Tidying up the old house Sunday, 03-Apr-22 20:42:37 CEST

Ready for selling the old house Sunday, 17-Apr-22 21:34:00 CEST

Monday, 11-Apr-22 20:36:57 CEST

Photos of the old house

Photographer came and made pictures, 360 degrees photos and films of our old house.

Wednesday 6 April

This week, I am slow at starting to blog again. It has rained a lot which is good. I went to the office Monday, Tuesday, and today, Wednesday. We had a course at the office with people from the branch offices in different countries, and I was the teacher. I talked a lot, scribbled on a whiteboard, answered questions, and showed things. It was great fun, but I was tired when it was over. I lent out two paintings for display in the branch offices.

The painting "4 Boxes" went to Germany, and the painting "Kinderdijk" went to Sweden. I made tubes of PVC pipe from the temporary downpipes we installed for the house. Sawed the pipe long enough to keep the painting rolled in the pipe. At the ends of the tubes, I made lids of protective paper we have for our floors. Then two of the students got the tubes with them with the instruction to go to a local frame shop and then hang the painting in the office.

While teaching things, I "missed" my free Wednesday afternoon, so I decided to use that tomorrow, Thursday instead. We still got things to tidy up, so I will need to work there. I also decided to take the rest of the day off to get a full day to finish the old house.

I brought two tubes of bell pepper to the office and planted them in pots there. It is just an experiment; we will see what they will be doing. I suppose they will not produce any bell pepper when grown indoors, but they will produce foliage. I will keep you posted on the progress of this project. I am part of the plant's committee at work, and we are trying different things to provide for plants in the office. We could go and buy new fancy plants, there is a budget for that, but we somehow resorted to totally free options.

This week, I looked every day at the tray of seed buckets that I took out of the fridge on 3 April. There is nothing to be found in the tray. No signs of germination at all. Also, the bucket with Malva Sylvestris seeds is quiet. I did not blog about it, but I took out the Malva Seeds on 23 March. The instructions on the seed packages say you might need to repeat several fridge-to-room cycles before all seeds germinate. We will see how that goes.

Thursday 7 April

I decided to install a system update on my phone in the morning. That had a surprising effect; the battery quickly drained after the update. There was no time to look into this, but it set a slightly grumpy baseline for my mood. There was no time to use the phone.

Today I had a whole day off to prepare the house for the photographer tomorrow. It was an uphill struggle from start to end. There was so much to do. I cleaned the windows on the outside because DW had cleaned most of them on the inside. I cleaned the glass in the cupboard doors. I also went to the recycling station with redundant things. We had one defective light on the car for two weeks, so I went to the garage to have that fixed.

After lunch, DW finished her work and started cleaning things. DW vacuum cleaned the floors. At some point, a thread got stuck in the hose. Apparently, the airflow cooled the vacuum cleaner's motor, so when that did not work correctly, the motor got warmer and warmer. Eventually, the overheating protection stopped the vacuum cleaner. It took more than an hour for the motor to cool down properly. When the vacuum cleaner started again, we were relieved that it worked as it was supposed to work.

While scrubbing a window sill, I cut a finger; it is not looking good if you leave bloodstains! I had not brought any long ladder, so I had to clean the windows from the inside via a small window that could be opened. The first couple of windows went very well. I had a rubber scraper on a stick to reach further, but I stood at a strange angle. It hurt my back and made me really grumpy. However, the thing with deadlines is that they are where they are, whether you are grumpy or got backache or not. I cut the lawn and cleaned the garden path while raining and hailing.

Symptomatically when cleaning up things, the better it looks, the more apparent becomes the remaining issues. At first, you are busy moving things out of the way, and when that is done, you discover everything that needs to be cleaned, and the more you clean, the more you find to clean.

We had to draw a line; after all, it was for photography, so there was no need to clean inside the cupboards. Even so, it was late. We went to our new home, really tired.

I put the phone on the charger before going to bed.

Friday 8 April

We started in the morning by giving the sheep a larger patch because we would be away from them the entire day.

For me, it was regular work from the home office day. DW and I went to the old home, logging in to work from the second floor. The photographer arrived and took images of our old home, the garden, everything. He was pleased with our work. "This is good," was his evaluation of our effort. He took regular photos, 360 degrees photos, and filmed a walk-through.

It was a little finicky because he worked each floor from the bottom and up, and I worked on the top floor. So I had to take a break and walk downstairs while he was busy on the second floor. Then I could return to my desk, and then the photographer did the next round of photos.

When the photographer left, we were relieved that it went so smoothly. We went to our new house and continued working from our new home.

After work, we went to a party. It was friends to us celebrating their 25th year of marriage. DW and I got 30 this summer. Cannot recall we had a grand party at 25 years. Again, I hope we don't bring home corona from the party. I drove, so I stayed sober this night. The party was great fun, but I have this feeling that I need to get used to being around people.

When we went home from the party at midnight, my phone had 2% left. I never ever had less than 50% after a full day of using this phone.

Saturday 9 April

I was feeling more tired than usual this morning. I wanted to do things, but there was no energy left. DW had the same feeling. We got a second-hand electric kettle that is leaking. It turned out to be so that the water gauge had a crack. I decided to fill the gauge with silicone entirely. This was the kind of task I had the energy for. The kettle worked better than before, but I think there is a tiny little leakage left.

We moved the sheep; they need maintenance regardless of energy levels. We also chased thistle weed. In general, we pottered around without doing so much DIY.

In the evening, I sowed 5 seeds of pumpkins from the pumpkin soup DW made. It was delicious! I envisioned the more pumpkin soup in the autumn made from our own pumpkins and think homegrown pumpkins would make the soup taste even better. But first, obviously, the seeds need to germinate, and we have a lot of hurdles to get through before there are pumpkins to harvest.

Sunday 10 April

Today the weather was excellent, and we felt that our strength had started to get restored. I cleaned outside the area on the east side of the building. Recently the plumber had picked up the ventilation pipes lying on the east side. There was bare soil left. Today I removed the pallet of rests of floor tiles. Then I raked the soil and sowed grass there. We plan to put gravel around the house to fill up a bit, but that is for later. We can also use the ground having good grass growing for the sheep to graze until we are ready for gravel.

The next task was to build a raised cultivation bed for the winter salad. This is an idea I got when we ordered seeds last time. I heard about a type of salad growing long into the winter. I found the seeds for this salad and ordered a package of the seeds. This kind of salad needs to grow in the shade, and we got that behind the house. The northeast corner of the house is an almost shady place, except in the morning and the late afternoon. I also want to try some barriers against snails because that is the big issue with salad. For that, I envisioned that a raised bed with a flat surface would work the best.

I made the bed 380 centimeters long and 80 centimeters wide. That way, I can reach the bed from one side. We had planks lying from when we built the façade of the house. At the front of the sea container, we got the planks we thought were not good enough for the house. They are suitable for projects like this cultivation bed. The bed is two planks heigh, that is 28 centimeters.

The bed was filled with hay lying around during the winter stay for the sheep. The sheep peed and pooped on this hay, so it is full of nutrition. There may be too much nutrition in the hay, but I will try it as the base layer of the cultivation bed. On top of the hay, I placed cardboard from the packaging of the PVC flooring. On top of that, I took four wheelbarrows of compost we got delivered on 20 November 2020. We still got a heap of that compost.

When I showed the bed to DW, we stood in the hall inside looking out, and right outside, we could see that a rat came to examine the new creation through the front door window. It was 20 centimeters long and had a tail that was another 20 centimeters.

In the evening, I started blogging again. It was about time to write up what was going on at the farm this week.