the House that Almost was...

so, the thing was with our first house was that it was a co-op, which meant that we paid a downpayment to get in and then monthly rent, but the whole neighborhood owned the houses together.

a year or so after we moved in the rumors started flying that the co-op was gonna be dissolved and that everyone would get the chance to buy out their homes at the price the bank valued them at. take note: not market value...bank value. a subtle but telling difference. which meant that we ended up paying about half of what the market value of the house was when the deal went through.

so there we were, with a house all our own....something was still missing though. we weren't city people! we're not the type that need to go out and party in downtown clubs or go to the movies everynight and eat out. we're homebodies. plus, the neighborhood was starting to go downhill. the trouble in the neighborhoods around us began to migrate into our area...one of the houses on our block was rented by the city for recovering substance abuser families, another to a former child abuser. you can see how we turned sour on the area.

a visit to tilda's childhood friend Gunilla, who lives on the other side of town in the country made us realize what we wanted. a place in the country, away from the city.
here's a pic of gunilla at her wedding...stunning, isn't she? a fabulous person that you only wish you knew! but she's ours, not yours! :-P

we started that day to look for places. first in the area where gunilla lives, since tilda loves her so much and it'd be nice to live close to a friend that close. things didn't work well though because all the houses were very high priced.

but, one house that caught our eye and our passion was a house up in dalarna. that's where tilda is from. central sweden and the heart of it's culture. what was so very special with this house is that they were selling it with everything in it. furniture, decorations...everything you see in the following pics was included in the house. such wonders! the style might seems strange to you who have never seen it but it has always been something special to me...something that connects deep inside me when i look at it. to live there would be like living 100-200 years ago. but while i wipe the drool from my mouth you can judge for yourself it's beauty and perfection!





















and...remember...EVERYTHING you see in these pics goes with the house. these are the only pics we've saved...there were many more of all the different small buildings that were on the land. at least 6 more small houses for the farm workers, guest houses and a blacksmith hut. really a village in miniature. that's how these places operated back then, self contained.
now THIS was country! i don't regret the house we eventually bought i love it to pieces and i miss it when i'm not with it, like a close friend that is away, but this place will always be special to me.
alas, the price was above our reach...oh we might have been able to make it work. but then there was the problem of the size of the houses. not one of them was really big enough where we could all live in one...there was no main house for a family of 4. in those days they lived a bit more cramped together than what we're used to. so to have the privacy that parents sometimes need, the kids would have to sleep in a different house. which made things complicated.
the fact that everything came with the house was a wonderful dream...but what to do with the things we had collected over our 8 years of marriage? things we struggled to pay for and keep nice. they might not be much but they had meaning for us.
so, in the end, we saved the pics and try not to think of the lucky people who did eventually buy the place. though i wish we had taken the time to travel up for a viewing of the house, but maybe that would have been too much? would have blinded us to our senses and we might have done anything to have it!

well, there you have it, the tale of the house that almost was...next chapter will finally deal more with the house we did buy and the divine village we now call home, Vikarbyn.

CYA!

Home sweet Home

thought i would dedicate some time to chronicle the places where we've lived. i'll leave out for now the apartments we've lived in, since they never really felt like a home, they were just a place to live.


i'll dig those up and post another day, since there are so many pics of the kids when they were younger in those.





for now, i'll limit myself to our 2 houses. places where we made a home. our first was in skälby, västerås. a bit on the edge of västerås, but still within 30 minutes biking distance of downtown. a lovely little half country area with lots of children's families and kind people who seemed to enjoy where they lived and respected it.





here's how we first saw our house, a duplex that didn't really feel like a duplex:

and what would be a pic of sweden without a winter scene?

really mild winter we had last year. year before we had massive snow and it really piled up. but since i couldn't find any of those pics easy enough, you got this one...lol. i expect much greater things now that we're up here in the north...i LOVE winter and LOVE snow...!!!

how about some pics of how it looked inside our 1st home? that's easy, i'll just take the pics from when we cleaned and styled it for the sale:

beautiful...but it hardly looked like that most times, for the sale we cleared out all personal items so the buyers wouldn't be influenced but our "junk". lol, good thing they didn't look inside the storage shed, i had crammed all those things in there.

this is soon becoming a longer post than i intended. though it consists mainly of pics and less text than my other long-winded testimonials...and i've only covered the first house. i was gonna do the house that inspired us to move up north and then our new house. maybe i should do another post with just those..? yes, i think i'll do just that! cya in a bit!

