JENS MALMGREN I create.

Foundation finished, Prepared for the container.

It is Friday 12 June. It has been a busy week. I always have busy weeks, so that is not the issue. It was like I had to shuffle blogging to the side for once this week. There has been a lot of things going on at the plot and the new house. I got a bunch of exciting photos from the development of the house and plants so I will reconstruct the events around the pictures. I prefer to tell the story while it unfolds, but that failed this week. I will make sure that the next week I will be back to a regular schedule of blogging while living. This means that now we return in time to last Monday.

Monday 8 June

This evening I worked on the portrait of Tess Northcott, and I will blog separately about her painting. We did not go to the plot this evening. It feels like I have been to the plot every evening this week, but that is not true.

Tuesday 9 June

In this era of my life, I start the morning giving plants water. The new tomatoes project is progressing well—kind of. The design of my pots has given me a little headache. Some of the seeds were sprouting into the fold. When finding out where the sprout was, I actually destroyed a couple of plants. From this, I figured out that either I have to choose another design altogether, or I have to make the fold much and much longer. Almost so long that it folds all the way to the bottom.

The preparations for the floor is in full progress. Here they placed the concrete beams to be used for each section.

The gray pipes are wastewater. The colored tubes will be used for input water, electricity, and media.

The electricity is arriving at a plate that is standardized for the bottom of the utility cupboard.

Here is the pipe to the kitchen going on top of the foundation beam. Space for the tube to the sink in the bathroom is dug out in the foam plastic.

Here are the tubes that Gijs delivered. Along with the house, there are rainwater pipes that will take care of the water from the roof.

We will be able to reach the space below the entire house due to these gaps in the foundation. Here steel beams are used to overlap the hole in the foundation.

I was missing the pipe for the wood stove, though. For the rest it looked completed.

 

The onion is nearing its blooming. It looks absolutely fabulous, and it is a grand onion, indeed.

This Tuesday evening I was attending a music event via Zoom. I also had decided to finish the painting of Tess Northcott, but I was not concentrating well enough to succeed with my plan.

 

Here you can see the house from above this evening. There has been raining while the carriage was standing at the circle. Then it was removed after the rain leaving behind a lighter rectangle.

It is so fascinating to see the project from the air. Here we are seeing the compartments in the foundation and the beams they placed, ready for the assembly of the floor.

 

Wednesday 10 June

The biggest surprise this evening was not the development of our own house but of Mrs. PMT. She got a humongous crane at her building site.

We contemplated how long this crane would be here. It was partly blocking the road. There was no problem driving around the crane, but I was just curious about this.

This evening we had decided to make use of the tip we received of the friendly neighbor to the man we helped pick up pallets. He had said that Wednesday or Thursday was the best day for checking for free pallets. We drove to the place and checked the availability on the way to the plot, and there we picked up our trailer and went back and loaded the pallets.

I guessed it entirely correct. This is called a bread loaf floor in Dutch. They call it like that because it looks a little like the foam elements are loaves of bread.

Along the sides of the foundation, they placed ridges. This makes the mold of the concrete floor.

In the distance, you can see Mrs. PMT’s house being mounted on her foundation.

The section of the house where the utility room is located is more complicated. Here they have more work to do.

Here is an opening to an adjacent section of the base. It will be possible to crawl under the entire house.

Here are Gijs pipes. These are for the heat pump.

Next to the big pipes, there is a thin pipe. It is for drainage from the heat pump.

Thursday 11 June

This morning I watered the tomatoes as I usually do. I am looking forward to the moment when we put them in the ground at the plot. I will keep a couple of plants at the old house, but most of the plants will be moving to the new place.

We received the offer from the electrician. He will install the electricity in the house. It feels good that we got that covered. We still got a vacancy for the water system in the house. The electrician had contacts for that as well, so we might make use of these.

Yesterday evening we ate pumpkin soup. It is made of smaller pumpkins. My wife got the idea that we could plant a couple of seeds of pumpkins as well. She did four seeds in every pot.

This planting season is not a very planned activity. We are doing things too late and as it happens. I think that we will be preparing the events for the next year’s planting season much more carefully. Either that or we stay in this doing is pure for the fun mode. I doubt that last, though.

We got a big surprise from the development of our neighbor’s project. The house was already standing!

Clearly, they will do much work on the outside of the house from here on. But it is a real house, and it looks impressive.

In a couple of weeks, it will be our turn to see the house be placed in two days.

The preparation below the flow was finished today.

On top of the foam plastic and the concrete beams, there is a rebar mesh placed.

We got ventilation pipes that will bring in fresh air into the foundation. Here we can also see the rebar loops sticking up out from the base frame. These loops are critical because they make it possible to anchor the walls of the house into the foundation. We will see.

Here is the situation on the north side of the utility room.

Small gaps around the pipes have been carefully sealed. The rectangle is the manhole. As far as I am concerned, it is not only my door to the underground. Also, my wife can go down there. She, however, declared loud and clear that she will find any reason to go down there. So from that perspective, this is the manhole.

Here is the opening for the woodstove. It will receive fresh air from this pipe. The air will get into the basement from the side pipes.

This evening it was the first time we noticed that post was delivered on this street. The postwoman looked really happy.

