We’d been planning the move from Hawaii to Sweden for a long time. Because the Swedish immigration authorities are ridiculously overburdened, the processing times for residency permits is counted in years, even if you’re married to a Swede who wants to move back home. There are entire web forums dedicated to the trials and tribulations …
Wow, that’s 18 months without an update. 2023 was pretty crazy. As I’m writing this update we’re living in a new house, in a new country, and I’m simply not going to be able to detail everything that’s happened. I’ll just give a quick summary. The last house-related update was posted in June of 2022, …
Besides the large living room, there was one easily sealed off part that also needed to be stripped and repainted: the (unused) foyer. The windows and windowsills here were also in bad shape externally, so that also needed fixing. We don’t actually use the foyer as an entrance (no one in Hawaii seems to, there’s …
We already painted the lower kitchen cabinets and replaced the countertops back in 2016, but the upper cabinets and the wall/ceiling remained. Needless to say this would put the kitchen out of commission, but we also didn’t want Axel running around while doing the stripping work. We were fortunate enough to be able to stay …
Things have been dead here for quite a while, but in real life we’ve made a lot of progress on the house. The process here has been described ad nauseam in the previous posts, so these updates will be pretty brief. While Kathy and Axel went to visit the grandparents in July of 2021, I …
A year or so ago I got a propane-heated vertical smoker, which I’ve been using to make some pretty decent ribs and pork shoulders. It keeps temperature fairly well, but not well enough that you can just ignore it. Since the only way to read the temperature was to look at the mechanical gauge on …
Last year, we stripped and repainted the blue “library”. This summer, Kathy decided that her home improvement project during the break would be to strip the lead paint from the “office”. I moved my work setup into the blue room and she worked on stripping the paint and then the whole paint prep started again. …
Continue reading ‘More home improvement: Repainting the office’ »
In the last post, I talked about the painting of the room. However, since we hustled to get the room habitable, we skipped the closets. Before the Swedish grandparents arrived for their visit this year, we wanted to get that done. As you may guess by now, this entailed first stripping a bunch of lead …
Continue reading ‘More home improvement: Finishing the closets’ »
Wow, posting’s really dropped off this year. Hard to get the time to do stuff, even harder to then actually write something about it. When we ended the last post, I was going to show you the room painting project that we continued with after replacing the windows. The first, and most painful task, as …
So there’s been a 5-month hiatus on posting, but things have been happening. I’ll try to catch up. During November, the grandparents came for their usual month-long Hawaii visit, and the task my Dad and I decided to tackle this year was to replace the old counterweighted “sash” sliding windows in the two rooms in …