Our Very Own Summer House

2018-06-09Friends, Us Standard

[Photos taken on 09-17 June 2018, posted on 29 December 2018.  We finally got a touch a frost, and an inkling of snow.]

We now own a summer house. It’s been a long time coming, with both of us following summer house listings for over a year. Yes, we’ve been quite happy with the summer house Finnur and his siblings inherited from their grandparents, but as all the kids have gotten bigger, space has gotten smaller, and fitting everyone in was getting increasingly difficult.

So, we bought a house. It’s in the west of Iceland, has three bedrooms, a potential for a fourth, and very unusually, it has a huge garage, or “recreational room with a large door”, as it’s formally known. We decided this would be a great room to have kids hang out in, and so far it’s worked out well. (65-ish images total)

Saturday 09 June 2018

The front porch view.
The living room view. We liked that the windows were relatively large, and all-encompassing.
After the official hand-over of keys, it was time to start marking where the sofa should go, etc. The duvets turned out to be very helpful markers!
Fiddling with a tape measure.
Another duvet-marker, this time for a bed.
The preferred couch dimensions.
Meanwhile, the kids hung out in the rec room!
We ended by visiting a cafe in the neighboring town, which we all liked very much.
The good life!

Sunday 10 June 2018

The next few days were spent spending obscene amounts of money. It was all a little insane. The reason for the rush was that Finnur would be departing for Russia after the following weekend, and we needed to get as much done before then as possible. This was my cart at CostCo…
Anna kindly agreed to take Emma to the swimming pool as I kept on shopping and…
… Finnur kept working on the back-yard wall.
So. Much. Random. Stuff.
Even. More. Random. Stuff!
I finally made it to the summer house at 8 pm, and began offloading all those little things one takes for granted.
The previous owners were big on bird feeding, and they told us to put cut up apples on little nails on the fence for the birds. Sure enough, this was 24 hours later.
All done at 10 pm, time to drive back home!
Stopping in Borgarnes to charge the electric car, so I would make it home.
Thankfully, there are a few speedy chargers there, and in the time it took me to go to the toilet and buy a hot dog for dinner, the car was more than good to go!

Monday 11 June 2018

The wall and shopping madness continued. At home, Finnur managed to clean the old base of the wall, so that he could start fixing it.
$3000 for a sofa, delivered in 3 months? Gnashing of teeth.
Lights!
Bedding!!
We ended up getting this bed base for the master bedroom as the bed is right underneath a window.

Tuesday 12 June 2018

Tuesday was Ikea day. It was also the day where we started bumping into the unhappy fact that Ikea’s storage area is too small for how popular the store is. It took about 4 trips to gather all the items we needed for the various beds, and we ended up on a month-long waiting list for one of the tall beds.
We rented a trailer, and Finnur’s dad kindly agreed to drive it around.
Three large mattresses. Eeek!
This time, Finnur and Anna drove to the summer house with Finnur’s parents to deliver all the stuff. Meanwhile, I made burgers for dinner.
Anna by the pitstop restaurant in Borgarnes town, as they were heading back.

Wednesday 13 June 2018

The never-ending wall project continued after work, with Finnur mixing cement! The entire left side of the base had cracked, and had to be rebuilt.
Base-making.
Budding flowers.

Thursday 14 June 2018

At the beginning of the year, I began attending the gym fairly regularly, under the supervision of my brother Bjarni, who is a personal trainer. This is as high as I’ve managed to dead-lift, as I have a bunch of issues that I need to work on (muscles to strengthen) before going much higher. Sitting all day does crappy things to a body!
After dinner I hopped on over to Ikea, to continue the great sofa-hunt. Saw this chair, which we ended up buying.
Stuff still missing. Sigh.

Friday 15 June 2019

While the summer-house-madness was in full swing, the big kids began attending horse riding camp. This time it was only half-day, and we somehow convinced them to bike there and back again, except when the weather was extra foul. We were super proud of them for making it work.
One of the horses.
That evening we committed to a sofa, and bought a part that was about to sell out, not realizing just how huge the packages were. We ended up transporting the smallest ones home, but the rest got to stay at Ikea overnight.

Saturday 16 June 2018

The day began with a morning Pokemon Go event. Afterwards, Finnur and I had lunch downtown, where one bakery had closed temporarily because Icelandic men’s soccer team was about to play Argentina at the WORLD CUP in Russia!!
The sign read “Closed until 3 pm because of the World Cup. Go Iceland!”
While 95% of Icelanders were watching the soccer game, I somehow managed to convince our good friend Óli to join me at Ikea. His car can tow, and he’d managed to borrow a horse trailer. It was just what we needed to transport the sofa we’d bought. Needless to say, Ikea was not busy, and all the staff was glued to computer screens watching the game. Occasionally there were cheers, including a big one when Iceland scored. Final result: 1-1 and the nation was ecstatic!
The rest of the sofa. Gulp!
We stopped at Bauhaus on the way out of town to pick up a trampoline…
Finnur telling Óli where to park.
OMG, we’d managed to fill a horse trailer!
So. Much. Cardboard!
We arrived at the summer house at 7pm, and the very first order of business was to assemble the BBQ, so that we could cook dinner! Holla and Óli are very very very industrious!!
The sofa pieces got brought inside, and…
… by 9 pm we had a usable living room!
Uhhmm…
The first cooked dinner! Amazingly, and very helpfully, the previous owners had left behind this big table, 8 chairs, plates, cups and glasses, which we happily put to good use.
A few kids out in the hot tub at 10 pm.
Inside, bed-frames were being assembled.
Tall bed going up shortly before 11 pm.
Anna hammering the base slats into place. Very useful helper!
With all the younger kids asleep we caught our breaths a bit at 1 AM (yes, it was still bright outside!).
This photos is time-stamped 01:21 AM. It was the end of a crazy day!

Sunday 17 June 2018

Anna kept being a great helper.
Óli and I assembled the master-bed-base.
Meanwhile, the kids made good use of the cardboard boxes.
Emma pearl-ing.
Bjarki making a computer screen?
The adults trying out the sofa.
As it was Iceland’s Independence Day, I somehow convinced Finnur and Holla to take the kids to a festival in Borgarnes, so that Óli and I could finish a few things before driving back home.
My big task: Mowing the lawn.
In classic Icelandic fashion, I started mowing in sunshine, which then morphed into rain with fat drops, which then turned into hail. I was not pleased.
Time to drive back home after a wildly successful weekend! By the end, we had a sofa, a comfy chair, a BBQ, one 140 cm wide bunk bed, one 140 cm wide bed, and one 160 cm wide bed. And it was just in the nick of time, because the next day Finnur flew to Sweden, en route to Russia and the World Cup!!!