Got all roofboards mounted! Sunday, 22-Mar-26 20:34:46 CET

Sunday, 29-Mar-26 21:56:51 CEST

Finished the roof of the wood-store house

This week, we finished the wood-store roof. Then we drove back to the Netherlands and attended a surprise party.

Monday 23 March

Yesterday evening, I went to bed earlier, and I slept wonderfully. One hour of deep sleep is awesome. I had 75 points for the sleep. On the weekend, Trump wanted the Strait of Hormuz opened, and if not, he would bomb Iran. Iran replied that it would start destroying desalination stations around the Middle East. It looks like Trump has a bad hand. He got no good cards. He is a loser; the world loses together with him. The stock markets went downwards.

The weather was not that pleasant today. There was a chilly wind and a sun behind a thick blanket of clouds. At one point, the cloud blanket was almost transparent, like frosted glass. It did not loosen up any better than that. The bulk of the work has been done with epic spring weather, not too cold, not too warm, blue sky, and no wind at all. I could not wish for anything better than that.

My morning task was to mount the downpipe to finish yesterday's work. Then I took down the scaffold in preparation for the west side of the building. The scaffold was not sufficient to reach the entire side. We did not take the time to determine whether that was entirely true, nor did we seek alternative scaffold configurations. We decided to work by ladders. It was decided that we should work without scaffolding. That felt wrong to me, and I had been angry with myself if it had not worked out well. It worked out well. I was relieved.

Today we had to mount the fascia boards and the ridge plates. WB did most of the action tasks. DD and I supported him. We had wooden ladders to provide access to the ridge. We had a metal ladder to place over the ridge to reach the side of the roof. The aluminium ladder was not pleasant when extended to full length; it was too wobbly. It had to play a secondary role in this part of the project.

We mounted the left side of the fascia boards first. On top of the fascia boards, the metal top boards are mounted. Then the fascia boards of the right side, and on top of that, the boards. As the last step, the ridge was mounted.

And then the wood-store house had a new roof! WB and DD went to the cottage to rest; they were exhausted. I continued to clean up around the wood-store house. I collected snippets of rotten beams we had cleared from the roof. I took down as many ladders as I could and removed planks, scaffolds, and waterhoses. We had collected a lot of things when working on the roof.

I got help from DW and WB to take down the large ladder. It is so big!

In the evening, we had festive food in the salon of the cottage. DW had made a quiche with broccoli and Camembert. We were all very happy with the roof's result. During the dinner, we talked about the plans for tomorrow. WB and DD planned to go to Isaberg, Sweden's southernmost ski resort. Both WB and DD are good snowboarders, but they had not had any good opportunities to go to a resort this winter, so it was good that the roof was finished, that there was spare time, and, not least, that Isaberg is just 40 minutes away.

Tuesday 24 March

DD and WB woke up early so that they could make the most out of this day's events. They made sandwiches, had a cup of coffee, and then drove off to Isaberg.

DW was not feeling good; she did not know what it was.

My task for today was to try out the plasma cutter for the first time. In retrospect, I was a little scared to use the plasma cutter. The instruction was not forgiving; all sorts of safety measures had to be taken to use the cutter. One of the instructions said to use the cutter in a fire-safe environment. That was not my situation.

This story started more than a year ago. A neighbor of the cottage is renovating his house. As part of the renovation, he replaced the house's heating system. Originally, it was heated with oil. Now he wanted another system. Actually, I don't know what he switched to, but the oil system had to go. In his barn, he had a tank for storing oil. It was huge. The tank was cut into five smaller boxes, and now they were going to be discarded. He knew I was into metal crafting. He asked me if I wanted the metal boxes. Of course I wanted them!

So now I was standing behind the barn, where the boxes lay, and the idea was to cut them into sheets. There was dead grass around the boxes. At first, I tried to run water to the location via a hose, but I did not have sufficient hose length. I opted for a watering can. This whole operation took more than an hour, tinkering with water. In the end, I had the watering can. There were no more reasons to postpone turning on the plasma cutter.

A plasma cutter works by forcing compressed air (or gas) through a narrow nozzle, creating a high-velocity jet of ionized, superheated gas known as plasma. This conductive plasma arc, reaching between 20 and 30 thousand Celsius, melts metal while simultaneously blowing the molten material away to create a cut.

