A Tale of Two Projects

As is often the case at the end of July, the weather was gorgeous for a few days, so I finally managed to stain our deck. Complicating matters a bit was a beehive that had formed under the deck close to the house, which was scary to stain on top of, but neither myself, nor the bees were harmed during the staining.

Can you spot which part of the wood’s been stained?

Two bees coming in for landing, the crawled down by a slightly larger than typical gap close to the drain pipe.

The flower & strawberry pots. I think I decided against staining this strip, as we need to do serious work on the wall over it.

The sloping wall. This needs to be taken down.

Anna and I peaked into a birthday party, where the birthday girl had made this awesome unicorn cake!

Meanwhile, Finnur was busy hauling and moving.

Deck wood.

Hrefna by Anna at dinner. The food was not awesome.

At 23:24 I apparently felt the need to go out on a walk.

Proof it was me at 23:42.

At 23:53. This being a more than a month after solstice, the evenings had begun being a little twilight-y.

Bjarki with a friend by a tent in our front yard. Bjarki was a little put out that I wanted to do stuff inside the house. Which was admittedly weird.

I completely forgot to take a full “Before” photo, but the first room to be attacked was Emma’s room. Those shelves were absolutely packed with books, but I’d gotten rather sick of pulling out books I didn’t really want to read anymore, for one reason or another.

I enlisted Anna’s help in sorting through ALL THE BOOKS, into keep, donate, trash piles.

No more books left here, but …

… there were quite a few in Bjarki’s room, which was also on my list of rooms in dire need of help.

Did you know we have TWO copies of this book?!  No, but it sure explains why it keeps popping up!

After three hours of sorting, we made it to the recycling center. Goodbye bad books!

It was a good thing that Emma was away with her dad!

All the books, and the other random stuff from Emma’s shelves.  Oh dear…

It was also quite fortunate that Finnur was away, because that meant I could leave the bed like this and go for an evening party!

According to the timestamps this photo is taken 45 minutes after the previous one with all the stuff on the floor?!  Arriving at a party on time sure is a good motivator!

Meanwhile, out in the country, Finnur dug holes and drainage channel.

Men and their machine.

The view at 00:43 as I biked home from the party.

The view out our window at 01:12. The sunsets kind of meld into sunrises at that time of year…

Water balloon time!

I forgot the trick where one removes a bunch of strawberry flowers to get more red strawberries, so we only got a few this year.

At 3 pm I was still working on sorting through the debris in Emma’s room. The last random things took the longest to sort out.

My arch nemesis: Small plastic pieces!

Dinner was at the high quality establishment of Ikea! Then it was back to Emma’s room.

By midnight I’d lost my mind enough that I actually made this pattern on this what-cha-ma-call-it before heading to bed.

This is how Emma’s room ended up looking. Removing probably over half the books, and other random things that hadn’t been used for a long time, freed up some space so not everything had to be on the floor.

That car-house is Emma’s night stand.

Yay, no random horizontal surface crap anywhere. Let’s enjoy this for the 15 minutes it’ll last.

According to the photos from the day, our master bedroom and the hallway got a bit of a tidying up that day (but not the laundry).

Anna also cleaned up her room. So nice!

With a parting glance over Bjarki’s bedroom, aka the next room to do-over, we packed for the summer house, and drove over to meet up with Finnur and Emma.

Trampoline time in full swing in the country!

Steinunn with her youngest.

Here be holes for deck supports!

Those are some strange teeth!

Cozy evening time in Finnur’s parents’ summer house, a 5 minute walk from the other house. We’d brought over a few jigsaw puzzles that we wanted to see whether were whole or not.

The boys were up and at it at 9 in the morning.

By noon the sky had clouded up a bit.

Group effort!

Sawing paper.

Supports being readied.

The kids were all right.

Cousins.

The deck-makers planning their next move.

Finnur shoveling cement into the paper cylinders.

The drainage hole. The area where the deck was being built has historically emerged pretty soaked in the spring.

Slow and steady does it!

Shortly before 7 pm, it was time to return to the city, this time with Emma and Anna in tow.

