The grind is done

This is the final result. I think it is pretty nice, it feels like it is melting in the hedge. 

Our window carpenter thought that red was nice as it was fitting with the windows, but I think this will match the windows metal one day and it feels more connected to the garden.

The final result

After painting it with järnmonja I had to paint a couple of layers of green. Having a red base is usually good with green as the green becomes deeper, as a final result.

From another point of view

It is also not super easy to cover though and, to be honest, painting the grind was not very easy either. One wants to avoid to clog the paint in the curlycues, as it looks horrible, like raisins skin, when one uses linseed paint, ot to have it too light - and it is not easy to see under all the whirls. 

The result is that of course, after I was "done", I noticed few spots were I didn't really cover the metal or the red paint properly.

Shining pine cone

Curlycues after one layer of green

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... 

Little fishes near the pool

 I did think that just having a white ceiling could have been a bit blend in an already simple poolhouse. Not that it needs to become anything complex but I think having some decoration it would embellish it and make it more welcoming and particular.

I had a vision on how it was supposed to be, but it is always very hard to transmit what you have in your thought to someone else while also accomodating Mattias' wishes to have something water related theme. 

After painting the whole ceiling with white linseed paint, we got a rim of little fishes painted with acrylic colors, catching on the shade of blue and brown of the mosaic tiles on the walls.

The tiles and the fishes goes in the same tones

The fish motif is taken from a stencil which reminds of a mixture of jugend and art deco. Using a stencil on the ceiling was not a straightfoward operation and required a bit of turpentine to clean out the first trials.

A close up on the fishes

The poolhouse is then getting relatively close to be completed. I still have to finish the exterior and the doors and the windows. I should have been done in june... :)

A vintage look for some fishes

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...

Another step forward for humankind

As always, our projects are neverending. We are now back to the pool house, where time stands still as everything else takes time, of course.
After the first attempt of getting the downpipe end correct, we finally got them right.

The downpipe is now gracefully ending with water towards the flowerbed.

The other downpipe has the same

As it generally looks, currently

The poolhouse project is still far from completion. If now I have just added to the list the painting of the final parts of the downpipes, doors and windows and other external elements still need to be painted.

Then, finally, we can probably mount the external lamp, put the toilet and the different shelves.

So, gives us a couple of years more? :)

Everyday life

I will never stop repeating that living in our house means having constantly something to do house wise.
Even something so trivial as a "spring cleaning" is a major task that takes the whole year (as we don't have a maid differently from the first owners of the house, plus I am working full time). Sometimes some of the rooms just don't get cleaned properly that year and it is not a big drama.
I have now replanned the activity (of course, I like replanning...) so I am prioritizing the kitchen which I had half done more than a year ago.

The kitchen cabinet from 1906

The other day I was focusing on cleaning the inside of the lower part of the kitchen cabinet from 1906, which is located in what once upon the time was the serving "corridor". 

The cabinet is painted with many layers of white and it is possible to see some other fancier color underneath. The original seems a "forest green", which I wouldn't mind to have in my "new dream kitchen".

One can see the original paint of the kitchen

The lower part of the cabinet is constructed in a very interesting way. There is the list on the wall side and the bottom is constituted by floor planks. 

We finally also got the last isolators to have where we had installed some wall lamps some time ago. We had already placed two on a lamp and now we finally got the second.

Detail of the porcelain isolator and the twigged textile cord

Finally, I have kept going on retouching paint in the different rooms and realized I had to retouch some holes, which will mean additional work. But I guess it is about time as they have been around for few years, as most of our tasks.

There was an alarm sensor there

Some of this retouches can be a bit more complicated, as for example this one as the device was not moved when we painted/put mikrolit on the walls. So there will be more putty layers for smoothening up the paint layers

How it looks now after closing the holes at least

I have also finally sand the work done last summer to patch some digging done by the electrician on the wall for finding the ringbell cables. 

When doing that I noticed that my retouches of paint on the wall didn't really work good. The color seems lighter than what I have which is a new interesting problem to solve.

