We got our permit to put the roof up over 1/3 of the terrace so I’m busy doing that. And Helena is busy taking care of the rest of the house, our son and planting all the flowers and trees and stuff we bought yesterday for approximately 10.000 swedish crowns!
Man it’s gonna look good and smell awesome when we’re sitting under the roof on the terrace with the BBQ on and the rain is falling down again!
I’ve also updated som photo albums:
The terrace-build, although not 100% up to date after I’ve started with the roof.
Our new carpark with the bricks that the Irish guys put down for us.
Our latest family get-together for my father’s birthday.
And as always added some photos of our wonderful son Sam.
The terrace is done!… almost. I’m waiting for the council to give us a permit to put the roof up. It seems that since we can use it as a storage if we put a roof on it we need permit. Isn’t that typical sweden, you can’t get any luxury without paying the government their piece of the pie!
Anyway, we’ve had a BBQ with our neighbours across the street and Helenas has spend some days just slacking in the comfy soffas we bought. We’re also waiting on Mio to deliver the outdoor dining table and chairs so we can have more guests!
On top of that (!) we’ve had bricks put on our driveway. Cost us 80.000 swedish crowns but it’ll be worth it. We hope. Won’t know for another few years since it may get completely screwed up when the ground settles a bit.
We’re doing so much on the house now which is kinad rediculous considering I’ll be off from work from july to the end of the year and have plenty of time then. But I want that time to just enjoy our nice home and play with our son!
What a weekend! I’m totally exhausted! We’ve been putting up the floor on our terrace and my knees are pretty much gone and my back is… not well! We would have been done with floor had it not been for 1) me being called into work because of an overheating alarm from our datacenter 2) Formula 1 weekend 3) friendly neighbours interrupting and 4) Sam having a very bad sunday and screaming his lungs out! Fortunately Helena is the handy type so when one of us was busy with Sam the other kept building. But we’re so very close now I can taste it 🙂
Check the image gallery 🙂
Now I just wanna go to sleep, but we’re off to a small BBQ with our neighbours. Meat and beer, great way to end this weekend!
>Usually when I really put effort in something I’ll do it so very detailed it’s scary – covering every little thing. And this terrace-build was a huge project and I was thinking of every thing that could go wrong, covering every angle. I even had extra bits for my screwdrivers! And it was particularly important that weekend because saturday was a national holiday in Sweden so couldn’t easily get new stuff.
But there was one not so minor detail I miscalculated – when I rented the drill I rented a drill that drilled 20 cm wide and 80 cm deep holes. The slabs I was putting in was 18 cm wide and 70 cm deep. Should’ve worked right?… wrong! The slabs where 18 cm but square, not round, so the holes needed to be 23 cm! And it only drilled 55-60 cm so not nearly deep enough! So we spent the better part of Saturday on our knees digging out the 27 holes wide and deep enough. But once that was done, the frame and beams went up like a beauty! At 9 pm on Sunday evening I waved off my workforce and this morning I put in 4 beams for the floor and it looks good!
Check out the gallery.
And thank you dad for doing so much of the work! Thank you AC for doing so much of the digging! Thank you mother for taking care of Sam, too bad he had a bad day on Saturday! Thank you Ricki for your help! And thank you Helena for keeping up morale and serving drinks and buying hotdogs and making sure everyone was happy!
I have very good family & friends!!
As a homeowner you have to have projects to improve the house in some way. And the first project that have been on my mind since we moved in is the terrace!
We plan to have a huge terrace – 4 by 16 meters – that’s 64 square meters addition to the house! It’s gonna be awesome! 5 meters will be under roof, a cozy area if you will on those rainy august days.
My family will come out in force on saturday and help with everything from building to babysitting so we can hopefully get most of the building done before end of the weekend and I’ll spend weeks putting in the floor. Then it’s time to put up the roof on the sucker, fortunately Helenas big brother will help out with that!
You can follow the build in this photo gallery.
Although it was a hectic few days to get everything ready for our very first Christmas dinner ever it was so worth it! We were about 13 people there over the day, 6 stayed the night so a bit of planning but it was so fun! Helena’s brother with his family and my sister with her kids and my brother, and Helena’s mother, grandmother, it was all fun and most people had a good time. It was a bit tough in the evening trying to make sure people of four generations had a nice time (what can you do when the kids wanna play Guitar Hero and the grandmother wanna watch the news!?).
Then on Christmas day we went home to my parents for a more British christmas with turkey and the crackers and even more fun was had by all.
All in all a very merry christmas! Thanks everybody!!
Some photos can be found here.
