When this comes down…
… then I can pick up the pieces from the gravel under the villa.
I built this lamp last winter as one of my garage projects. It was meant to hang over the dining table. But after carrying this beast into the dining/kitchen room I figured that it looked way too massive. It is made from massive logs left over from the guest cottage project. To find a new location was an easy task as I still hadn’t figured out how to light up the living room with its 5 meters high ceiling. That’s where the lamp is hanging now. Lifting the lamp up wasn’t exactly a light-weight exercise. And if this thing ever comes crashing down, it’s going to smash straight through the wooden floor and the insulation below it. Well, I hope it never comes to this.
One day went into attaching the panels in the open space of the living room. Climping from 2.5 to 5 meters above the floor and jumping from one scaffolding to another was a little circus act but I’m rather glad about the result.
The open space in the living room is now kind of ready. I even spent some hours on the finishing touches and doing the first ever cleaning of the windows (at least the inside). Kind of brighten up things…
I just hope I don’t need to change the halogen spots too often. Putting up the scaffolding for half an hour to change a lamp ain’t very fun, but that’s the cost of tailored villa.
Finetuning around fireplace
The love of my life: my pneumatic nail-gun. It came into good use again over the weekend.
20 x 208mm boards wanted to be attached besides the fireplace. And 14 x 120mm boards on the ceiling above the fireplace. The later piece of work would have been easier if nobody would have switched two packages of ceiling boards that have a white wax treatment instead of a white lacquer treatment in the local K-Rauta. Because it wasn’t one of the brighter days I didn’t notice the difference until I had attached 12 boards already. Only from distance the difference was easy to recognize. After a short Scheisse-moment, the wrong stuff was quickly pulled off the ceiling with the crowbar and the right stuff attached. Cost of error: 1 hour and some unnecessary swearing.
But as usual I’m pleased with the result.
After adding the lists around the fireplace, cheating a bit with silicon in the corners, and filling the holes the nail-gun left with white plasterwork, the whole thing starts to be ready for a little celebration. More about that later.
Pax 2.0
Ikea offers decent quality furniture for cost-conscious buyers. But sometime stuff is missing that “cottage” feeling and for sure the individual touch considering that about 1 billion other people have exactly the same piece of furniture.
The same is true for the Pax series of closets. They offer great value for money and plenty of flexibility when it comes to how design the inside of the closets. But yes, even with the sliding doors nowadays available, they do look rather boring. What we do the master bedroom of Villa Linnea is to buy the standard Pax closets and then customize them.
The sliding doors are a project of itself, but them I assembled already last summer. What I did now was to build a nice frame around the basic Pax closet that makes it look much more like part of the villa than a stand-alone closet. It took me an insane 6 hours as pretty much every piece had to be customized, but I’m not too ashamed of the result.
The next step of upgrading to the next major release of our Pax solution is to rebuild the sliding doors re-using the mechanism but replacing the MDF boards entirely with stained plywood and nice lists. The drawings are ready but I’m afraid that it will a project for next winter as they are more urgent things to do before I’m celebrating the launch of Pax 3.0.
The 80:20 rule
Have you noticed that the 80:20 rule applies also to building or renovating? Think about changing the wallpaper. 80% of the time goes into tearing the old wallpaper off, plastering over the holes in the wall, and then there are the never ending works for the floor and ceiling lists. The actual wallpapering is only a marginal part of the whole project.
Laying floor tiles is not much different. The actual mortar/tile-laying related work is only 20% of the fun. The rest makes up the other 80%. Let me walk you backwards in the process…
But lets first gaze at the beautiful result: the floor tiles and the compass mosaic (which increases the percentages of this project to a mathematically impossible 120%!).
Surprising how curved the straight lines appear on the photo taken with a Sony digital camera. Now the hallway is ready for the delivery the stairs (after painting all the walls as well).
Because I decided to use white joint filler for the mosaic and dark grey one for the other tiles I had to split the joint filling over two days. First I did the joint filling for the dark floor tiles and only the next day I did the joint filling for the mosaic. If I would have done it in one go, it most likely would have turned into one grey/white mess.
Before I could even start with laying the tiles I marked the two sides of the mosaic compass with laser precision. I put down the mosaic first and started to lay the floor tiles from the mosaic outwards. Below is a photo of the laser marker but you can’t really see the laser beam.
And before you actually mark where to lay the floor tiles you need to naturally know first how to lay them: sideways, long side towards the light, aligned on the edge with the wall to avoid cutting unnecessarily often floor tiles into pieces, and so on. I spent an incredibly amount of two hours playing around with multiple configurations. I came finally to the conclusion that I’m aligning the mosaic with the center of the door and coincidentally with the door to the bathroom.
So, the 80:20 rule applies also to laying floor tiles. And if you add a lovely mosaic it to it, it adds an additional twist to the whole equation.
