I’m still not able to make it up to the farmlet, but the roofer tells me the roof is done now. He’s been great about sending snapshots, so I’ll do another photodump here.
It looks very shiny and tidy! The little roof over the front door is very typical of the 1950s and 1960s in Norway, and to be honest I kind of hate it. I have been trying to figure out whether there might be a better solution, but that window above the front door really limits the available options. I might even be willing to sacrifice it if it meant it was possible to build a prettier front entry. That window is at floor level upstairs and it is useful for lighting up the stairs and landing, but not really essential. This blog post shows the kind of front entry I’d love to have (called “bislag” or just “inngangsparti” in Norwegian). In fact, this is roughly what the house used to have before the upstairs was expanded. Here’s a very blurry picture of the original house that gives the general idea:
It seems like it might possibly work to add something like that? It’s not really a high priority though, since it’s a purely cosmetic thing. Although looking at the pictures a bit more, I kind of wonder whether I could just remove the little roof all together and leave it at that; it could look really clean and nice, maybe with just a simple glass “awning” over the door (there are loads of options like this). We’ll see when it comes time to paint the exterior.
The more pressing issue is window replacements, which I’m hoping I can swing next summer. The plan is to replace all the windows on the north, east and south walls with upgraded windows of the exact same size, but on the west side that faces the road I’d really like to create a sun porch.
My hunch is that the bump-out may originally have been a sun porch that got walled in, though I don’t have any photos to prove it. The term for this kind of room in Norwegian is “glassveranda.” The second house described in this article is a good example of a place where the original sun porch was covered up, probably because it made the house too cold. That could well have been the case with this house too. Lord knows it’s cold enough as it is!
Everything about this part of the house–both inside and outside–is crying out for the bump-out to have windows all the way around, and maybe even a door to the south leading out onto a modest little deck in the sunny corner on the right. That would be the perfect spot to sit and enjoy the late evening sun. Since all the windows on the house are in serious need of replacing for practical reasons, it doesn’t seem like too much of an extra leap to splurge just a bit to add a few more windows and make a sun porch, especially since this western facade is so bleak otherwise. I definitely don’t want to add windows on the other west-facing walls because of how those rooms are configured inside.
So…the next demolition project (in addition to pulling up the flooring in the kitchen) may just have to be removing some of the wood paneling in the bump-out to see whether it was originally framed for more windows. Now I’m super curious!
ETA: dumping this link to a Swedish door and window producer. They make absolutely gorgeous old-fashioned products, including etched glass that would be perfect for the bathroom window…
Renovation Tangent 