Yeap, you read that right – I officially regret buying our house. It’s not due to any problems with the house or the building of it. Or the worth versus cost. Because it’s a good house and definitely worth what we paid for it. No, the reason I regret it is that I gave this guy our money!
To summarize – it’s our version of “CBS 60 Minutes” who try to nail “the powers that be” and this time they were after “Älvsbyhus” which is the company building the most houses in sweden per year. And they had 3 families who had their dreams turned into nightmares because of leaky roofs and heavy rain on the day of the assembly but most of all because of “Älvsbyhus” poor post-building customer service. Or lack thereof. When we got into this whole thing we quickly realised one key factor was if it was gonna rain on the day they’d be putting the house together, then we’d be in for a nightmare trip. And we also knew that you get what you pay for and “Älvsbyhus” is the cheapest option out there. But we also figured if they build 1.000 houses per year they kinda must know what they are doing. And we haven’t had any major problems (although we still have four outstanding issues after our inspection but they have promised to take care of it).
But then when you see the segment in “Kalla Fakta” and when they interview Donald Johansson, the CEO of “Älvsbyhus” and the entire thing gave me a terrible feeling of being ripped off. I actually gave my money to this guy!? They make some 150 million swedish crowns per year but his ego and “we are never wrong” mentality stops them from the goodwill factor of fixing these three families nightmares that would’ve cost them a maximum of 1.2 million swedish crowns and saved them from being blacklisted and that PR nightmare that was shown on the TV?! The arrogance, the condescending “you don’t know what you are talking about little girl” towards the journalist.. That f*cking old fart made Göran Persson look like a big care-bear!!
If I had seen this before we signed on I’d never have bought it and I sincerly hope they get alot of “we changed our minds” calls today ’cause a company that has a CEO like that deserves to go out of business. In my opinion.
Then again, if we hadn’t bought that house we wouldn’t be friends with Hanna, Micke and the Westbergs 🙂
Yeah, I’m still alive and I just realised how long it’s been since I wrote things here. But that’s how busy I’ve been. Or we’ve been! For the past weeks we’ve been going to Ikea every other day and hardware stores and all that crap to get the house in order and we are slowly getting there. But every time we say “Done!” something else pop ups. And we spend weekends visiting friends or family. Add to that a busy schedule at work and you realise why I’ve been slacking here.
Anyway, the house is almost “Done!” as is “could pass as a normal house where people live” rather than the mess it’s been in the past few weeks. Really gotta give it up to Helena that’s keeping things tidy around chaotic little me 🙂
I’m slowly but steadily settling into my new life as homeowner. Fortunately it’s a brand new home so I don’t have to do that much maintenance work yet but there’s still a bit of work to do!
Biggest change so far is that I’m more aware of things I didn’t use to care about! Most importantly mortgage rates and electricity rates/use! I’ve never paid an electric bill in my life before ’cause it was a part of the monthly rent in the apartment I used to have and Helena used to pay it for her apartment, and I’ve never had a loan of 2.5 million before so all of a sudden I care about that too. And I’m more and more turning into my father – I’m just afraid of the day when I think having a tie is a good idea!
I just finished two weeks vacation. Or whatever you can call it!! Painting a new house from scratch really sucks! And so does having to roll out a lawn! But now it’s done and we can now lay back for a bit to enjoy it 🙂
Pictures are here as usual.
Now I’m just waiting to set up the mortgage and start living a grown up life owning a house… geez, this moved fast!!
You know when you see those home-makeover shows and they paint the place in a flash? … I’d like to meet those people. ‘Cause I have a house here that needs 3 coats of paint. And after two days, combined manhours approximately 30 hours, we are 3/12 part of the way! We have done the first coat on 3 walls. That’s it. It takes goddamn forever to do this work. I don’t know how anyone could do it faster though, if you’re not a pro, but we don’t wanna dish out another 20.000 crowns to have it done that way…
Other than that everyone is proceeding according to plan. Hope to take some photos of the house now, with updated interior and the paintjob almost done. Well the first coating anyway…
On friday I had the day off from work and I spent it packing everything and transporting as much as I could to our house. But the real action didn’t start until saturday morning!
We went to rent a lorry to handle the big things like our bed. And apparently they don’t like it when you pay in cash! They get nervous that you’ll drive off with it! But I looked trustworthy enough for her to allow it anyway so off we went to Mio to pick up our really, really expensive (10.000 SEK!) diningroom table. Then back to the apartment to fill it up. Helenas mother dropped by and when my family arrived we loaded it up and went to the house and loaded everything off and sat down for a coffee. Then “the men” went off with they lorry to Sureguard to get all my things and then back to the apartment to pick up things that were going to the dump. Add a little time pressure and you have one serious, effective and not so fun Kris!
