Still can’t make it up to the farmlet, so I’ll post a quick snapshot from here in the city; it’s not so bad here either!
ETA: I totally forgot to add that I signed up for a workshop on microcement in March! I’m really hoping I can learn to do it and become good enough to do projects myself.I just got an estimate on how much it would cost to get microcement applied professionally and the cost is prohibitively high. It would cost as much as the entire construction part of the renovation. I’m now super motivated to get VERY good at plastering!
EATA: dumping some links to combining chickens and greenhouses for future use: Swedish homestead, Richard Perkins. One rule of thumb I learned was 3 chickens per square meter. Plus Charles Dowding on the pros and cons of greenhouse versus polytunnel.
It is driving me a little (okay, a LOT) crazy not to be on site to inspect the bathroom progress. But without a car in the depth of winter, I just don’t have it in me to take the trek by public transportation in the cold, only to arrive at a farmhouse without a functioning bathroom, where I would have to spend at least one night.
And so I stew over other things. For some reason the kitchen is my focus, perhaps because I already more or less have all the details of the bathroom figured out. As I was brooding over it this week, I came to the realization that what I really want for the floor is Marmoleum, the natural linoleum produced by Forbo. I have always loved it and have probably written about it here before. Given that the whole rest of the house will have funky old pine floors, this seems like it would be a nice contrast; it’s a natural product that’s easy to keep clean and it would make the kitchen seem warmer and more sealed against pests. If I’m right in my suspicion that the kitchen will require some major structural renovations, especially if I really do want to try to expose the log walls, the floor may well need rebuilding and re-insulating. I wouldn’t really want to put a new wood floor in, since it would never match the other rooms. Plus I have to say that living with a wood floor in my apartment kitchen stresses me out; no matter how careful you are, water always drips.
So I’m trying to locate a distributor for Marmoleum here in Norway. It’s very common in commercial applications but not so much in private homes. Forbo’s Marmoleum Click product is available, but I definitely don’t want that. It’s basically like laminate with a Marmoleum surface. I had it in my last kitchen in the US before moving to Norway and while I LOVED the surface, there are two reasons I don’t want to use it again: 1) the color varied too much from package to package, so I ended up with randomly placed slightly darker rectangles and 2) like laminate, it requires a very even subfloor, which I very much doubt is the case at the farmlet. Plus it’s a lot thicker than just the thin layer of linoleum; the ceilings are already super low without building up the floor even more.
OMG, I couldn’t be more excited! The contractor sent the first pictures from the bathroom renovation. This is major! Here’s the floor entirely gone (and you can see that quite a bit of the walls are log construction too):
This is the south wall where the sink (left) and toilet (right) used to be:
The size of the niche where the pipes go is surprising large. I don’t really see a good way to take advantage of that, since it’s right behind where the toilet goes. Sadly it will probably just have to be walled over. Here is part of the west wall with the window:
And here’s the other half of that west wall, with a closer shot of the niche:
And last but not least, here is the north wall where the vanity and washing machine will be:
You can really see the roofline clearly in this shot. I find it fascinating to see how the bathroom was added on.
I’m getting ahead of myself as usual, thinking about what color microcement I want for the walls well before the work on the bathroom has even commenced. Right now I’m being pulled in two quite opposite directions.
On the one hand, I have long loved pale green bathrooms with white trim and fixtures. There’s a really great one on this website. It looks a little like this NCS color (S0907-G20Y), though perhaps a little more yellow? My only hesitation is that it might not be the most flattering color?
On the other hand, I have an idea about some kind of very pale peachy, salmon-y pink. It seems like it would be very flattering in the morning when one has to face oneself in the mirror. I haven’t really found anything that resembles this vague vision, though I’ve long admired the pinky color of unpainted traditional plaster walls in the UK (like this). NCS S1010-Y70R is kind of in the direction, though maybe too grayed out? Or maybe NCS 21020-Y50R? Or is that too bright? Gah, I don’t know! What do you think?
It seems like a bad idea to have an empty house without at least some curtains in the windows. This thought has been nagging me, so I did some online searching and discovered to my great delight that there were some 100% linen curtains of an ok size and color on sale at a deep discount at a store within walking distance of my apartment in Oslo. I rushed up there and bought all seven that I found on the shelf:
It seems like these might actually work in all of the rooms, so I may go to another outlet of the store to see if I can snag a few more. The price is great–reduced from about $70 to about $12! I’m super excited about this. They also smelled really nice when I took them out of the package like good linen does. Now I just need to wash, dry, and iron them. Can’t wait to hang them the next time I’m at the farmlet. The contractor stopped by here in Oslo to finalize plans for the bathroom job there. They should be starting up sometime this week, so maybe I can make a farmlet run sometime toward the end of the following week. Exciting!
Renovation Tangent 