The small compressor we bought a year ago struggled to produce sufficient pressure in the nozzle, but it worked. I hooked up the metal box to a claw connected to the plasma cutter. That way, it can produce an electric circuit. I had a new welding helmet and regular gloves. I pushed the nozzle against the metal and pushed the trigger. A short blue-yellow flame came out of the nozzle; it burned the metal. I cut the first seam of the box. I could not cut too close to the edge where the weld was done because the material was thicker there.

I could work happily for twenty minutes before a fuse blew. I checked around different fuse boxes. I found that it was one of the main Diazed fuses that had blown; it is a 16-amp fuse. It was really warm as well. The Diazed fuse is an older international standard, IEC 62271, that has not been adopted in some parts of the world where they are full of their own misplaced superiority. I could not find any replacement fuse in my fuse storage. Most of the electricity in the main house and the workshop building was still working; they used the remaining two phases. This is an old farm; here are old fuse boxes used. We also got modern fuses in some places. The old fuse is a porcelain fuse you can buy at the grocery store. Modern fuse boxes use reusable fuses that you reactivate by pushing up a button.

So now I had to get to the store, how? DD and WB had driven to the ski resort. I could walk or use a bike. I opted for a bike. The bike had a flat tyre. I tried the bicycle pumps we had lying in the barn, but they did not work. Perhaps the pumps were already of low quality when we bought them, and they have now reached their best-before date. So my next bet was on a cheap-quality compressor. It has bicycle accessories! I had to move the compressor to the working part of the property. Here I got the bicycle tyres properly pumped. I do not like too cheap tools.

Now I biked to the local hardware store, Tallberga Köpcentrum. Here, the owner's daughter, Klara, was the cashier for today. It is a miracle that the local shop is still operational. Most other shops have left for the larger cities. I picked up the only 16-amp Diazed fuse package in the shop. I had been slightly bummed if they did not have any 16-amp fuses left. Bike to the next city? No, I had probably gone to DF and DM to ask if they had any spare 16-amp Dialed fuses.

I biked back to the cottage and continued on the plasma cutting. I found that the plasma cutter has a knob indicating amperage usage. I was set to 20 amps. I lowered it to 10 amps. Now, the cutting would probably take longer, but I would not consume more fuses if the theory held up.

Without the interruption while working with the plasma cutter, I felt I could start learning to handle the tool. The manual said you had to bump the nozzle against the metal, but here it often got stuck. The cuts got jagged that way. It was possible to initiate and maintain the plasma flow at a small distance from the metal. Then the cuts got more even. I do think it would have been better with a more powerful air compressor.

Here is a film of me cutting with the plasma cutter.

When I decided to stop cutting, I had one box still to do. I leave that box for another time. I moved the finished pieces into the barn. They will be better preserved in the barn than outside.

DD and WB came home from their visit to Isaberg skiresort. They had a magnificent day. There had not been many people on the pistes, so there were no queues at the lifts. No crowded restaurants. It had been absolutely fantastic. They were curious about what it would be like to go to Sälen next time. We will see how that goes.

DW picked up a cold during the day. She cooked a magnificent dinner, but then she was done. We went to bed early.

Wednesday 25 March

Today, DD, WB, and I went to the recycling center with the rotten beams we collected from the roof. WB was not feeling well.

I cleaned up the workshop house and arranged for a fence for the robot lawnmower. It is just a leftover plank from when we cut planks last summer. It will keep the lawnmower from getting disoriented and landing outside the cutting area. At least, that is what I am hoping.

DD and I also shoveled away the moss that came down from the roof of the wood store. We placed the mosses on the compost heap. Now there are only two piles of broken tiles and several heaps of intact roof tiles to move to the end location. Oh, well. This body only has two hands.

Thursday 26 March

I did not sleep well last night, as I often do before a longer journey. We started to tidy up the cottage. I put all the tools where they belonged in the workshop house. It was a lot more work than I had anticipated.

I had one special plan, I tried to bring with me two metal plates from the steel that I had been cutting with the plasma cutter. It was possible to load two sheets in the back of the car. Then I put the trunk carpet back over; no one will even notice that the steel is back in the car. The suspension is perhaps taking a little more weight, but that is it. I also packed the plasma cutter. If I want to cut anything from the steel, I need a cutter. The compressor at home is much more powerful, and perhaps I can press the cutter to 25 amps at home?!

