In the garage attic

Completing the garage cleaning is taking extra time. This is also because there are extra spiders to take care of (...).
One nice detail found is this ventilation shaft:

Ankarsrum?

And then, we took a ladder and we finally put the head in the attic.

Is that a human brain or an humongous wasp nest?

We put the hands randomly and we found tons of cars carpets (used. BLEARGH!), 5-6 double baskets specimen (for vases or for what!?) and finally some piece of history:

An Opel wheel cup possibly from 1960

But instead of finding human bodies, as we feared, we found...a fairly good amoung of extra tiles!!!

An extra amount of tiles can be always handy to have

The tractor got stuck

To keep high the expectations on what we have found on the garage attic, we should go back in time and tell the story of when the garden tractor got stuck.

Once upon the time, Mattias (who had by the way stated he would be the one writing this post) was finally moving the lawn. He used the tractor for doing this for being fast (and furious).
However, at a certain point we heard "scrunch" and after that the tractor didn't move, nor started anymore.

We had no idea how to identify the issue - we did a basic issues hunting but that didn't solve any problem and we thought that we had to bring it for reparation.
But how? The tractor weights quite much and the wheels didn't move of a single centimeter.

That's how we did it...

A guy with a problem and a solution. He is an engineer!

We put extra soap on the improvised ramp

Mattias pulled the tractor, while me and Isabella pushed. 

The tractor is finally up - but at the end we needed the extra hands of one of our neighbours

Luckily, the problem was not a serious one, although we wouldn't have anyway managed to fix it ourselves: the brakes were stuck!

Hidden surprises

As part of our therapy to clean out stuff that has not been removed by our predecessor and clean out buildings that we haven't had time to take care, we have now switched focus to the garage.

We are digging our way through the garage

 Everything looks normal: there are a lot of strange objects, old things possibly that has belonged to another epoch or galaxy, many spiders, some other kind of animal and also components of other items that we have been looking for allover the place. Note: we have not yet investigated what there is in the attic...

Piece of decorative eave !??!?!

 We have never been doing a proper inspection. Not even during the official one it was possible to examine the state of this building since there were too many items and the inspector just resigned.
In these two years, we have never had the opportunity to "reset" the state of the garage and actually look at its conditions.
Sadly, today we found a surprise...

What's there!?

Brilliant! An hole in the wall!

We suspect that the intention was to build a door on the back of the garage, but the project (luckily) never proceed more than by removing some bricks in the first layer of the wall...
At this point we are afraid to look into the attic of this place!

Cleaning the tools shed

Finally, after two years, we have cleaned out the tools shed.
We could possibly open a garden shop: we almost have a piece of each existing tool on the planet...

Do we miss something, maybe?

Fonts

As we are approaching the possibility to get the house name back on the facades, we have also to think about a font to choose.
Unfortunately, from the postcards we have, it is impossible to understand which is the exact font that was used, but when looking carefully it seems as it is all written in capital letters.

Following the suggestion of some expert on old buildings, we have kept our eyes opened looking at our neighbouroud, but so far, we had no luck in finding anything that could fit.
The other day, though, I was walking in a part of Åkarp I had not yet explored and I saw this...

It could work fine, couldn't it?

Owners list, rev.2

The information we had about who has owned our house has been definitely very limited.
We have thought that just few families had been living here since 1908, when the house was built.
But, after contacting Kathleen Cook-Frieberg's son and realizing that they were living here for only 6 years (1952 to 1958, he states), I was struck by the evidence that there must have been someone more living here after the Ingemanssons.

I finally found that, although Burlövs Kommun (the municipality of Burlövs, where Åkarp belongs) doesn't have any relevant information on the house, one can pay for searching some archives through this website.

I made a request to know all the owners of Villa Bellevue and few weeks later I got scanned copies of documents, from 1879 up to the digitalization era.

The page where it is stated that Axel Ingemansson bought the area

Owners from 1928 to 1952

It was also funny to see that I could spot who owned some of the houses that are located nearby ours!

Finally, this is Villa Bellevue owners' complete list.

•  The mythical figure of Pehr Pehrsson (or Per Persson) owned half of Åkarp land, it seems. He has been a quite relevant figure in Åkarp history and I can see that 1879 he bought the land that includes the area  belonging to Villa Bellevue. 
• Axel Ingemansson bought the land the 30th of December 1906. He built the house.
• Anders Nilsson lived here from 1914. He died 1918 and his wife, Agnes, sold everything to Lars Larsson 1919.
• Lars and Mathilda lived here just 9 years. 
• Edvard (?) and Alma Berggren bought Villa Bellevue 1928.
• Ellen Persson came and lived here from 1944.
• The next Villa Bellevue lady was Kathleen Cook-Frieberg. She lived here from 1954 according to the papers.
• Inge and Karin Edler owned it between 1958 to 1971.
• Bengt and Britha Svensson have been the ones living the longest here. From 1971 to 2004.
• Thomas Bachrach bought it from them and sold it to us 2012.
• And here we are, at the bottom of the list. 

So, counting from Axel Ingemansson we are number ten on the list. It is a quite impressive list of owners and I am amazed the house is in such good shape considering. Or maybe, afterall, there are not that many original details left, but just patches and layers from everyone :)

The thing is, it has been hard enough to catch who has been living here from 1952. I don't think I will manage to get the hands on anyone before Kathleen's son, Christer. Pity, though!

IKEA's 1700 serie

During the 90s IKEA launched on the market something very unusual, considering their products: the 1700 serie. This serie is still sold, but through other brands (for example Flora Linnea, Move), with some variations respect to the original items.

The different items are inspired by old Swedish furniture and reproduced as copies, but still with the same quality.
IKEA sold not only furniture, but also lamps, plates, glasses and cutlery in the same style.

For some time now, I have been drooling over the trågsoffa (a wooden couch) and few days ago, I finally saw one on Blocket. I had an image in mind of how our veranda should look like and I can say we have been very lucky that the family who was selling the cough, had also many other items of the same collection.

Our veranda finally got some furniture

 I have been looking around for other similar items, but I was definitely stuck for this specific couch. Why? Because the wooden work is so beautiful and has the same style as
the one we have on our staircase!

The couch details

The staircase banister