Changing Burrows #3

 Greetelings there, fellow Wombatants! It's Michael here, and welcome back to Changing Burrows, the little blog-series we write while our usual programming is paused due to the extraordinary circumstance of having inherited a house and moving into it!

..... wow, what a mouthful.

Anyway, good news! This is the first time we're posting something...

.... from on-site! Looks a little different by now, and generally, everything here is temporary, but we managed to bring our PC over, so that's good. We can actually do some hobby stuff, now.😉

But yeah, bringing our PC here was but one of many little successes in recent weeks.

So, as Amalia pointed out last time, one of the first orders of business was to get some curtains up.

And i mean proper opaque ones. Because throughout the whole house, every window just had those transparent ones called sheers. Good for decoration perhaps, but well..... everyone can see what you're doing, especially with the lights on at night. >_>

So as you might have already seen above, we equipped the upstairs apartment (the one we're moving into) with...

Wonderfully non-transparent curtains! Hooray, we get to have some actual privacy!

(Ok, in all fairness, all the windows have rolldown shutters we could have used, but we find those things loud and ugly.)

Anyway, another project we mentioned last time was the balcony. It was full of random debris, stuff that was just kept around because no-one felt like throwing it out.

So we had one evening after work where we got to.... er, work, dedicating some time to cleaning the place up and making it fit for use. We still have some pots full of long-spent soil that need emptying at some point, but at least our balcony is now actually useable as such.

Also, check out our balcony awning!

Awyep, shade on demand! Vey cool.😉

Anyway, the highlight of these past couple of weeks was clearly last Saturday, when we got our buddy over to help. That's when we moved the PC, along with all this other stuff:

Good heavens, our PC looks so dirty in this picture. >_>

It's ultimately a fraction of all the stuff still left at our old apartment, but it was all we could bring at the time. Plus, with us still actively working to partially clear out our house, we just don't have the space to bring over actual furniture and stuff.

So, after moving all this stuff over, we had another..... "big" project ahead of us.

This giant, towering fridge disguised as a phone booth. It was in the downstairs kitchen, which was totally the wrong place for it. Upstairs, there was only an old, decommissioned and somewhat manky old thing, so we wanted to switch. Old manky thing goes out, and giant towering megafridge goes upstairs into our kitchen.

...... which meant carrying that thing up a flight of stairs. Oh joy.😶

..... and we had exactly 0mm to spare when maneuvering it 'round the corner, too. Nasty job, but.....

..... we got there. Kitchen looks like this, now.

Though, if you looked 'round the corner, you'd see that there's no oven/hob. Yeah, that's something we'll need to address. Might as well make it a decent one, though. We're not bringing the hyper-basic one from our old apartment.

(Actually, the kitchen back at the old apartment is sort of an open question mark. Aside from the smaller utensils, we really don't need any of the larger appliances or furniture. Kinda hoping our ex-landlord will take it off our hands, maybe?)

Anyway, we do have a washing machine and indeed, a dryer in there. But uh, curious detail about the dryer...

It insists on speaking Icelandic! Dunno why, and we've not found an option to change it, but..... eh, it adds character. Besides, if we really need to, we can control the thing via our phone, so it's all good. It may continue to honour it's Viking ancestors.

Unfortunately, while we have plenty of decently interesting stuff to share, a lot of what we've been doing these past couple of weeks has been soul-grinding, slow and awkward bureaucracy.

From the small, banal stuff like switching over costs for water supply and garbage disposal, over organizing a bulk-rubbish collection pickup all the way to the really big stuff, like getting into some proper planning as to what investments we should make towards renovating the house, how much of a mortgage we'll have to take on in order to get the whole project going an so on.

To be quite frank, there are moments when it feels like the sheer amount and size of the tasks in front of us is going to suffocate us. But alas, we've taken on this project because let's be honest, this is our only chance of ever owning our own home. We made this decision, so we'll ride it out.

And i mean, at the end of it, we should come out of it owning a somewhat modernized house, half of which we'll be renting out. That's hardly a prospect to complain about.

And heck, even if everything goes utterly wrong somehow, we actually have total security. Because should push come to shove, we can literally just turn around and sell the whole thing, pay off whatever mortgage we'll have left at the time and still walk away with more than we started with. Not that we're planning anything of the sort, of course.

Still, with that little bit of venting out of the way, there were also some smaller projects around the house that we made some degree of progress on, like:

This poor door!

Okay, so this used to be a normal, perfectly reasonable interior door. Then, my parents apparently decided that they wanted to cover it in newspaper, then plaster an image with balancing rocks on top of that. You can see most of that design.

However, at some point further on, they then decided to start plastering over that as well, covering the door in a wild collage of family photos and... uh, boomer humour postcards.