The plasma cutter came with a bag of extra nozzles, but I could not find that bag. It was lost. I searched through the workshop house a couple of times. When I packed my coat, I found the bag in a pocket. That was nice!

We had found items at secondhand shops and wanted to bring some of them home. We also left a couple of items in the cottage, such as an angle grinder and two pieces of the scaffold. We brought more things back home. We had to discard items in the fridge. Usually, we take items like that with us, but it was too much this time.

We cleaned the cottage, vacuumed the floors, removed ash from the fireplaces, and loaded the trays with new firewood. The goal is essentially to have the cottage in a state where others can use it. We don't rent out the cottage regularly, but friends sometimes borrow it. In that case, it is better to leave the cottage in a good state.

At 1 PM, we said goodbye to the cottage. We first went to DM and DF to say goodbye for this time. Then we went to the grocery store in Tallberga to dispose of sorted waste. Then we stopped in Värnamo to discard unsorted waste.

WB drove. It was overcast but dry. Pretty good weather for long drives. We arrived at the Öresundsbridge at 4 PM.

We switched drivers at a Danish road restaurant outside the town of Pedersborg. The sharp sun cast long shadows. The toilets had a handwritten sign in Danish saying they were not operational. All people who could not understand Danish just went to the toilets without hesitation. Others like me bounced off the sign. I had no idea where DW and DD went, and to my surprise, they emerged from the door to the defunct toilets. They had not understood the sign. It was not flowing perfectly during flushing, but otherwise operational.

We switched drivers. WB could rest, and I went behind the steering wheel. I drove to a city right across the border to Germany. Here, DW had selected a hotel with breakfast. It was actually more like a motel. That is not such a well-known concept in Europe. Alas, we could not park outside our room as they do in American movies. There was a central parking. But each room had its own front door. You arrived directly in the room from that door. It didn't feel normal to have a room like this. I think I had preferred a regular hotel, actually. But here we were, and we could stay here, so that was fine. I suppose.

We went to a restaurant after we had “Checked in”. It was an Italian restaurant called Isabella in Harreslee. It was a little more posh than we had anticipated. The food was good.

DW and I had two vegetarian pizzas: a vegetable pizza and a Misto pizza. The Misto pizza was really nice! WB had a steak, and DD had a carbonara. She was the least happy at the meal. The wine at this restaurant was not at the same level as the wine of the Old School hotel in Siek, which was excellent. I think the wine from the Old School in Siek was so good that we would book a stay there to experience it again.

 

When it was time to pay, the payment system failed. We tried all our regular payment cards. The rolls or failed receipts were heaped up on the table. Then I paid with my credit card, and that worked. It is always good to have a bit of excitement in life!

After we visited the restaurant, we went back to the hotel to sleep. WB and DD had their own room, and we had another room.

The mattress was soft, and the cushion was the typical shy variation that vanishes after half a second under the pressure of your head, with fluffy flaps surrounding your head—a slightly claustrophobic experience. The duvet was also the typical arctic type good for 40 degrees below the freezing point, and the heating was set to combat the same non-existent arctic conditions.

Outside on the street, someone had parked and was playing music loudly. WB went to them and asked them to lower the volume. They complied. That was nice.

I woke up at 3 AM, drenched in sweat. The oxygen levels were not good. The window could be set open a little. I took the duvet out of the cover and arranged to sleep only under the cover. The feet still got nice and cosy under the arctic duvet.

These adjustments worked well, but it was not pleasant with the now cold puddle. Oh well, after a while, the puddle got warm again, but it was sticky, which was not nice.

DW turned off the heating; I had missed that.

Friday 27 March

When I woke up, I was pleasantly surprised to see I had 72 points for my sleep. It could be much worse. The lawn was green. In Sweden, the grass was still brown from the winter.

All of us went to the breakfast restaurant and evaluated the night. DD and WB had turned off the heating and opened the window at the start of the night, but they had not removed the duvet cover. They were not impressed by the Ellen Hotel in suburban Flensburg.

