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!!
Woke up this morning with one thing on my mind – doing another round of painting on the house.
Then I started reading the news to find out John Hughes is dead!! What tha hell!? This guy wrote some of my favorite movies ever!
I know I was too young to “get” Breakfast Club/16 Candles the first time I saw it but with the fucked up school years I had, belive you me, I totally got it and it absolutely helped me survive it.
Ferris Bueller I still consider to be one of the funnies movies ever! When I first saw it I just rolled on the floor laughing so hard when they crashed the Ferrari it was unbelievable! Then we have the “National Lampoons”-movies that are rerun forever (see Christmas Vacation every year) and more.
(EDIT: I’d earlier made a reference to the Jackson “Thriller” video, but ofcourse that was John Landis, another 80’s icon!)
Really sad he’s no longer with us. Although his spirit lives on in his movies.
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…
Let’s talk about something else than our house… yesterday marked 40 years since the awesome achievement of the Apollo program to walk on the moon. Anyone who have seen the TV series/documentary “From the Earth to the Moon” knows just how advanced it was, and that just scratched the surface.
So when I read the tabloid “Aftonbladet” here in sweden running a poll saying “over 60% of their readers think it was fake” I get upset. It’s a pretty ignorant to discuss it over and over again, cause it does come up now and again ofcourse. And I hate to think what Grissom, White and Chaffee would say about it had they not died in the Apollo 1 fire!
But then I found this nice piece of journalism – “Top 5 proofs it did happen” and it put a smile on my face.
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.
Now it’s really summer time here in Stockholm! It’s wonderful to walk to work nowadays, stopping by Kungsan for a chocolate dipped icecream before work. Think that was one of Gods many plans to be honest!
Our house is almost done. We’re waiting for the electrician and the wallpapers to go up, we’re also having our fireplace mounted this week but it looks like it’s the wrong kind. Won’t know until it’s done and the covers are in place though.
And then, on july 13th we have our big inspection of the house that will either end in such a huge list of negatives that the entrepreneurs will have to redo alot of stuff, or most likely a small list of things that will take them 1-2 days to fix and we should be able to move in that weekend. That’s almost three weeks from now! Can’t wait!
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…
If you live in sweden, go to Livsviktigt.se and sign-up. I have.
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…
One of many things me and Helena have in common is we like movies! And we’ve seen quite a few in the recent couple of weeks, even gone to the cinemas – 3 times!!
Wolverine was pretty good and fun action. Angels and Demons was so so. And then we saw Terminator Salvation and it was abit of a disappointment! It was good action but it took itself way too seriously, hardly any comedy, paper thin story. So not that impressed. Atleast the third one had some moral to it, this was just plain action.
But one movie we saw on dvd the other week was “Fireproof”. We thought it was gonna be a good drama/romantical movie about a couple who’d grown apart and was on the brink of divorce. But it wasn’t. It was a sugar-overload sent by the american jesus christ society! I’m all for respecting other people and their beliefs and if they want to believe in jesus christ then go ahead. But don’t try to convert the world through these kinds of Hallmark movies! I mean the movie and story was ok, had it just not been for the “I have to love god to know what love really is” crap they kept on about.
And someone really should take a look at the subwoofer in Heron number 9 cause it’s been sounding crazy for a year now…
And so another awesome weekend ends and the first real week of summer begins!
Me and Helena are keeping ourselves busy wether we like it or not, but on saturday it actually looked like we were gonna have a lazy ass afternoon and evening at home with only the TV as company. But oh no, we were called into Heron City to watch “Angels and Demons” with two friends of ours. It was nice to see them again but the movie could’ve been better. Although I gotta say it’s still fun to see movies from Rome where I can say “been there” (although nowadays I say it quite to myself).
But sunday was the big day for us. My family and some of Helena’s joined us at our building site for a little tour of where everything is going to be becauase in exactly one week the house will be lifted in place. And after that tour we went to a nearby lake and had a picknick/lunch, celebrated my 34th birtday (!) and just enjoyed the kick ass weather! After that we went home to find out noone had showed to check out the apartment so to comfort ourself I got to open my birthday present 2 days too early and we spent the night trying to play Metallica on our Playstation.
Absolutely kick ass weekend!
Back in 2000-2001 I had a friend called Markus. We lived a few kilometer from each other, we both liked “Star Trek”, movies, computer games and the occasional beer (or in his case, bottle of wine). I liked him. But after Eden died and after Markus got married and I did my world tour we kinda lost touch for a long time and what little I heard from him was from my sister who ran into him now and again.
But now we decided that it had definitely been too long so me and my fiance went over to their house for a BBQ, some beers and alot of conversation. And it was good! It was awesome actually. Marcus and his wife now had 2 kids (she was pregnant with the first one last time I saw her!) and he had done so many home improvement I couldn’t believe it was the same Markus! And we had a great time just talking and discussing things about life and stuff. It was great reconnecting and we’re definitely gonna do it more often 🙂
I’ve added some new pictures in my 2009 album here, although you should log in as “guest” to see them all.
Most importantly I have some pictures from the baptism me and Helena went to a week or so ago. It was for her brothers newborn, Emilia. As always it was a great day and I had a blast! And so did Helena once she got over the anxiety of “what does a godmother do!?”
Then there are some new pictures in our album for our new house. (you really should bookmark cause I’ve grow tired of mentioning every update to it)
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.