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!