Then my brother Jocke went off to his girl while me and my dad went back to the house to join Helena, her mother and “uncle Leif”, my mother and sister who had put most of the furniture in order already. Then we had an awesome barbecue and after everything went home we spent the night cleaning up as good as we could and went to bed. Unfortunately it took quite a while for me to fall asleep and I had some nightmares so didn’t sleep very well at all.
But on sunday we went up and started our “list of things to do” but that went out the window when my friend Ricki said “I’ll be there in 30 minutes to hook up your home theater” which wasn’t really what we had expected but it worked out fine anyway. After a small tour of Ikea and Bauhaus we went home and got to work and after about 6 hours of work it was all good to go with “Wall-e” (as sound tests go, you can’t beat animated movies!). Eva dropped by too. And Helena did her thing cleaning out some areas and making sure we were well fed. I hate living up to gender stereotypes but we really did yesterday. Then we went back to the apartment to pick up the cats and boy were they glad to see us again. They still don’t know what to make of the house though…
After driving Ricki home I came home (!) at 23:00 and even though I had a gazillion things to do and wasn’t tired I went to bed and ended one of the busiest weekends of my life!
Now I’m back to work and piling up things to do at home but trying to focus on work. Not going to well to be perfectly honest.
Yesterday and today have been full of calling people everywhere to try to sort things out.
Everything from my bank, internet & tv supplier to the people who’s gonna deliver the grass and now the sanitation department to make sure we have somewhere to throw all our garbage.
So many things to get covered! But so far I think we have everything covered!
Right now we’re in the middle of packing up our old apartment to move this weekend now that we passed the building inspection and we’re good to go! Thankfully we’ll have support from my family this weekend when moving, I just hope we’ll get our huge couch so people have somewhere to site! And on sunday Ricki is coming over to do what we do best – building my home cinema 🙂
Right now so unbelievably happy!! 🙂
Everything is slowly moving ahead to us moving into our new house in 2 weeks time. They still have some loose ends to tie up, some electricity work and the wallpaper goes up last, and an inspection on 13th and then we can go ahead and move in. Thats the plan now anyway. Can’t wait!!
Saw “Knowing” the other day. I like the first 99.9% of the film but in the very last scene they ruin it for me by going religious. It’s a bit like “Battlestar Galactica” – love 99% of it had they not been that religious.
If you’ve been checking out this image gallery you should know why I don’t update much. Got tons of stuff to do and when you least need another ball to deal with life throws a huge curve ball right smack in your nuts!… more of that later, sometime… now we gotta finish that small little shed that’s soaking wet now…
They’re set to start building our house on monday and I thought I was on top of it. Then a truckdriver calls me up and says “hey there, where you want the house? you’re suppose to set up a sign you newbie!”… well it’s not my fault they told me I wouldn’t need the sign since there were so many people building there that they had everything under control, the sign-thing is just for people building in the middle of nowhere.
That’s what I get for trusting that guy…
Yesterday I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep when all of a sudden I realise… no matter how I do it, I will not be able to watch cable TV on my projector the way we have it planned now! And no matter how I replanned it, unless I dished out some $300 for another receiver and payed $10 per month extra for the card, there really is no way to solve that situation! And it drove me insane! Seriously, I couldn’t solved it! I had the chance to design my cables in that room the way I wanted it but there’s no way of getting the cable TV in there. Sure I can get the TV but no sound, unless I have extra cables along the wall that will look like crap!… so I guess we’re gonna have to pay that extra money so I can sleep again… until I realise the next problem, whatever that may be.
>Went by our new home yesterday to see if there was any progress with the house. And to our surprise there was! The foundation is now in place!! Very surprising how fast that happened actually! We’ve gone from “should we do it” to having a foundation set in stone for us in less than 8 weeks. It’s a bit scary cause thinking back about 14 months (february 2008) I was living in my little rented 2 room apartment and totally happy with that and didn’t see any need to change. Now we’re building a house!!
Check out the photo gallery here (or on facebook!)
Also added photos and some captions to the photos from Söderköping. Again I remind you to login as “guest” and password is the company I work for.
Don’t have much to say here really.
Our house project is moving along nicely. Should be ready to move in around july 15th if all goes well.
Me and Helena are going about our daily lives hoping that the rest of our lives are as good as the past year have been. ‘Cause it has been freaking awesome!
F1 is going down the drain for Ferrari and now it seems like they may not be with the sport for 2010, great fun that’ll be!
Other than that… moving along, nothing to see…