Every house has its story. What's yours?

Life is full of surprising and intellectually stimulating interludes, particularly when one's household is equipped with offspring of an adventurous and inquisitive nature. One of the offspring contingent of this particular household presented me with an interlude of that sort mere minutes ago by accidentally drawing a thick blue line in permanent marker smack dab in the middle of the kitchen floor--a nice absorbent oak surface.

My wife, the Viking descendent, threw in the towel immediately after taking a few desultory swipes at the blot with some window cleaner.    » read more »

I may have mentioned in a previous post that our house is a rambling, character-oozing dwelling with multitudinous charms, but a bit on the elderly side, at least for this part of the world. Built primarily in 1930, with extensions added in the 1950s and the 1960s, it is festooned with interesting little nooks and crannies. As we discovered the other week, it appears to be festooned with something else as well - pesky little rodents.

Well, not festooned exactly. More like sprinkled.    » read more »

This really has virtually nothing to do with the topic of this site, but this evening I was sitting on the couch exploring Google Earth's new space features, beginning with the various stars and constellations that hover directly above my house, when, lo and behold, I discovered the skeleton of E. T. stuck in the Orion Nebula. I was wondering whatever happened to that charming little critter.

It began with a gentle whine, so slight that it required the temporary suspension of respiration and a fractional tilt of the head at just the right angle to be sure I was even hearing it. This was followed by a wide range of puzzled expressions, ranging from game show contestant to village idiot (admittedly not a large leap) as I wandered the house trying to pinpoint it. The refrigerator? No. That whines too, but at a lower frequency. This whine was so high that it was just within the range of my early-middle-aged auditory receptors.    » read more »

The weather has improved, the snow melted away and the temperature risen enough that flowers have finally poked their way out of hibernation, branches are budding, and the grass is once again rather green. I thought I'd celebrate the arrival of spring with a little photographic stroll around the periphery of my home.

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There it is-one of the primary conundrums with which one is inevitably encountered on moving into a new house or apartment: which pictures to hang, and where?

There's a huge threshold to be crossed before one can bring oneself to the dramatic moment of actually digging up a hammer and poking a hole into the otherwise virginal (at least, in that particular spot) paint or wallpaper. How can one be sure the picture, poster or painting is going to look good there? How can you know before you actually make that leap, damage the wall, and hang the damn thing up?    » read more »

A couple of days ago I was strolling through a mega-market buying various tools and other odds and ends, and happened to pass by a bin full of nicely designed, small bird feeders.    » read more »

Our new house, a large, rambling, u-shaped one-floor dream house (at least for us), neatly tucked away on an island in the Stockholm archipelago, came equipped with an unexpected pleasure (or curse, depending on how you care to look at it): in particular, a swimming pool.    » read more »

We're gradually making the transition to CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Lamps) wherever we can in the house. In particular, we have about 12 decorative outdoor lamps that are linked to a photosensor and come on automatically whenever it gets a little dark outside - wintertime in Sweden, that's about 20 hours a day. So it makes perfect sense to use them there.    » read more »