From the looks of it, I didn’t do a whole lot of tidying that Saturday. It does look like I made it to the grocery store…

I also ventured downtown to listen to my old classmate, Stína, sing jazz!

Eating an open sandwich.

Adda, and all the people that couldn’t get seats.

See the people climbing out on the roof of the white and red building. They totally sat there and listened later on!

Yet another evening (11 pm) walk.

The local cemetery.

There’s light up there.

10000 steps, baby!

Meanwhile, the summer house gang finished making the cement supports.  Good stuff!

After taking a breather day the day before, it was time to attack the two last rooms this round: the front downstairs room (technically storage), and Bjarki’s room. The grand plan involved swapping the beds, and moving some of the shelves between floors.

Oh, my eyes! Sadly, this didn’t change much this round. There’s always next summer!

The photo albums. Yay.

We documented one of Anna’s Danish projects, before recycling it.

Bjarki’s room started out as “the office”, housing all our books. Now that the room had gone from Emma’s to Bjarki and Emma’s to Bjarki’s, it was finally time to remove the adult books.

Where’d the bed go?!

Upstairs! There may have been shouts of Pivot! Pivot! on the way. The next job was to sand all the “I love …” messages off and remove the old stickers from when this was Anna’s bed.

This was Bjarki’s room at 18:40.

Emma with an old toy of Anna’s that we found during the dig in Emma’s room.

We didn’t get a lot of photos from the country that day. But they kept working.

Anna ended up at a concert a little down the hill, as this was a three day weekend, and parties going on all over the country!

It ended spectacularly!

Meanwhile, this was the downstairs room at midnight.  Also quite spectacular, considering how it began the day.

Apparently I ventured downtown to recharge my batteries at a cafe for a bit.  That’s it for this day!

On Emma’s last full day of daycare vacation, I took her for a haircut, while her big siblings went back to horse camp.

A newly shorn Emma.

Tidying continued. At 3 pm the downstairs room looked like this.

All the ‘adult’ books, many of which could probably go visit the recycling center, if we had the guts…

At long last, Bjarki’s room looked like a bedroom, and not a storage room.

This unit used to house all the stationary etc, but finally it was all Bjarki’s!

Yet another 10000 step venture at 23:28. Getting darker fast.

Eerie calm in the rain.

At 11 pm, I was out and about again, this time in the town on the other side of the hill.

This style of house has fallen out of fashion in Iceland.

What?! There’s a pond!!

The eye of Sauron, next to a church, of course.

6 minutes past midnight. These quiet late summer nights are a favorite of mine.

And thus, my summer vacation was over, and Finnur and I went back to work. I resumed my habit of reading a bit during my coffee break. This was what jumped out at me…

Apparently I went shopping for clothes. Anybody want to guess what size this is in relation to yourself?

Bjarki with some other kiddos at horse riding camp.

Actually on a horse.

Both siblings visible.

This was the last day of horse camp, and Anna snapped me her day.

Anna’s horse.

Siblings.

By dinner time on Friday we had returned to the summer house by Laugarvatn, this time bringing Holla and Óli with us.

This photo is taken at 10 in the evening. Long daylight helps when doing construction projects outside!

I thought this was pretty hilarious. The guys were trying to use a laser to align the deck supports, but the sun was too bright. Therefore Finnur ended up dressed in a blanket to try and create a bit of laser-friendly shade!

Holla, aka Super Mom, playing with the kiddos.

Timber, timber, everywhere!

Much progress was made, so we had to drive to the next town to by more timber. We just made it before 4 pm and closing time!

Peace and quiet as siblings watch the morning kid-friendly tv program. Linear programming is weird!

Time to get to work!

Einar starting on the deck itself, with Steinunn checking the progress.

Heh, the deck is almost bigger than the house itself!

Much thinking going on.

Three men at work.

Inside people.

The status at 5 pm.

We then packed up the house, and headed over to the other cottage to say goodbye.

We drove to Laugarvatn town, to eat dinner at the Lindin restaurant. I think this may have been pride weekend?

Stripes everywhere!

Emma and I went outside while our food was being cooked. The lake was very pretty.

Rock-throwing, always a classic.  With that we drove to town, and life as normal resumed.