad to refresh the heavy Christmas food

The buns are ready and it is time to go to bed and wait for Christmas

The good thing with Christmas is the extra little free time to be able to do some project. 

One of the things that I have been doing has been starting to clean up the boiler room. It was a mess last year. We got some minor order and clean up some stuff, but we never finished, with the result that it got very messy very quickly.

On top of that, the ceiling has fallen down on one side of the room and I am thinking of tearing down the rest of it to fix it up properly.

The hole in the ceiling

I think the higher planks are the original roof. I believe that when the toilet was made, they probably reinforced it with iron beams and lowered part of it

Also this part is soon falling down

While cleaning up I have also noticed how great they have been patching the window, in this room.

Some foam, a big cut, some random pieces of wood, part of the window has never been painted in green. I wonder what did they do to it from the start. I suspect that there might have been a shortcut for filling oil in the oil based heater but that was patched brutally? 

It is weird that in such fancy house nobody did take care of the details of the less noble parts of the house...

How the window is looking from the inside

Wooden bits and pieces are placed on one side of the window

The window has been chopped off in some weird way. That part has never been painted in green - so
not touch from the 70s at least?

In the room I am trying to squeeze in a lot of things to have tools and spare parts and whatever in order. 

Right now though it is a bit complicated if I have to be fixing the roof. So, I have placed some stuff just temporarily in the middle of the room.

There will be a drawer, a carpentry table and a quite generous shelf

Mimmi is approving the temporary placement

Still "vacation"

 It is becoming a summer tradition, but I take advantage of some solitude for painting the floor in the entrance, as quite some little elefants have the property of leaving thousands of marks on it, since it is painted black.

So, that has been one of the final touches during the last days of holiday (or actually, one of the first working days...).

 

I so wish to renovate this room, but I know we have to wait for it. It will be nice to have a real floor and not this painted "under floor".

The last days of holidays haven't been that bad weather wise - pity though that I have managed to transform the pool in some nice soup, as today it is a very bright beautiful and sunny weather and we can't really take advantage of our luxury issue. 

Nice corner of hollyhocks

The work in the garden has been focusing on the usual cutting of the several hedges that someone planted for torturing me, I guess, allover the place. But some corners are just beautiful to watch, after the hard work!

I have been also continuing to make progresses, slow but steady, on the pool house.

Now I have one layer missing for the inner roofs. 

This is not a very ergonomic position. I get a lot of pain in the shoulders when painting the roofs.

Vacation at home

This year there hasn't been much travelling during summer, nothing that I really mind as I think home is the best place to be (despite the quite boring weather that has been pestering Skåne since I have been on vacation).
One of the reasons why it is nice to be home - although I do love travelling - is that there is a lot to do and it needs to get done. So, why not take up the sleeves and start to dig into the different tasks?

Despite a slow start, I have finally got a flow eventually in the middle of the holiday time.

Firstly, in the garden there is an eternal fight with ground elder and ivy. While I managed to attack properly some areas with the ivy, nearby the garage, I haven't managed to defeat in the way I want the ground elder in the slope behind the pool. I simply don't have enough time for it.
But this year, instead of just cleaning it out, I thought of starting to plant some things, hoping that they will keep the weeds away.

The effort on the small piece I managed to clean out

At the same time, we have finally started to remove some bushes jungle near one of our hedges, which looked horrible and hinder also cutting the hedge.

Now part of the jungle is gone

Our gardener will come one time more to complete the job. Some of the plants, chervil mainly, got moved to another part of the garden, hoping he will undermine the ground elder job. We couldn't spare though some of the nice flowers that had spontaneously come up there...

On the other hand, inspired by the visit of Andre', a window carpenter within the byggnadsvård domain, I started up again the work on the poolhouse.

First, I have now painted with the first layer the windows.

The window wood was very dried and I did have to oil it 

Then, I started to continue focusing on the poolhouse. While the weather has been decent, I have focused on the eaves of it and even one round of it takes many days and I am not yet done with the first layer. But I am getting closer...

First layer for the north east part

Probably I was starting the second layer for the southern part. I have lost count.

At least one can see a bit of difference, finally

Now, vacation is almost over and I definitely need to complete cutting the hedges that are remaining (about 3 of 6,5 we have), continue with the ground elder and try to finish off the poolhouse. Theoretically we should have started to use it in June, but well, I was very optimistic then...