Suikoden

Full name: Suikoden "Mommycat" Farmer

Named after: Japanese videogame about 108 stars of destiny

Birthday: May 1st, 1998 (chosen by vet when we found her)

Trivia: Appears grumpy at first, but is quite cuddly and playful still. Only allows Ron to give tummyrubs. Fought off a fox when our other cats were kittens. Ran away once and was found catching mice in barn some 6 months later. Likes to sleep on top of people. Keeps us company by the computer, sometimes helps us type. Gives a special little jump when she's happy to see us. Plays with dolls in secret (and eats Barbie hair).

guests bring out the BEaST in me

i love having a tidy home...makes me happy. i love the thought of being able to have friend drop by without warning and not be ashamed of the way the house looks.



but, sadly, i hardly ever take the time to keep it clean...oh, it's not filthy! but i want it to be neat and organised at all times! i know that all i would need to do is to do a little everyday and that would keep me ahead and things wouldn't pile up...but do you think knowing this and actually doing it are the same thing?







when i know we have guests coming however, then i go into clean mode. being patient, like a creeping glacier, i take each room and straighten it up...taking the things out that don't need to be there and putting them in the next room. for example, i find that i almost never need 10mil lego bits in my kitchen or a few thousand cuddly aminals(Erinspeak) in the sofa. you may think me insane but they jut don't belong there.



so...things gravitate from room to room in succession as i clean them...finally i'm left at the bottom of the stairs with a load of things that need to be up there. a perfect cleaning strategy to me...though tilda has yet to grasp the inner magnificense of it. :-P







the kids rooms are always a world unto themselves. they seem to demonstrate the inherit chaos entwined in the frabric of the universe. everyday vera MUST empty her dress up clothes drawer and ofcourse everything ends up on the floor while she searches for that one ballerina top that she wanted. afterwards she's WAY to occupied with other worldly matters to bother to tidy up the pile of shiney cloth and glitering necaklaces.



erin attempts to keep her room straightened up...i guess she still remembers the time we used to dock her saturday candy when it wasn't clean. so her room isn't that bad really.



our room is usually full of tilda's 5million articles of clothing(while she still tells me that i need to thin out my clothes supply, which seem to only consist of 2 jeans and 5 t-shirts, lmao). make the bed there and usually it looks good. the closet is in order now so clothes can return to their destined place.







the upstairs toilet is so small that dust and clutter feel too claustrphobic to even go in there. so it's easy too. most times the jacuzzi needs a good scrubbing after the kids have splashed more soap on the walls than themselves and the dirt ring from my little angels needs a power sander to remove.







but...after all that...the place really looks nice. then the guests come and make 50 dirty dishes per person and set free captive dust bunnies from their pockets. so, by the time they leave it's not quite a disaster area but neatness has definatly taken a beating and is in a groggy state.







so...after all this prattling and long-winded complaints, i give you 3 pics of our clean living room and dining room BEFORE the evil guests have come.

as promised, the images that even my genius couldn't conquer...:-P

Coming out of the Closet

so, when we moved into our lovely new house,

(see to the right) the closet in our bedroom was a mess of peeling wallpaper and a yellow laminate floor.

now since we knew we were gonna have to redo it, we thought there was no use in unpacking all of our clothes there...but weeks went by and i just never got the time to do it...and the boxes of clothes just sat there so it looked like we had just moved in last tuesday.

well, something had to be done! so, we decided to put Erin and Vera on the project. turns out that even though ripping down wallpaper may seem to be the funnest thing in the world to do, the children soon grew bored with it. finally, no amount of threats and revoked saturday candy could persuade them to do anymore. in the face of this family revolt, i stepped in and ripped up the vinyl floor to see what was under it. here you see the progress up to that point.

