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We're closing on the sale of my mother-in-law's summer cottage, Ängisbacka, later today. Because of the pandemic Wax will be going to the bank to sign the papers as executor without me (and as mentioned, since MIL's estate was in the negative after probate, the proceeds of the sale will go into Knypplinge, which has to be finished so that we can rent the other side of it - it's not saleable in its current condition and even finished it would likely be close to impossible to sell. We have to rent the other side because the mortgage would be too much for us alone, having been intended for two incomes).
Ängisbacka is an adorable and beautiful cottage, the ideal rural former-laborer's-cottage - a mid-19th century little square red cottage with white trim, with an orchard on one side and a hill down to a sheltered garden on the other.
It has all that the Finnish summer cottage purchaser expects nowadays, which is to say, electricity, but no plumbing (there's an outhouse on one side of the lot, a separate sauna on the other, both paths potentially treacherous in the dark and too far to walk without getting cold at night even in the warmest part of the year). This would be insurmountable inconvenience to me, but my MIL intentionally and happily lived there all summer, as long as possible at a time, from the time the triplets were born 13 years ago, in order to be closer to the family and her grandchildren even though she worked an hour and a half away by car until recently (a laughably short distance to my sensibilities, having grown up in the US visiting family regularly who lived 8, 9, and 11 hours away by car, but basically insurmountable in Finland, a trip my in-laws will consider to see their immediate family only a couple of times per year). It was her favorite place in the world, and essentially her life's dream. She happily plunged into cultivating boxes of vegetables, a row of bushes, a patch of strawberries, a greenhouse full of tomatoes and several beds of rosebushes and other perennials; she was best friends with her next door neighbor and delighted in making food to feed to her friends and to fill the freezer under the stairs.
The buyers are an elderly Finnish-speaking couple from Turku (Pargas, where my wife spent much of her childhood, is still majority Swedish-speaking by a thread, like 51%, but even as recently as 2003 was almost completely Swedish-speaking; everything is bilingual now, including all the customer service). They are after the gardening, and extremely eager to begin doing it as soon as possible, and they intend to begin with some renovations to install running water.
Because they are eager to move as quickly as possible and because they are starting with work anyway they assured us we can leave anything in the cottage we need to, which was a huge load off all our minds because we have nowhere to put that much stuff. Instead of having to empty it we had to get the stuff we wanted. BIL from Turku and his wife brought a trailer for the big stuff and we spent Saturday getting the kitchen hutch, a wooden bench made by my wife's grandfather, the massive dining table and chairs, the Heteka (a vintage ww2-era Finnish-made steel cot), the gas grill, the woodchipper, and a folding aluminum ladder.
We couldn't quite fit everything Saturday so yesterday there were two final trips necessary, to get the bits of the greenhouse (kit, the kind you assemble with a metal frame and plastic panels) that we never got a chance to assemble last summer and then the wheelbarrow. I should have realized the last departure would be a bit emotional, but I got misty in the garden, looking up at the rings of firs and birches and aspens from the little bowl of moss-and-clover-covered lawn where I've spent so long reading and napping in the sun; and Wax was on the verge of tears locking up the cottage itself; the association with her mom is so strong, and the cottage was the biggest thing she owned and the thing that was the most her, so it really felt like a last bit of leave-taking there, even though we have most of her worldly possessions crammed around us at Knypplinge (in tottering stacks that are collecting dust and preventing us from living comfortably, lol).
Ängisbacka is an adorable and beautiful cottage, the ideal rural former-laborer's-cottage - a mid-19th century little square red cottage with white trim, with an orchard on one side and a hill down to a sheltered garden on the other.
It has all that the Finnish summer cottage purchaser expects nowadays, which is to say, electricity, but no plumbing (there's an outhouse on one side of the lot, a separate sauna on the other, both paths potentially treacherous in the dark and too far to walk without getting cold at night even in the warmest part of the year). This would be insurmountable inconvenience to me, but my MIL intentionally and happily lived there all summer, as long as possible at a time, from the time the triplets were born 13 years ago, in order to be closer to the family and her grandchildren even though she worked an hour and a half away by car until recently (a laughably short distance to my sensibilities, having grown up in the US visiting family regularly who lived 8, 9, and 11 hours away by car, but basically insurmountable in Finland, a trip my in-laws will consider to see their immediate family only a couple of times per year). It was her favorite place in the world, and essentially her life's dream. She happily plunged into cultivating boxes of vegetables, a row of bushes, a patch of strawberries, a greenhouse full of tomatoes and several beds of rosebushes and other perennials; she was best friends with her next door neighbor and delighted in making food to feed to her friends and to fill the freezer under the stairs.
The buyers are an elderly Finnish-speaking couple from Turku (Pargas, where my wife spent much of her childhood, is still majority Swedish-speaking by a thread, like 51%, but even as recently as 2003 was almost completely Swedish-speaking; everything is bilingual now, including all the customer service). They are after the gardening, and extremely eager to begin doing it as soon as possible, and they intend to begin with some renovations to install running water.
Because they are eager to move as quickly as possible and because they are starting with work anyway they assured us we can leave anything in the cottage we need to, which was a huge load off all our minds because we have nowhere to put that much stuff. Instead of having to empty it we had to get the stuff we wanted. BIL from Turku and his wife brought a trailer for the big stuff and we spent Saturday getting the kitchen hutch, a wooden bench made by my wife's grandfather, the massive dining table and chairs, the Heteka (a vintage ww2-era Finnish-made steel cot), the gas grill, the woodchipper, and a folding aluminum ladder.
We couldn't quite fit everything Saturday so yesterday there were two final trips necessary, to get the bits of the greenhouse (kit, the kind you assemble with a metal frame and plastic panels) that we never got a chance to assemble last summer and then the wheelbarrow. I should have realized the last departure would be a bit emotional, but I got misty in the garden, looking up at the rings of firs and birches and aspens from the little bowl of moss-and-clover-covered lawn where I've spent so long reading and napping in the sun; and Wax was on the verge of tears locking up the cottage itself; the association with her mom is so strong, and the cottage was the biggest thing she owned and the thing that was the most her, so it really felt like a last bit of leave-taking there, even though we have most of her worldly possessions crammed around us at Knypplinge (in tottering stacks that are collecting dust and preventing us from living comfortably, lol).