Creative electrical work and the wall patch that I sanded

Some retouch

At times there are ungrateful tasks that need to be handled also with some bitterness as it is far from optimal from the current perspective and compromises are needed.
 Now, we are also good at procrastinating so it has been for few years that i have had to paint the plastic lids that are put on the wall to hide electrical cables.
Just to make them melt on the wall and not be so obvious.
On top of that, last year, when we were painting the metal sheets on the roof, we had got a leakage in the tower room and the ceiling over the piano had clear stains.
Thing is that I have to have all sort of plastic paint available for doing this as the wall is originally painted with some of that paint and we have recently threw away some big jar since it had got bad. Today I would have not painted the walls with this kind of paint, so it irritates me to have to go and buy small jars of new one.

Starting to paint the lids in the living room

Anyway, I have finally started to work on this task and have completed four rooms of six. In few of them though I need to do more retouches as the wall has holes or got patched and I have to investigate how to fix it properly or at its best.
A small task, but still time taking in its simplicity...

Nice summer weekend

It is fantastic that despite being in Sweden one can still get some summer days in August - this can be a quite rare event some year.
Anyway, thanks to this we have managed to (of course slowly) made some progresses in some of the billion of projects we have.

First. Mattias fixed properly the downpipe that collapsed.
However, the vine is still hoping for a better care.

The downpipe is back on its position

The vine needs desperately some support

Flowers are blooming in my most effort taking but satisfactory flower bed. The one behind the pool, which is enriched with ground elder and all sort of weeds one can think of. 

Though, every now and then, some of the flowers I try to plant to kick the bad stuff out, is emerging and shining.

Gladiolus

Dahlia of two colors.

And finally, a four year long project, a two year old birthday presence, is out to be installed. 

The famous outdoor clotheshorse (I wonder if this is the right translation for torkvinda) is almost in place. 

There is where the clotheshorse should be!

Finally, I have also managed to paint a bit of the poolhouse. This is quite an eternal project, as rather than the painting itself, going around with ladder and scaffolding to reach the different parts to paint is quite time consuming.

One layer more...

Not a good week

Progresses are currently made by Mattias who is trying to fix a lot of stuff that breaks now or that has been broken forever. 

In all of this, since I am working, I try to come home and hope that the weather is merciful enough for me to pain the pool house or work with the stones behind it.
Of course, I could also paint indoor some parts, but there are also other things I want to do...

We have been having the carpenter showing up, trying to adjust our garage doors, which unfortunately, as they are heavy, have a tendency to tilt slightly.

In a previous attempt, the carpenter had put some washer to tilt back the doors and it did help at the time.

We had asked the blacksmith to fix some metal bars to apply on the back of the doors, to stabilize. The carpenter's hope was that that would also tilt them back, but that of course didn't happen.

The metal bars are mounted on the doors

Mattias managed also to put the handle buckler but we had some issues with the one for the key, as the holes are too big and the buckler wouldn't be attached to anything.

The mismatch with the key buckler

The garage doors. When looking at them one can see the uneven gaps due to the tilting

In an imperceptible manner, I have now geared up a bit towards the pool house painting. The main problem is that when I have the time, the weather is unstable. If I can't paint, it is sunny and shiny.

It is also imperceptible because first I have been oiling everything and now I am putting the first base layer, which though is almost on the transparent look.

This is under the roof. Do you see any form of painting?

Maybe seen from the other direction?

When preparing for the base painting an accident happen. I misplaced a paint jar on the edge of the table, thinking it was longer than it was in reality and the opened jar fell straight upside down.

I used kitchen tool toys for picking up as much paint as I could.

I have almost picked up all the paint here

That was not the only accident of the week. 

I had noticed that one of the downpipes around the veranda was hanging a bit too much, due to the vine that is pulling it out.

Well, the other night it was probably a bit more windy than normal and (together with Isabella's sunflower which had been grown beautifully) the downpipe fell on the ground (and the vine too).

The downpipe is waiting to be put back

With the output, of course, of having an additional task to have to fix.