Escaping the chaos.

 

Welcome into my house, honeybunnies!

In Sweden, when you go visit someone for the first time, you always say "let's go for a 'husesyn'!". I don't know exactly how you would translate that, looked it up in an online dictionary and it said "house inspection" - which is exactly what it is, but "inspection" sounds so harsh and unpleasant. When you go on a husesyn, you're all like "ooooh", "aaaaah", "I love what you've done with the place!". (In case you're an asshole, you could of course say that you hate it and you don't know how people could live like that but you probably won't get a second invitation.)

Anyway, I thought we could all go a husesyn in my house! One room at a time, obviously - I don't want you to get a country-living overdose.

Let's start with this room, the one I call the "piano room", in lack of better words. Because, well, that's where we keep the piano. Logical and quite descriptive, huh? It's also a room that has meant a lot to me these past five months.

You see, when Ronnie and I came home after celebrating Christmas, we walked into a hallway filled with ice-cold water. A water pipe had burst while we were away and was rapidly turning our house into a swimming pool. Apparently we were "really, really lucky" - only three rooms were destroyed: our hallway, our bathroom and our laundry room that we also used as a storage area, but if we would have come home just minutes later, the whole first floor would have been completely ruined. (Then we'd be talking kitchen, dining room, living room and "piano room".)

The carpenters had to remove the floors, walls and even the ceilings, dry everything with a heating fan for weeks, and then start rebulding everything from scratch. We decided that we didn't want a new wall between the laundry room and the bathroom, but instead get a bigger bathroom with a built-in landry area. Since our house is 110 years old, our insurance only paid for a little bit of all this - we had to come up with 45 000 dollars ourselves. Which naturally we couldn't, so we had to take out another mortgage on the house. Not the ideal way to start the new year.

So, what does all of this have to do with the piano room in the photos above? Well, the thing is that our house has been in a state of total and utter chaos since the beginning of January. Since we lost our storage room, bathroom and hallway, everything that used to be in these rooms had to be moved into the rest of the house. We had to make narrow trails between all of the cardboard boxes, clothes and misplaced furniture just to be able to get around.

But. The piano room was - is - sacred. I refused to fill it up with trash, but instead insisted on keeping it clean, neat and angst-free. The worse your living conditions are, the more appreciated it is to have one place where you can get away from all the clutter, all the must's and should's. This room has been that place for me. A hide-out from the mess that has been our home this year.

Unbelievably, they still haven't finished fixing up the house after the water-leak. The builders haven't been here for weeks and I'm starting to think they forgot about us. We still can't use the bath tub or the shower, a window is missing, cupboards are leaning against the walls instead if hanging on them, and so on. (We do have a tiny guest toilet on the top floor, it even has a shower, just not a very good one. So it's not like we smell or anything.) But at least our house is starting to get back to normal. I can't wait for it all to be done, so I can start putting everything back where it's supposed to be!

Until then, I hang out in my piano room. Whenever I'm sitting in there with the heat of the sun at the back of my neck, it's easy to remember that it could all have been so much worse.