Some Byggfabriken shopping

One of my favourite shops is of course Byggfabriken. It has almost everything that a modern "byggnadsvårdare" needs, plus the atmosphere of a bit old style shop. Anyway, every now and then we need (casually?) to go and buy some small things for the house. From paint, to other accessories.
Last time it was Mattias' turn to indulge himself into spoiling the house with nice stuff...
This is what he came back with:
1) A porcelain insulator: to have in the cords of the wall lamps that are placed around the piano. They don't really have a *real* function as the cord is already perfetly insulated, but let's say for the sake of how things were done in the past....

The porcelain insulator

How it should be placed, more and less....

2) Some flax insulation (linisolering) to put in the gaps between the floor planks in the "Red room" (the piano and tv room). This room doesn't have a warm basement room under it, so there is a icey draft coming up if you try to feel closely.

The isolation keeps coming up

As we are not expert in this, we are probably doing something wrong, as even though we are squeezing the flax down, it just doesn't want to stick too much.
Maybe this was not exactly the right product for the purpose?

The flax insulation

3) Finally, a chain for a ventilation shaft in the guestroom (now, Mattias' room). In reality we had decided to not get one because it didn't look possible to fix one chain on the ventilation shaft without asking our blacksmith for support. 

But Mattias forgot all about this and bought it anyway and... surprise surprise, he even put it up without any problem!

It is a detail, but it is nice to have a decent chain to open the shaft

Detail of the ventilation shaft. It says "Patent Örnen"

Easter time

It has been since we have moved in this house that I have embraced the more Swedish tradition to prepare the house for Easter. Not that I am hardcore with it - we bought this stuff four years ago and haven't changed much around it (Mrs Wallergårds' blog, sadly the pictures are not visible because the site where they were hosted is long gone).

So, I just want to show again (but on this blog ;-) ) some furnishing detail, although it is not about renovation or history of Bellevue.
It is just that it is nice every year to put this decoration out  just when Lent starts and everyone is alert to spot nature spring awakening.

Narcissus are typical Easter's flowers

 After all the greyness, it is indeed nice to have some color's touch.

An Easter "tree", next to the autumn lady, on a nice jugend sideboard

 The house is too big, I guess to have a turn over (I fail also during Christmas time) and I don't think that exaggerating would do any good.

Each door handle on the bottom floor has some Easter's decoration hanging

Two big hen are guarding the veranda

 It is also very hard to find typical Jugend items, so I just have a mixture of whatever I bought which doesn't make any sense in relation to the house or its age.

Small chicks are spread a bit everywhere

More on the library. Possibly hard to see

This is also part of the life at Bellevue, within the bigger works which includes buying proper furniture (still!), restoring and trying to survive the general maintenance of house and garden.

Basement stairs from another epoch

We really don't know how was the basement many years ago. We know what kind of renovation has been done by our predecessor, but we have no idea how it really looked like before him or the Svenssons. It can easily be that it was a little bit more comfortable than it looks today, after all downstairs there was the "food cellar" and also the facility for doing the laundry. Somehow as it is today.

2004: unknown work done around the basement stair

Hammering around, 2004

Patched stair, 2004

The thing is that the stairs that go down to the basement are utterly uncomfortable and quite dangerous. One has to bend for avoiding to hit his own head and must be very careful to not slip or there will be quite a fall to make, especially if you are a kid or an "old lady" ;-).

Autumn 2013, the beautiful basement stair with an unsafe fall (note: we haven't chosen the blue color for the stair and the trash you see is not there anymore)

Since we were going to have a good bunch of guests during the holidays, we felt that we wanted to secure in a ugly but robust way, the possible fall. We didn't manage to do it in time for the full invasion of guests, but few days later the work was completed.

View over the fall, now safer

Details

The gap has been closed

Thanks to Mattias' father engineeristic tips, Mattias managed to put together a fence, hooking it to the wall thanks to a triangular wooden strip and a column that has been there since we moved.

Triangular wooden strip detail

We didn't want to burn the floor

Since there are actually laws (if not recommendations) and common sense to dictate that when one has a fireplace, you should protect your wooden floor, we did try to invent something to put under our modern fireplace.

The idea also was to use the space under the fireplace to store the logs. 

We really didn't understand how one could use the fireplace without anything before. Wasn't it dangerous?

Anyway, since the fireplace is in some sort of copper, we went and ask Vinslövs Plåt to make a taylor-made piece of plate, in copper, to have there.

It looks so shiny now!

But the colors are beautiful

Now, we just miss a spark arrestor in cast iron. Not the easiest task on the planet, of course.