Summer action

I have been trying to find the occasion to write what we have done, small and big, but time always fly away. 

At least today, I manage to make concrete the attempt to document some of our minor efforts during the summer.

Some of the small things we have manage to do have been in the pipeline forever. It feels as the whole past year has been sucked up into work and kids and our own logistic/activities without leaving much space for anything else. Also the energy has been limited. 

There is much more that has happened in the last months, so I hope I will manage to catch up in the future to summarize things that I would like to have documented, from both small and bigger house projects of all kind.

1) 

I sadly do not remember why but clips that were holding some cables in the basement fell off. I then asked to try to find news ones, but what I got was not exactly the same product, was some metall hook for fences, as far as I understood.

I then tried to fix these new hooks to hold the cables, but that didn't turn out to be perfect as it was very hard to hammer them into the ceiling and I manage to create more work for me to fix. Holes that will need some adjustment. 

The ceiling, the cables and the holes

2) There have been a lot of small issues with a couple of doors/locks/keyholes. I still have one to fix that has been wrong since we bought the house and probably for decades. But I have put some effort in trying to fix (again) the keyhole for the pentry door. The holes have been just made into the void, basically and the screws have been not manage to get a proper grip. I have now tried to fix it with some linseed putty, with the hope that when it gets hard it actually holds everything together and not that it becomes to brittle and fall aparts again.

The keyhole with the putty

After being "repaired"

Similarly, I repaired also the bathroom door. Also there, one of the screws couldn't get a grip and seems that has been just poorly placed. A bit annoying as this was done by some pro and I would hope that when you pay for something (and not cheaply at all), it would actually give you some insurance on the quality.

Anyway, I removed all the parts of the handle and then I applied once again linseed putty hoping that it will also hold things in place.

The injured wood

I put the putty in the previous holes

I put back things and I am hoping for the best :)

3) As summer is summer, there are also a lot of outdoor projects ongoing, mostly a general maintenance of the garden.

Being inspired by some neighbours with some similar system, I have invested in an automatic sun driven watering system to be used when we are away (and even when we are not).

I also got some old barrel that I have then oiled with linseed oil and filled with water.

The barrel

The sundriven watering system

The system set up for test

I have still to set it up actually properly, to be able to water the plants and so on. It will require me to cut the little pipe and puzzle it together in a smart way. But I want to move the barrel closer to the pump so that it is also less in the way with all the piping.

4) Finally, earlier during summer I had the chance to check the roof as part of the two-years inspection after we painting it. When doing so, I noticed that there was literally all sort of things on the gutters.

Especially before autumn, it will be great to have the regular task of cleaning them out. If they are stuffed, the rain will just overflow with the risk of causing damage to the house structure instead.

Mattias jousts on a long ladder for cleaning a gutter

Also this is not a trivial activity as for reaching some parts you really need to be safe and sound on a ladder. But work is in progress at least!
 

Make a cast on old pipes

It is true what they say. Having a house is a constant source of work. An old house probably generates additional issues, especially if owners after owners have been playing around with trends, personal taste and whatever. A big house with a complex structure will also generate quite some tasks.

I think we got jackpot of complexity and infinite amount of tasks to deal with. 

In this case the fault is somewhat ours. 

When we moved in 2012, we relied on a quite cheap/old house incompetent building company, that helped us with the major renovation we did. 

One day, one pipe in the basement started to drip water. We looked up and thought that the pipe for some reason just broke.

Some of the workers we had, took and broke the insulation around to pipe, to check its state. 

It turned out that the issue was due to the fact that the radiator had been removed at the end of the pipe, and with a change of water pressure, the water of course started to go out of the open pipe.

As the insulation was broken, they took some modern one and just wrapped it around the old pipe.

The pipe with its modern insulation

Nothing strange with it, except that the "cut" around the old insulation has looked like crap and well, I hadn't had major plans to do anything about it (well, after 9 years, what do you expect... that this is prio 1?) for a while.

Close up around the fracture in the old insulation

I have recently had a visit of a building engineer who, when checking other issues with the house, looked at this and told me: "Arianna, you need to fix this asap".

It turns out that such old insulation is usually full with asbestos, and that is ok until one breaks and touchs the parts. 

Now, I have been there fixing the laundry for 9 years, so I suspect that, if any asbestos, I have had some exposure to it (although I have never touched for any reason that part of the pipe).

Nevertheless, she recommended to buy some plaster rolls, that I suspect are usually used for molding plaster items or even broken limbs.

Starting to roll the wet plaster rolls

Without knowing what I was exactly doing, I dripped the plaster roll, one by one, in cold water. 

I took them up and started to roll them around the pipe.

I wasn't very prepared and the floor got a bit messy

I wans't really prepared, so plaster started to drip from the pipe a bit everywhere. Eventually I put some form of floor cover and that made life easier. Luckily it is reasonable easy to clean plaster up.

At the beginning my technique was very much suboptimal. It turned a bit better by the end, although when comparing with the old insulation (which probably had plaster rolled around it too), one sees an abyss of different. The old ones are smooth and even and perfect. What hands for doing such a job!

The critical point that was supposed to be sealed

By using the plaster rolls, I am basically sealing the asbestos risky point and, as a bonus, I am also making the modern insulation looks a bit more like the old one.

