So I've made peace with the falling leaves.

Whenever I wake up with my heart beating too fast, feeling stressed out even in my sleep about all the things I need to get done in the days or weeks to come, I've learnt that the best way to relax is to... well, relax. Because all of this stress is only in my mind. It's nothing but a leftover from back when I was constantly on the verge of breaking down from all the pressure I put on myself, from double and triple and quadruple booking every minute until there was no chance in hell I could get everything done in time.

But that's all over. It's not my life anymore; my body took care of that for me. It forced me to hit the breaks, the only way it knew how, and more than two years later I'm still slowing down. There are things I need to get done in the next couple of days and weeks, sure, but we're talking a very reasonable amount. It just feels like it's too much, because my mind has come to associate the very thought of work with a feeling that screams "I can't do it I can't do it I just can't seriously I can't breathe help help help I'm going to die!". Noone can change this pattern but me. And since I'm lucky enough to be the boss of my own time, I also have to accept responsibility the way a boss would.

This morning, the responsible thing to do was take a few hours off. A few hours to think through my tasks for the following week, to slowly realize that it's all under control. And if I later find that it's not, then I'll skip things. I know now that nothing work-related, and I mean nothing, is worth risking my health or sanity for.

After a lazy breakfast, followed by soaking in a steaming hot bath, I feel more than ready to take on this day. But you know what I'm going to do first? I'm going to take a walk, listen to my favorite songs and enjoy the sun against my skin. Because I'm the only one who can make myself see the beauty that truly is all around.

"It's not a movie
No private screening
This method acting, well
I call that living"

                                      Conor Oberst, my hero

The Spontaneous Almost-Dream Bathroom.

Moving into my new office, it hit me that it's been way too long since we went into a new room of my house! It's definitely time to continue the husesyn.*

*I'm copy-pasting from the first part of the husesyn: 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.)

In January, when we found out our hallway, laundry-room and bathroom had to be thrown out and rebuilt because of a terrible water leak, my mom immediately said "oh, but then you can take the opportunity to make a much bigger and nicer bathroom!". Since we had been told our insurance would only cover a third of the cost - because our house is so old - I wasn't exactly in the mood to get excited over the fact that our perfectly decent bathroom could now become "bigger and nicer". We had absolutely not been planning on renovating it, and I was horrified over the fact that we would somehow have to come up with 45 000 dollars. (In the end, we had to take out another mortgage on the house.) But sure, I agreed that now that we had to redo it anyway, why not make the new bathroom a great one!

Then, two weeks later, I ended up having an emergency surgery that led to an infection and had to stay in the hospital for weeks. When I came back home, on a Sunday, we got a call from the builders: "Umm, yeah, we're gonna start working on Tuesday and we need to know exactly what interior you want us to put in." I couldn't believe it - "but you didn't even tear down the old bathroom yet, why on Earth do you need to know what the new one is going to look like, already?!". 

He mumbled something about needing to know where the pipes should go, and, well - me and Ronnie went straight to work. We googled the night away, looking for inspiration, praying that our taste in bathrooms should be somewhat similar. Luckily, it was. So the next day, we both took a day off work, drove around to different bathroom warehouses where we just ran through the buildings yelling "this one?" "Sure!" "OK, good." "How about that one?" "Why not!". On Tuesday, we presented a list of every single thing we wanted in our bathroom - and now, six months later, it's all done. All except that there's a leak in our new shower, that is. It's been "fixed" twice, and we've come to the conclusion that instead of being upset about it, it's better to just accept that our floor will be a bit wet every time we shower. Oh well.

And I must say, for a bathroom that was extremely hastily and spontaneously designed by two people who knows nothing about interior design, I simply adore it. The result might not be my dream bathroom in every detail, but it's pretty close! (And the cats love sleeping in there - especially in the tub - so it must be a good one.)

All we knew when we were running around looking for the right shower, taps, toilet, sink cabinet, bath tub, wall- and floor tiles and so on, was that we wanted the bathroom to feel homey, friendly, and fit the style of the rest of the house: a little bit retro, a little bit Swedish archipelago style, and very country-style.

These are some of the inspirational photos we found while researching the kind of bathrooms we liked:

And while some of these might be a lot prettier than our bathroom, they all have a huge problem: they're not located in our house. So I'd rather take our new bathroom than all of these, 10 times out of 10.

(You can check out our hallway here and our "piano room" here.)

Step into my hallway, baby!

 

Let's continue our little husesyn around my house!

Above, you can see what our hallway looked like when we first moved in. I get chills just by looking at those photos... (Obviously not the good kind.) I don't want to say anything bad about anyone else's taste so I'll say that to me, that's not the ideal hallway, and then we'll leave it at that.

But, speaking of ideal hallways! With a new floor, a removed door and radiator, new walls and a painted ceiling, plus the kind of furniture I love, now I wouldn't change a thing. A lot of people seem to find it boring with white interiors, but since our house is so old and narrow - and with a ceiling so low that a tall person has to constantly bow a little bit - we decided the best way to keep it from being claustrophobic is to go light, light, light.

I guess the previous owners wouldn't agree, since every single color was represented with its own wallpaper when we bought the house. (The piano room, for instance, was a sullen dark red, our bedroom was pink, the gust room purple, the living room yellow, the kitchen a disgusting green, sort of like snot.) Oh well. Each to his own!

Lots and lots to do today, I really should get ready... but days as sunny and gorgeous as this one, I just don't feel like getting dressed at all!

Thanks for coming on this second part of my "house-seeing", feel free to stop by any time. ;)

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.