So, having been a bit "limited contact", i'll be honest: We didn't know half the people in the photos, and besides that, many of the photos would have been a bit morbid to keep. Plus, the boomer humour was of course just unfortunate to have around. Sooo we tore all that off. Gonna have to see how we proceed with it. We figure that restoring this door back to it's original state would be next to impossible, so perhaps we should come up with a creative project of our own, there.

Then, there was this little project:

So, you're looking at the back of one of those multi-image picture frames. Yep more collages. We had like 5 of those things hung around the place, all full of family photos that would've seemed pretty awkward and/or inappropriate to keep.

So we had a bit of a time taking all those apart, taking the pictures out and throwing out the frames. We've put up some decorations of our own, and we wanna put up more, but those multi-frames just don't really do anything for us.

Oh, one more massive project:

...we put a little anti-slip mat into the shower, so we can now shower without breaking all of our bones. Yey.😛

As for cool stuff we've found, well, there's this:

See, we thought it was some kind of dog cleaning station or something (-A lot- of the stuff around here is for dog care), but on closer inspection, it turns out that no!

It's a cordless vacuum-cleaning gun, with various attachments!

This is good, because we've found a few different vacuums around the place, meaning we had to pick one. Then this cool thing came along and made the choice for us.😉

Oh, also, this happened:

So, this is my old cross-trainer. When i moved out of this house years back, i couldn't bring it along because it was simply too darn big, so i left it with my parents, who wanted to keep it.

Well, they -did- keep it. Buuut it's been sitting on the downstairs balcony for ~6 years. Granted, it's a roofed-over balcony, but still, this poor thing was left outside for years!

......... and yet it still works perfectly, including electronics.😶

So uh..... yeah, we got my old cross-trainer back! Just gonna have to partially disassemble it so we can bring it upstairs and reassemble it at some point. Still, that was a neat surprise.😀

But yeah, with all that said, we actually largely took this weekend off. It's been kinda hard on us, not gonna lie.

The nasty heat wave isn't helping either, but yeah. We've been struggling to find time for ourselves. There's constantly a bunch of stuff that needs doing, and no matter -what- we decide to spend our time on, there's always like 5 other, equally important things we're neglecting in the meantime.

Still, this weekend, we did decide to just take some time and be a human being, again.

On that note, we made a small little decision when it comes to our hobbies. You might recall that we like DCS, the flight sim.

Well, the thing is, DCS is cool and all, but it's always been a bit of a study/practice-intense hobby. So in our current situation, we realized that we could never, ever find enough time or energy to do DCS. So we've switched simulator, so to speak. Or rather, we've paused DCS and are now enjoying what little time we can carve out in two simcade games:

There's Nuclear Option, an amazing game set in the near-ish future, with hypermodern jets where everything has F-35-like technology, so everything is datalinked, everything can fire on datalink tracks, many aircraft have some degree of stealth and what have you. It leans towards realism, but all the high-tech stuff and simple controls make it quite approachable. A lot like VTOL VR, but you can play it spontaneously, without the whole ritual of setting yourself up for VR every time you wanna hop in for a bit.

And then....

We dug up good ol' IL-2 BOS. Partially because it, much like Nuclear Option, provides a lovely in-between of full, DCS-style study sims and more arcadey action games. But also, because it's currently got a big sale going on, which means that you can finally get the Flying Circus DLCs for a sane price!

Hooray for biplanes and Zeppelins!

Though it's also been a sufficiently long time since we did anything with WW2 planes for us to enjoy that side of it as well.

Funny, really. This would be the perfect time for us to get back into War Thunder. Except that with all the "features" designed to make you spend unreasonable amounts of money in that game, we'd probably just feel sick of it within minutes. Pass. >;p

.... but yeah, that's us. That's what we've been up to.

Going forward, the plan is actually to simplify things a bit. We're looking to get a commission in here to determine an "official" number of what the house is worth, (seeing as we still have to buy the second half of it from my stepsister) as well as working with a consultant on how to go about partially renovating the building. So laying down plans and getting some clear direction, as well as some actual numbers on the costs of it all.

Though with that said, there's still plenty of "practical" work to be done around the house. Old furniture to remove, cupboards and dressers to clear out, and we'll have to eventually get our stuff out of the old apartment as well!

Oh, and we already know that for a few days soon, we won't have internet access at home. The old service provider contract and our new one unfortunately don't overlap, so there'll be a gap of 5 days where we'll be cut off. Oh well, at least it'll be quiet, so we can get some work done around the house in that time.😉

Anyway, we'll leave it at that. It's been a stressful time for us, but hopefully, as we finish off certain tasks and take steps to organize the whole project, things should clear up and become much more manageable.

So until our next post, stay safe, check out Nuclear Option (#nonspon!😜) and have a good one!