Now it was time for breakfast. The breakfast was included in the hotel's price. It was surprisingly good. The coffee was good, and there were plenty of choices for those with a standard European taste. Müsly, Juices, Yoghurt, pastry. There was not much of an English breakfast, but that did not matter because evening meals should not be eaten at breakfast. The waitress made a freshly fried or scrambled egg, which was nice.

The little restaurant had generic hotel art on the walls. I had a view of a large hall next to the hotel. It had an impressive number of solar panels on the roof.

It is as if good, nice hotels are not spread evenly around a country. The city, the village, or the place is suitable for a specific kind of hotel. In an industrial area, you get the hotels people need. That is, people working in the factories or driving trucks, etc. In a more posh area, with culture, theatres, and picturesque cities, the more posh people want more posh hotels. I had not realized this before. When driving through Germany, trying different hotels, we are figuring it out as we go.

We checked out, and WB was the first to drive. It looked like it was going to be a sunny day. When we came out of the industrial area, I noticed an art piece of a car with a traffic sign through the bonnet. I suppose this is fine art in this region of Germany.

I blogged, and DW knitted on the socks she has been working on during this holiday. The socks are made from an art yarn with various patterns throughout. She finished the socks before we reached Hamburg.

I've been writing in this blog document for two days now. Word decided not to add this document to the list of most recent documents. It annoys me. This is the kind of bug that stands out in a world where artificial intelligence is said to eliminate all white-collar work.

DD and WB helped really well with replacing the roof of the wood storage house. WB will have a hectic time ahead when he returns to the Netherlands. He is a carpenter producing furniture, and there is a great demand for his work. DD is looking for work as an architect or in a related field. It is a challenging job market. She will send out application letters to potential employers and update her portfolio to showcase her skills in rendering and drawing building constructions. DW and I will start the gardening season.

We passed Hamburg without any big traffic jams. The harbour was lit by the sun. The steel giraffes were standing in a row waiting for container ships to be loaded or unloaded.

In Bremen, we drove into a considerable traffic jam. After a while in that jam, we started to get hungry. I found a restaurant away from the traffic jam. It was a restaurant located in a park, and it looked nice! It was almost as nice that DW and DD thought we had to wear more festive clothing to be allowed in. That was not the case, though; we got a table.

 

We got the menu card, and I immediately knew that I wanted the spinach quiche. We got bread with pesto made by the restaurant. It made me think of the pesto that DW sometimes makes from ground ivy. To this we had bread.

DD did not feel well, so she was not sure what to order. After considerable hesitation, she decided on the spinach quiche as well. WB had a steak.

It was delicious. All was stylish in this restaurant—the beams in the ceiling, the iron plates on the wall. The napkin was folded into a crown.

They had real art on the walls. I liked that.

Even the toilets were highly stylish. Often, the stylishness of an establishment stops at the toilets, but not here. It was as if the toilet area was even more styled than the rest. It must have been expensive. Outside the restaurant, there was an adjacent park with small gardens.

After finishing our exclusive lunch, we continued our journey to the Netherlands. I drove. After Groningen at 3:45 PM, we switched back so that WB would drive again. It looks like the ladies did not drive any of the trip to the Netherlands. That is luxurious!

I had a nap. When I woke up, we drove past our own city on the way to Amsterdam. It was not completely overcast, and it even rained.

During this trip, I have been able to blog extensively from the back of the car. I have been thinking that it would be nice if there were a way to mount the mobile phone on the back of the front seat. It could be a simple construction hanging on the head cushion. I would also like to be able to mount the phone conveniently on the front passenger seat.

We arrived in Amsterdam at 5:45 PM and unloaded DD and WB's bags. We had a cup of tea as well. Their cat was glad they had come home. He "talked" a lot but was also spinning and bumping heads. Even the strangers got head bumps. After the tea, DW and I drove home.

We came home at 7:15 PM, and the car is now on 192313 kilometers. The sheep was really enthusiastic about us having arrived home. DS welcomed us. Merida was happy we had come back home, but she was pissed we had left her for almost two weeks. We unpacked the car and made a big, messy pile of stuff in the studio. For the rest of the evening, we had to sit because we had not been sitting enough for two days in the car.