quite a big room, yes? to give you an idea of how big it is...there are 3 of these closets on the second floor. 1 in our room, 1 in vera's room and one has been converted to a tiled jacuzzi room. yes, a jacuzzi! when you're done being envious...let's get back to the point. the point being all the hard work i put into this project.

so...seeing that the sun wouldn't rise without my kicking it in the arse and the closet wouldn't fix itself without the same incentive. i proceeded to really get to work on it. i pulled down all the easy to reach wallpaper and then started the real work...taking a paint knife and scraping all the sticky residue and scrapes of wall paper off. being patient like a creeping glacier, i worked by sections and slowly but surely(with the liberal use of a small water spray bottle to loosen paper) i finished and was down to bare wood!

the whole room was wood, lovely planks on the walls and wide pine planks on the floor. tilda had already bought the paint supplies we needed so i began painting on the special base coat. which is supposed to make the wood more of a better surface for the final coat to get a grip on. hmmm...anyway, i painted and i painted and i painted. the top arch of the ceiling was a bit hard to reach so i brung in the monstrosity(i'll add a pic of it later) a BIG clunky wood contraption that the previous owner had left us...think of a regular carpenter's saddle and add a small platform on top. i magicked it through the door that was half as wide as it was(ah...the joy of being a former mover) and then climbed up and twisted my head half off to be able to paint the top.

then, you say, then i was finished, right? well you'd be wrong if you thought i'd do a half-arsed job. now was the time to sand the very worn floor. it had probably never been done in the 106 years since the house was built. scroll back up and notice it again.

well, i got out my handy black and decker sander(it had already served me well and proved it's worth when i undertook the project of "the formerly brown, brown cabinet"(a tale for a later blogg)). i closed the door as tight as i could and put on an air mask(that despite the name let's in surprisingly little air) and cranked up the sander. man! i tell you what, in that enclosed area it was LOUD! quicker than i thought possible, i was done! magnificent, the floor looked. such a lovely pine floor.

but, STILL not done. cuz though the floor might look nice now and for a year or 2...eventually it'll start getting worn again. in comes the floor protecting glaze. 2 coats of that and man...the rich luster and color of the pine REALLY came through!

done? not by a long shot! yes, i had created the perfect closet. beauty squared and god wept and all that...but where were we gonna put all our clothes? so i got out and found all the crappy shelves that were in there before and repainted them white(instead of the worn au natural that they were) and rehung them. plus i added the shelf system that we used to have as a wall shoe shelf rack for tilda's million and 2 shoes in the old house.

now...you wanna see the finished product? do i have to shake you awake after all this boring text and not even one half-nekkid women to keep your interest? ok here it is!

now i notice that in that video, the shelves are not up and the floor is unglazed...but despite my reapeated efforts and many foul curses...i couldn't get the new pictures to appear anywhere but at the top of the post. if you scroll up you might notice my attempts, small odd pixels at the top of the post...cuz i could not find a way to remove the failed posted pics once posted...luckily i could reduce their size to almost zero(which gave me a perverse pleasure in itself and a feeling of victory in defeat).

maybe i'll make a second post with just those few pics that i wanted in this one and you'll just have to content yourself with a few chuckles at my apparent idiocy.

that is all. :-P

Ron

Full name: Ronny Hal Farmer

Birthday: June 15th, 1970

Occupation:
Chef
husband
father
in shifting order of importance

Personal traits:
quick to laugh
slow to anger
thinks a thousand times more than speaks


Special talents:
patience, like a creeping glacier

Activities:
cooking
reading
gaming
being me

Matilda

Full name: Johanna Matilda Farmer (Månsson)

Birthday: July 7th, 1979

Occupation: Clothes retailer/Cleaner

Personal traits: Chatty, restless, engaged, intelligent

Special talents: Playing piano, organizing, debating

Activities: Reading, singing, walking

Erin

Full name: Erin Melanie Lara Farmer

Birthday: February 2nd, 2001

Occupation: Student, first grade

Personal traits: Calm, creative, considerate, intelligent

Special talents: Whistling, drawing

Activities: Bike riding, gaming