 

This evening we noticed we had received 7 millimeters of rain. We hope that the grass we planted will sprout so it will be necessary with more rain. We don’t have any water on this street. We cannot just connect a hose and spray our garden. It is a little bit too much to bring water for the grass as well. At some point, we will have a well, and that will make it possible to water more plants. Since there is no electricity, it will still be a little challenging to water a large area of the garden, so in the meantime, we are holding our thumbs for more water from the sky. All the critical plants like the apple trees get water from jerry cans that we bring every other day.

The apple trees are doing fine. They have new flowers, but I doubt that these flowers will produce any fruit this season. We will need to be happy with the apples we already got on these trees.

Now you can see the compost from the sky. It is one meter in diameter already. The most significant addition to the organic material was the plants from the driveway. From then on, we found sporadic stealth thistles. The floor still got no concrete on thi

Friday 12 June

Then it was Friday already. Today they were pouring concrete to finish the ground floor.

What is there to say? It is flat.

I could see almost no issues. In the hobby room, a little part of a rebar net was sticking up out from the concrete. I think I will cut that away so that we are not stumbling over it again and again.

The rainwater pipes end here. From here, they will be extended to our excess water storage.

 

Saturday 13 June

Our house will be delivered in 9 days. I believe they will bring a digger to bring back the soil around the house. That will happen next week. Let us say that I hope they will do that. Perhaps I will need to mark up the places where pipes are sticking out of the foundation? Actually, I spoke to the contact person at the foundation company, and he said they would fill in the soil around the foundation. I think the right timing for that is next week. Presumably, they will fill in the foundation for two other neighbors as well as making use of the same foundation builder. It is Mr. LB (with wife), and his neighbor Mr. RH (with wife), has the same foundation builder as we have. That is really convenient because we did not need to get that potty house in plastic. They placed that on Mr. LBs plot.

On 22 June, they will bring the wood for the exterior of the house, and isolation material for inside the house. We will put these things in a container. We decided we will buy a sea container to place along the right side of the driveway. We ordered it, and it will arrive some day next week. Today we started preparing a place for the sea container.

I talked about the sea container in a blog post already on 9 May. Back then, we had the impression that it was a good idea to put it on pallets. Later we spoke the company delivering the container, and they talked about garden tiles of size 60 by 60 cm. It appears that exactly 60 by 60 cm garden tiles are Dutch high fashion garden-style right now, so those are not easy to find for free. Tiles of 30 by 30 is what everybody is removing from their gardens. Guess what, it is all a complete stupidity to discard things that have a lifespan of a couple of hundred years. By doing that the humanity is burning resources, it actually cannot afford to abandon. There has been CO2 released in the air 30 years ago to produce these tiles. They have a life span of a couple of hundred years. The CO2 is still up there in the air from the tiles that garden fashion made redundant. There is no way we can get that CO2 back into the ground again without spending more money on carbon capture, and even if we do that, you cannot just capture carbon that easy. This brings us to what I am doing. I pick up these tiles and intend to use them. For the sake of saving human life on earth. Had you guessed that I was that friendly to all of you?

Here we started clearing the ground for the sea container. We decided on a little more than a meter from the driveway. On the right side of the photo, you can see the driveway. The driveway ends at the dirt road that we created together with the neighbors of this area. On the other side is the building site of Mr. AA. On the other hand, We will let the container have the doors on this side. That is near the entrance to the hobby room in the house, so that looks like the right spot.

On the other side of the future container place, you can see the sign I created on 26 April. In the distance on the left side of the driveway, you can see the foundation. There is also a little heap with sand that we don’t know what the foundation people will be using. The sign will be standing in front of the container.

Today it was hot weather. We went home because we had earned ourselves a siesta. After reloading our batteries, we came back and continued working on the foundation for the container. Here is one corner near the sign. We used the soil compactor that we bought at a second-hand shop last weekend. It was much easier to operate it with two people.

On the other side, we got the corresponding pyramid. The idea is that the container will rest on this and that it will not sink into the ground. Assumptions.

 

Sunday 14 June

Today we continued on the preparations for the sea container. It was supposed to be less warm weather today, but I did not notice that it was chiller today.

Yesterday we used all our garden forks and spades and shovels of various types. We have more of these, but they had broken handles. That is not so practical when we are working on the same task, like preparing the ground for a container. To solve this, I suggested to my wife that we would get new shovel handles so that I can repair these, and we can start to use them.

Because of this, we went to a garden center, and while buying the handle, we also picked up a squash plant.

We also had two rakes—one that I bought not so long ago and a rake that I made. I have to say that despite the handle on the homemade rake is a little too short, the rake head is fantastic when sorting out lumps of clay from the soil. I would like to make a new rake that is more straight, and in the next version, I would like to put a longer tail. For that, I bought a second-hand broomstick already.

It was a lot of work to flatten the ground where the container will be standing. It was hot, and we worked and worked. It was as if it never ended.

The last thing my wife did at the plot tonight was to plant the squash plant. It received a little ring of clay around it so that when it is watered, there can be a small pool. It also gives a little bit of shadow for the plant.

That was it!


I moved from Sweden to The Netherlands in 1995.

Here on this site, you find my creations because that is what I do. I create.