Observations

We’ve been living in the new house for 11 months now, but there were still two things that needed to be done to really complete the project. One was to replace all the windows — all 72(!) of them. It took our builder until September to do this, for reasons that are unknown to us, because it was clear when we bought the house that all the windows had to be replaced. And then he had to apply sealant to all the windows, inside and out, taking more time.

He did all the insides in a single day, which meant that the sealant of all 72 windows were releasing their solvent, which smelled strongly of almonds, all in one go in our open plan house. Luckily the weather wasn’t too bad, because we needed to keep the windows open to ventilate!

And then we had to make haste with painting the outside window frames, because it had been so long ago that anything had been done with them, and it was clear they wouldn’t hold out another winter. But of course it is impossible to find a professional painter who wants to take on a job at a weeks’ notice in October, so we had to do it ourselves.

We decided to keep the same colour scheme: bright red, deep blue and cream white. (There’s also some ochre yellow in a few spots, but that’s only inside and we will paint that over with one of the other three colours in due course.) But because the colours on the outside had already faded a lot (especially the red) we compared the “colour fan” we got from the DIY store with a doorpost inside the house. Clearly, it was RAL 3020, “traffic red”.



So we had a 2,5 liter can of paint mixed for that. But it is bright.



So we stared painting (after we first sanded, de-greased, applied primer, let that dry, sand again and de-greased again), but it became clear that traffic red is not actually the colour that was used originally. At first we thought that it would maybe darken a bit when the paint would dry? But it didn’t and the difference is visible.



So then we took a closer look at that doorpost. It seemed that someone had just re-painted only that doorpost, and had used traffic red for it! The difference is subtle enough that we never noticed, but once you’ve seen it, it’s very clear!



But that can of paint was around 300 euros, so that’s what we’ll use. I kinda like it, it’s so bright!

The second thing that needed to be done was the construction of the shed. We ordered it quite some time ago, but because of reasons, it was only built at the beginning of October. We chose thermically treated wood, a process that basically boils the sugar out of the wood. That makes it unattractive to bugs and mould, which should help keep the shed in good shape for years to come. It is 2,5 x 5 meters, so a very decent size!



We put the back of the shed towards the parking spot, so that it creates a bit of a secluded area in front of the shed. We’re not quite sure what we’re going to do with the bit of garden there — it doesn’t get that much sun, so we can’t do anything too outrageous with plants.



We had our bicycles under a tarp, which made it inconvenient to go anywhere by bike — even though the distances are very bike-able, we ended up taking the car more often than not. We’re very happy we can put the bikes in the shed now, the convenience of being able to simply grab a bike and go has already proven to reduce our car usage!



We had a lot of stuff in the house that we would store in the shed, like tools and other bits and pieces. That all took up space in the house — we couldn’t even use the extra side door to go outside because it was barricaded with boxes on the inside. So we quickly got some shelving units and started re-organising. We now have a lot more room in the house, and we have emptied some boxes that were still left from the move and put those things in their definitive place.

There’s still a list of things to be done, but all the work that we needed to hire contractors for, is finished. I can’t think of anything I would have chosen differently. We love it here.