Miracles can happen!
Miracles do happen! Maybe not the kind where the blind can suddenly see again or the paralyzed start walking, but sometimes little miracles can take place. It was a little miracle when I arrived at Villa Linnea this weekend and one of the big projects scheduled for the summer, the building of the large terrace towards the lake, was done.
It’s like a group of Mainzelmännchen, a bunch of German little dwarfs (see also under http://mainzelmaennchen.zdf.de) had been out there and build the terrace magically overnight.
Now we can bring out the garden furniture and enjoy the sunset on the terrace assuming that it would be summer (and there wouldn’t be 15 cm of snow still hang around). And yes, miracles do happen. This one comes at the price of 38 Euro/hour but it was worth it! I only need to figure out how to building the railing and the stairs towards the lake. But that’s for another time.
I’ve been preparing the hallway for the tiling by spreading a layer of moisture resistant stuff onto the three layers of dry wall. It’s not quite the same than the thick plastic-like layer of moisture resistant film that one applies in the bathroom but it will surely help – together with the floor-heating – to keep the occasional water from the floor.
The other project of the weekend was the paneling of the ceiling in the dining and kitchen room i.e. another romantic date with my pneumatic nail-gun…
Darling, I’ve gone shopping!
What do you do when you don’t build? Correct, you buy stuff to build with later on!
It’s been an expensive week. First I ordered the floor boards for the second floor. One hundred pieces of UPM WISA PRO floorboards in vanilla color 145mm wide. At 9.70 Euro per piece plus 100 Euro delivery charge to get it to the local K-Rauta I’m not too worried about the price as you pay 4.50/m at Puukeskus for the untreated version (reminder: each piece I ordered is about 2m long).
The next order was placed at Pukkila for floor tiles that will come into the hallway. I assumed it to be rather challenging to find tiles in the right size and matching color pattern to fit our compass mosaic.
But with help of the very nice staff from Pukkila in Tammisto (and after some carrying about of the compass mosaic) we found a tile that matches nicely the color tone of the mosaic tiles with the letters i.e. the darkest part of the mosaic. The tiles from Pukkila are called Dolmen and come in size of 604/300mm i.e. nicely work with the mosaic sized 600. Perfect!
Next up on the shopping list were the lamps for the kitchen and dining area. After some research in some various web shops, Bauhaus, and K-Rauta I found some lamps that at least hypothetically please the other half. Both of them come with an white antique-wanna-be finnish which could look rather nice.N
Last but not least, a little 390 Euro shopping trip to sähkökaluste.fi buying more ABB Jussi power sockets, light switches, and thermostats for the second floor completes this week of procurement.
Flow Festival
Well, actually the main work over Easter was rather related to “blowing” than “flowing” but I didn’t dare to have that word in the title of the blog post as it might attract the all-wrong crowd…
Anyway, we spent two days blowing the insulation material, the so-called Selluvilla, into the roof of the villa and into the floor of the second story. The material and the “blow machine” (whatever that one is called) where delivered on Thursday before Easter. I have to thank the driver still. I have never seen a driver taking so well care of the goods. He dropped them off nicely, carried some of them even onto the terrace and covered everything with a tarp we provided. Impressive! Never happened before. We need to send our good feedback to Suomen Ylijäämävarasto in Hämeenlinna where we ordered the stuff and where we lend the machine for free.
The pile in front of the villa might not look that impressive on the photo but we are talking about 130 sacks of 15 kg of insulation material (which essentially nothing else than treated, recycled newspaper and magazines). As mentioned earlier 1.8 tons of stuff.
The actually “blowing” into the confined spaces in the roof was faster yet messier than anticipated. While we did have protective suits, ear protection, and filter masks, proper goggles such as skiing masks would have been good to have. When you load the stuff into the machine, sack by sack, you essentially experience a complete whiteout due to the dust flying around. The machine crunches through a sack of insulation in about 3 minutes.
We were three people for this operation which is the perfect amount for this task. One carries and opens the sacks, one loads and operates the machine, and the last one blows the stuff into the roof.
During Friday (also the day of arriving) we did the open floors in the towers and the whole roof above the living room. On Saturday we did the roof in the towers (20 sacks each!) and compressed the insulation in the open spaces in the second floor.
The rest of the Easter break went into other tasks such as insulating, pulling the electricity cables and paneling the wall between bathroom and the hallway. With the door in place it looks so much more ready and soon one won’t need to worry about how the bathroom looks like for another year.
The damn door actually doesn’t close as the frame is too tight. Don’t buy doors at Byggmax. They might be cheap but you need to spend an extra hour every time to adjust the distance between the frame and the door.
Naturally, to Easter belongs also the mandatory Easter fire.
I’ll close for today with a last image from the villa in winter conditions…hopefully next time it’s spring.