The final result

It wasn't easy to make it even there

Another point got sealed as well, since I was at it

Considering this was the first time I used anything like that, I am quite happy of the result. The old insulation has leaked a bit color on the plaster, as of course, it got wet. But it should be enough to paint it a bit. In theory I should use lime paint on it, but since those are two micro spots that needs some adjustment, one of us should be able to just paint with whatever we have around. 

So, that's the next step. Problem is that now when I look at the pipes, I just see spots where I would like to preeventively patch all of this...

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

As good as it gets

One of our pain points is the basement.
You need to be a dward to walk in it, the floor is definitely uneven because we wanted to secure water flowing through it in the only drain, the lighting is not cosy and there is some extra ceiling mysterious stuff in one of the rooms that is questionable in choice and beauty.

On top of this, I have the bad habit to try to save as many things as possible that could be reused. In the specific boxes and emballage have got some space in one of the basement rooms.

In the last years instead of having things in order, I have just thrown everything in a big pile, making the room even worse and any chance to play ping pong or fuzzball endangered by boxes or refreshened by some cats "leftovers" (as the cats have felt threatened too, I guess, and decided to mark the territory).

I therefore tried to made it at least accessible and cleaned.

Fuzzball and pingpong. Now visible and accessible through the boxes piles

A room with a view. Not showing much of the room I cleaned but how potentially it could be nice to play pingpong now that there is space

At the same time this season is challenging. Spring cleaning (that for me last the whole year) should peak now, painting and windows renovation is at this best while the whole garden needs attention before the ground elder will take over everything....

Grape hyacinth in a flowerbed spared from ground elder

Eternal projects

We are specialists in starting things and let them take their time, occasionally years.

So, let's praise Mattias, who has found the battery charger of the drill and can finally make some holes in the heating room. The heating room is also the "tools" room and hence we need a nice tools table to gather in order most of the things we have got.

The tools table

We started to fix that room last year and I think have cleaned 1/3 of it...

At the same time, I have started to work again on the windows, the ones for the pool house. So, that maybe we can finish the pool house this year and start with some other "bigger" project. 

Anyway, the problem I am having is that I need to refresh my windows renovating skills as I haven't done much about it lately.

Step 1: remove where necessary the paint

Starting a task always takes a toll, but I hope that now that I have done that I can put myself into "production" and have a flow.It would be nice to be able to finish off also other windows that have been waiting for renovation for a while now.

There was no much paint left to remove here

The water gauge

Few weeks ago, VA syd (which delivers water among other services) sent us a letter that it was time to change the water gauge. On the back of the letter it also provided instruction on how the water gauge needs to be installed and so on.

I went in our basement and checked the status and I noticed that of course, all those "requirements" stated there were missing from our installation.

The old water installation

The old water gauge and one of the valves

Basically, the water gauge needs to be mounted on a console and both valves around it needs to be of an approved type.

The water gauge we have had been installed 2009. I wonder why now all of a sudden they had all these rules and so on to respect.

The other valve and a little tap

It sounds almost as they are enforcing a change just for the sake of providing extra additional work and material: afterall, my valves and the rest of the piping had been there probably from whenever running water came to the house (1920?) so, it lasted just hundred years afterall.

It reminded me on how they push to change windows....

The new installation

So, now we have a bunch of new valves. A console that is properly attached to the wall, with a new, fancy, digital water gauge and a couple of new pipes.
Forced modernization...

One can be lucky

The retouching of the walls is almost completed. I am a bit dissatisfied that the new color has turned out to be a bit lighter than what there is on the wall and I have still some minor retouching to do.
I hope that lightness will disappear with time, but right now it is not very fancy.
Except for that and for the eternal house cleaning, I always keep the eyes open to try to improve the home feeling with items to complete the furniture.

As we have barely curtains and few carpets, the acoustic can be quite challenging, especially with a horde of small kids around.
I have always thought we should try to focus on buying carpets, but I have never come around to it, fully.
Though, the other day I did see an advertisement on some selling group on Facebook for a big carpet. I am not sure it is fully original or a copy or what, but it was big and beautiful and I thought it would have worked just fine in the dining room.

The carpet, while we are placing it

I think the result looks promising - we can surely adjust the positioning in the room, but size wise it works as a charm.
It feels very strange though to have a carpet there, where we have never had it. The best is that finally all the marks of Oscar's cars been thrown on the floor to play are hidden under it!

Carpet, point of view #1

Carpet, point of view #2

Carpet, point of view #3

Same day, although time was not on our side, trying to do too many things at the same time, as always, I did finally manage to get hands on a table to put the mangle. 

A mangle is something that Italians have no clue what it is. However, it seems a "must" in a Swedish home, especially with a touch of retro. 

I have started to use it, although I am not yet having a full proper technique with it, I am afraid, but I didn't even have space where to have it when I am ironing or folding the laundry. 

The pink painted desk

Not that our laundry room is fancy in any way, but having a good surface for the mangle and for handling laundry was needed, although it is a bit on the way for the drying rope right now.

The laundry room is getting crowded

Our unfancy laundry room

There is plenty to do here and probably I need to adjust these things several times before finding the optimal position. But a good start would be if I manage to sell/give away the wooden panels that were in the kitchen in the 90s. Should I keep one for "memory" of the house at least?