We watched the finale of the Great Pottery Throwdown season 3. I checked the post that had arrived. After a while, Merida came to lie next to me on the cushion. I am sure she will be back to normal by then. We went to bed, and Merida came to lie between us, or rather half on my chest, purring loudly. She is switching positions from time to time, but mostly tucked up against my side, stretched out, keeping an eye on me sometimes. I even got a paw on my face at one point. She is a funny cat. I did not have any deep sleep this night, but I got 70 points for the sleep.

Saturday 28 March

This morning, it was overcast and spitting rain. We had a slow morning with tea in bed. It is good to take it easy after a long drive. I blogged.

After breakfast, we started the new gardening season. In November last year, when we sold the sea container, the buyer had a drone fly over the container to take photos of the situation. He also took a photo of our garden, and I used it to make a diagram of the garden and all the beds. So this morning, we decided on generic names for the beds so that we can now make a diagram of our garden.

We divided the garden into a grid, in a well-known pattern of letters for the columns and numbers for the rows. DW made an Excel sheet with our plan.

The plan is in Swedish and Dutch. It is a language mess, but it is what it is.

DW is not feeling well. I went to our regular farm shop to see if they had the seeds we are missing, but they don’t have those. So now I’m driving to another city without DW because she is sitting in bed reading a book. It had been much more fun to go on a seed shopping tour together with her, but she is not feeling well enough for that. We decided on fresh seeds for all the planting. It’s not good with old seed stashes, 40 minutes to closing.

I went to a regular shop where we usually buy sheep and animal things, and they had many biological seeds, so that was nice. I missed two things on the list: citrus thyme and tomatoes treated against Phytophthora.

So I went to another garden centre I’ve never been to. The owner, the owner's wife, and the helper were there, and they provided much information. It was a delightful experience.

They had a great range of products. If it were not ten minutes until closing, I could have bought much more. I now have a lot of work to do to tend the seeds. I think I will set up an incubation area in the barn's workshop. I want to bring DW here sometime, and we would enjoy buying more from this quirky garden center.

Sunday 29 March

Tonight we set the time to daylight saving time, one hour ahead. It was a beautiful morning. DW slept well, so I hope she feels better today. She was still coughing like a crow, but there were improvements.

DW cut my hair this morning. I had long hair before the holiday, and now it is even longer. Today we are going to the surprise party of a friend of DW. I want to look more handsome when we get there. It feels like we have been so busy that there has been no good moment to cut my hair. Now it has to happen. I made a quick selfie of myself with my new hair.

After lunch, we drove to the Kantine in Mijdrecht. Here, the husband of DW's friend had arranged for the surprise party. We were instructed to arrive at the restaurant at 1:45 PM. The husband and daughter had a supposedly unplanned shopping tour in the town, which was sufficiently tiring to prompt a visit to a random café for a cup of coffee. Then the plan was that a crowd of friends would be standing ready at that café, just like a coincidence. There were plenty of things that could go wrong. The toast master at the café had a real-time positioning of the DW's friend. All people in the crowd were given silly party hats. I thought silly party hats were a Swedish phenomenon, but they may be part of contemporary Dutch party traditions as well. We were given the position and whereabouts while we chatted and sipped our drinks. I was driving, so I was on alcohol free variations.

As it happened, the center person of this conspiracy suggested that she go to the Kantine in Mijdrecht for a cup of coffee. The daughter just had to delay it a little to make the timing perfect. The daughter is a pro at delaying things (according to the father), so there was plenty of time for all visitors to get to the café on time.

The toastmaster asked us to be silent, and the protagonist arrived near the room. She did not like the little darker corner of the restaurant in front of closed curtains. This is the moment when the waitress removed the curtain, and we started singing "Happy birthday". The choir's singing quality was questionable. We had not practiced this song; it was more like a wall of sound. The now 60-year-old birthday kid was shocked for a couple of moments. I actually got a little emotional to see her reaction.

The servers brought snacks and drinks, and people chatted. It was nice.

After a couple of hours, we drove home. I was tired, socialising is fun, but it takes a bit of energy as well.

Here ends this week. It has been a wonderful week. I wrote 4851 words, which is absolutely amazing. It is almost hard to realize that we started the week on a roof at our cottage in Sweden and ended it at a surprise party in a restaurant in Mijdrecht.