Flowers in the Garden

Tulips are so rich in color!

One of the greatest things of Tjodheim is the fantastic garden that receives sunlight all year round. There are some flowers around the edges and I thought about putting a little garden patch in the center of the garden for Isabelle to have something to look forward to.  She loves watering the plants.

Master Bedroom

 
I have so many ideas for my masterbedroom! One of them is to remove the nasty carpeting there is right now and bring out the life in those 1917 wooden boards on the floor.  If the woodboards are un rescuable, then one can always recurr to the magic of white lacquering.  It is to my understanding that painted wood is colder than oiled wood so I am keeping my fingers crossed so I can do my reviving of the woodboards with oil. The walls would definitely be repainted in either a very light ivory or off
white color.
 I have also thought about putting in a set of sliding doors to make a closet, but then again I can't really make up my mind because of the slanted roof. In my current home I went through the trouble of custom making a closet and gosh was it one big piece of work!
The other idea would be to have some sort of chest drawers of about a meter high from the start of the slanted roof up to where the window is but then the space from the top of the chest of drawers would be wasted...
Something like this perhaps, from our good friends of IKEA...


Jeg har så mange ideer for masterbedroom min! En av dem er å fjerne den ekle teppe som står der akkurat nå og få ut det liv i de 1917 trebord på gulvet. Hvis planker er ikke brukelig, da kan man man alltid gjør den magiske hvit lakkering. Det er til min forstand at malt trevirke er kaldere enn oljet treverk, så jeg holder fingrene krysset slik at jeg kan gjøre mitt gjenopplive av planker med olje. Veggene ville definitivt males i enten en svært lys elfenben eller egg hvit.
Jeg har også tenkt på å sette i et sett med skyvedører å lage et skap, men da igjen jeg kan egentlig ikke  bestemme meg på grunn av skrå taket. I min nåværende hjem gikk jeg gjennom bryet med å lage egendefinerte et skap, og gosh var det en stort stykke arbeid!
Den andre idé ville være å ha en slags kommode skuffer på rundt en meter høy fra starten av skrå taket opp til der vinduet er, men da plass fra toppen av kommoden ville være bortkastet ...
Noe som dette kanskje, fra våre gode venner av IKEA ...

The fireplace!

From Parafin to Wood

The house had a parafin oven fitted in the year 1973 and it was used up until the house was sold in 2010.  Now, coming from the tropics where fireplaces are only meant to look like a fancy decoration in a living room, I had no clue of how necessary it would be to have a working one in the house.  Needless to say, I found out that parafin is not very user-friendly.  I hate the smell and I am terrified of the fumes and everything related to parafin.

Major decision:
Remove the parafin oven and replace with a real fireplace.  (check!)
Replace with a real fireplace. At a cost. A rather high cost!
So I contact the municipality and I find out that the chimney needs to be rehabilitated before installing a fireplace.  I call the heat people and they come over and give me a quote.  The damage?
10,000USD, yep, ten grand.  That is around 60,000 Norwegian Kroner.  The job they have to do is basically get on the roof and insert a new steel pipe down the chimney in order to avoid any possible fires. the house is almost 100 years old so it is imperative to do it. (after much consideration: check)

Here is the old parafin oven (really 1970's!)

A piece of art isn't it?

This is how it looked when I bought the house.

Now choosing a fireplace is not an easy task.  Goodness it is one of the most difficult journeys I have embarked myself on!  So I learned as much as I could about fireplaces, the pros and the cons, the beautiful ones, the practical ones, etc.  And in the end I went for the Nordpeis, especially tailored to Nordic interiors. 

It is pretty heavy but it delivers. Though it takes a good five hours before the whole house is warm, I can say that it is a good purchase.  The bottom floor of the house is approximately 67sq.mt. and it warms up nicely without any additional source of heat.  Some of the heat does reach the second floor but not as much as I would like it to.  In any case, the windows are from 1979 and if you stand next to them you can actually feel the cold draft coming in.  If you light a candle and put it next to the margins of the window, where the limit between the window and the frame is, you can see the fire move due to the draft.  Hopefully, one day, when I am able to change the windows, the warmth might stay inside a bit more.  Today, for example, it is -10C and the fire has been on almost all day and the inside temperature started this morning at 15C and we are now at 21C, which is pretty good.

Here is Isabelle and me next to our fireplace.  :)