Oh.my.god! I went to my building site and it really looks like a house! In 10 days my builder has put the beams on the floors, go the beams up for the walls, and has started on the roofs! When he couldn’t get the crossbeam for the roof up he started putting up the first parts of the wall, so here’s what i looks like now!
I was away for a week on holiday and when I get back my builder calls to ask me if I could get him the last things he needs for the roof! My mum and dad went over to check the process during the weekend and all they could do was gape, mouth wide open, to the progress. The 12th of May all the stuff was delivered, and a little more than a week later he is asking for roof materials, geez! BTW, it took three guys 12 hours to carry all the stuff from the dock to the site!
I asked my builder why he thinks the house won’t be ready this year (that’s what he said) and he answered soberly that now everything big is getting up and done which makes it look like huge process but that later on in the project it will seem like nothing is happening for weeks when he goes into the details. So now I ordered the stuff he needs for the roof, the windows will be arriving in five weeks and then the kitchen, the tiles, the floor, the bathroom sink, and everything else, so excited!
The house seen from the sea
Okay so I’m in Helsinki and this weekend it’s all going down at the building site, all the materials I listed and the 42 rafters for the house is going to be lifted onto a barge tomorrow and taken to the island. I manage the transports and the logistics by nervously blabbering on the phone to all people involved until they make stuff happen. It’s remarkably time and energy consuming to link one builder, two logistics companies, two suppliers, a work force of three and the barge driver so that they are all informed of each others timetables and doings and that they all appear on the same island at the same day at the same time, with me not being there. There is also continuously some misinformation because they all take initiative and call each other but forget to keep me informed. Like my barge driver who discussed with one supplier and decided to change the port of discharge, but forgot to tell me, my builder AND the second supplier. Good thing I had that fixed before everything would have gone bonkers.
On a positive note, my mums and dads builders’ were bored (M&D are also building a house) as the barge with their stuff was late so they decided to take the short ride to my island and help me with my 26 fallen trees! Yey!
On saturday I’m going on vacation, in a city with a 10 hour time difference so then I’ll be so out of office and out of building project it isn’t even funny. I pray everything goes according to plan and that I don’t have to a) have cold sweats the whole trip or b) take a plane home.
My view to the north
Okay, so I ordered a whole bunch of stuff to get the project going, to be honest I don’t know if it’s a lot or not, but anyways it takes a whole barge to do it. First I had trouble finding the men to carry, because where I live it’s in the middle of sowing for the farmers and all the companies have projects similar to mine booked. I even went as far as talking to my cousin but he couldn’t come either, and a guy I met at the motorcycle fair in february, how desperate am I? So then I called a local handy man who agreed to help and to get some of his friends to come help him, so that’s all set. BUT! Then the guy who owns the barge told me that it wasn’t going to be ready next week so I managed to get my dad to persuade another barge owner to postpone his vacation to transfer my stuff, so now it seems like all is good. The list of stuff is really long, here it is, apparently this is what you need to build the exterior (exept the paneling)
This weekend I got to do nothing at the island, because my family decided to throw me a small birthday party, so it was all fun and no work. I’m going to have a long break from the project as we’re in town next week and then we’re off to Los Angeles, so the next time I see my project it will be two weeks into building in the end of may, can’t wait to see how far its come by then. Oh yeah, i installed the time lapse camera
I’ve told you before I get these obsessions, people usually laugh, one of those worried laughs like haha, funny, but really thinking “is she absolutely mental?”. Well, my biggest obsession so far is the sink I talked about in my post “Babysteps”: http://moodhouse.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/babysteps-5/
So the story continues, I found a company who can make a sink, in Bali and ship it here! Craziness! I got a bit sceptical on how they are going to get it here intact and wether it would stay under 300kg like needed. Then my interior stylist Maja tipped me about a company in Finland that make the most beautiful sinks I’ve ever seen, they’re called Sisustusbetoni, and the material they use is concrete. The only problem is that they have a weight limit of 180 kg and the design I want is closing on 300 kg (oops!). So.. now I’m back to square one, and designing the sink all over again because the company in Bali wants more accurate measurers. I had trouble picturing the sink so I did scaled-down versions of it in paper!
My miniature sinks
I came to the conclusion that the best measurement is 180 cm long, 30 deep and 30 tall. I messaged the company, lets hope they give me the answer I want to hear!
Pheew, I worked for four hours on saturday and three on sunday, it may not sound a lot but for someone who works 9-10 hours sitting at the office every day standing in a half bent position picking small twigs and branches really takes the toll on you. The ground is covered in small pine branches after the winter storms, so all of my lot looks like this:
Twigs everywhere!
I know you might think “but why do you need to pick them up” well it’s because pine trees contains a lot of acid so if I ever want anything to grow on my lot apart from more pines and blueberries I’m going to have to do something about it. So starting from one end making my way towards the other end took me around 5 hours bent over picking until my lap was full, carrying it over to the barrel I then burned them in. I burned four piles and collected an additional four for next time, and I’m still not done!
My pretty piles on my pretty lot
My barrel smoking from the wet twigs
My handy man, ie my Honda ATV
Sassy made a good job of carrying twigs, only in the wrong direction. Here she is resting after a hard days work.
After my hard days work I took a walk on the beach and found a message in a bottle, the one I told you earlier about. Took a picture of the content me (didn’t realize I had mascara all over my right eye, haha!)
Me after work
Ever since I was a kid I’ve been sending messages in bottles hoping for someone to find them, and also looking for them on my islands’ shores. Well today, I found one! It said “evelina (phonenumber) mattias (phonenumber) call us, hugs and kisses!” I immediately texted both of them, I was so happy to have found a message in a bottle at last! And guess what they replied! They had thrown the bottle from a ferry going from Gotland to Stockholm a year ago!
= the feeling of realizing that the project at hand is bigger than big.
I started the island season this weekend. Thank god I had Jonne and his dog Jade with me because there was so much to do (and still is, hence the title)! I knew we had a spring cleaning ahead and some maintenance to do on the old house but had no idea what was to come. We went over to my part of the island only to realize that our handy man had made a mild understatement by saying “it isn’t that bad”. What he meant was that no trees had fallen over building or damaged anything during the winter that came with lots of storms. The understatement derives from that he forgot to mention that there were 16 fallen trees plus the whole place was covered in small pine tree branches fallen in the storms. One tree had missed the wood shed by a meter, another had aimed at the outhouse and missed and one cut off the path to the sauna. The rest were lying about, it looked like a team of giants had been playing Micado and gotten tired. So, we took the chainsaw, an axe and got to work!
Micado in the forest
Some trees had been chopped off by the wind right in half!
A crocus, (lat. crocus vernum) made my day brighter
It really felt so overwhelming, and knowing I’m going to handle all this on my own was almost to much to take in. Thank god we cured my overwhelmization with some wine, dine and the first flower of the year gave me hope.
So, now it feels like I’ve been going up the loong uphill in a rollercoaster and we all know the feeling when the carts goes over the “bump” and you get that feeling in your tummy, that’s the feeling I have now, everything is speeding up and rolling faster and faster. Next week I’m meeting the builder and the master builder at the island for the “founding meeting” and then we have two weeks to order the material and then the building should start, hoogaah!
