PARENTAL LEAVE

In 37 days I’m going on a 7 month parental leave. Add one more month of vacation and I’m gonna be home for a long long time!

I know I shouldn’t amp up my expecations since I’m bound to disappointed but.. 8 months with my little boy. Learning him to eat solid(ish) food, learning him to walk and maybe even talk a little bit. It’s gonna be great! I just hope we don’t suffer too much economically because of it.

STILL AT IT

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.

DONE!

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!

FLOOR IT!

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!!