Cimorene

Our plumber hasn't been able to pin down the local digger contractor yet. Now besides the digging they'll have to break the new asphalt up and then repave when they're done!

And there was great rejoicing!

Status: the digger guy never called him back so it got backburnered. He is trying again.

A few days ago I had one of those sore knot spots in the middle of my back and it annoyed me enough that I actually went and got the plastic massage stick, which I hardly ever touch because I can't be bothered. And it felt good at first, but I guess I irritated it too much or... whatever, I'm not clear on the mechanism, but it turned into an inflammation, like a little bruise, and now it's been annoying me even more constantly for two days. So I only want to be lying or sitting with a hot pack pressed next to my spine but I also would really like to be standing up and doing things, just not enough to stay away from the hotpack for long. I did take ibuprofen. I can still FEEL it there, being not exactly painful but just really ANNOYING, and I hate it. Also annoying that a hotpack on your spine tends to make you very warm.

I have been gradually accumulating a little bit more energy each day - hence the desire to be standing up or doing things, which I didn't have all winter until the middle of February - but it still doesn't feel springy enough to enjoy being outside. There aren't any flowers up anywhere. The sun isn't out every day. Our tenants were out there raking leaves (which we didn't do at all last fall) with their smallest child yesterday afternoon. They are embarrassingly much more together about... house... maintenance... stuff and they keep doing like twice or three times as much yardwork and stuff on their side of the house as we ever get around to. Last fall they even had a new load of gravel put down in the driveway on their side (there's a drive into the garage - which only they use - and then another one, which still has 0% visible gravel left, on the other side leading to our front door). I just every time want to cry and be like AHHH I'M SORRY FOR BEING SUCH BAD LANDLORDS!!!! WE ARE TEMPERAMENTALLY UNSUITED TO BEING LANDLORDS!!!!! We haven't done that. It wouldn't be professional. Also they asked us if they could get a dog, and obviously yes. They aren't decided yet apparently, but the children are campaigning. Wouldn't that be nice?

I finally got a response from the Finnish tax agency - after I think almost an entire year - for how much the tax will be for the money left me by my great-uncle. Finally, we know how much is left for plumbing (etc)! And at this point I fear we may have to call the plumber, even though in the first week of the year he told us he would call us, because it HAS been 2 months. On the other hand, maybe the ground was too cold to have done any of the digging yet.

I was asked to talk some more about wallpaper, and I love to talk about wallpaper!

I grew up prejudiced against wallpaper, because ( Read more... )

But when we bought our 1950 wooden house in 2019 and dove into researching it we learned that wallpaper was the most common, expected wall treatment for it. I wasn't even willing to consider moving in without changing the wall surface treatments of every single room in the house, on initial walkthrough. (waxjism agreed that things were mostly ugly, but she would totally have been willing to live with some of it for a while, and some of it forever, and my mother-in-law didn't see anything wrong with some of the wallpapers, but was just ¯_(ツ)_/¯ about my aesthetic preferences.) When we bought the house, the existing wallpapers and wall treatments were as follows: ( Read more... ).

The downstairs walls of our house are actually made out of stretched cardboard, a common and inexpensive wall material at that time that was sold on giant rolls, soaked to soften it, then stretched out evenly in all directions and nailed to the framing timbers on all four sides. This construction method was designed to be wallpapered over. We learned that we could also paint the walls as long as the paint wasn't a vapor barrier (no plastic content: traditional oil paints or distemper, tempera, or mineral paints), and we were very attached to my idee fixe that paint is cheaper and better than wallpaper; so we actually did this. We regret it! Wallpaper was the style- and period-appropriate choice and the better choice for our wall type, more forgiving of errors. The distemper-painted walls in our dining room look fine, but distemper is vulnerable to physical wear. The 0-VOC linseed-based eco paint we used in the living room took me like two weeks and like six coats because we chose a medium green and it wasn't opaque in any less. This paint also takes a long time to cure to full hardness, and as a result has various dings in it. We could've papered this room in a similar shade of solid green paper for about a third the cost and a tenth the effort, but again... we were not wise yet.

A primary consideration for us was choosing period-appropriate wallpaper and curtains that would fit the architecture and feel of the house.

Kitchen.
waxjism and I have both posted before about how we later spotted our kitchen wallpaper, by the Swedish Boråstapeter, in The Queen's Gambit (I know now that they filmed it in Europe in order to work with my idol, German production designer Uli Hanisch, so it makes a lot more sense to find the paper there...). (Illustrative screencap in an old post of Wax's here; product page here.) We fell in love with this paper when we saw a sample in a rack by the door at a wallpaper shop in Turku, actually, but we had already bought the backsplash tiles you can see here behind Sipuli from a local guy on Finland's equivalent of Craigslist (tori.fi).( Read more... )

Curved entryway wall.
There's a picture of this up above in its current wallpaper, Sanderson Hampton Trellis. (A couple more are available in this old post about my beloved rainbow ball coatrack.) I fell for this kelly-green paper with its large-scale white geometric trellis print early in house research and so did waxjism. We knew immediately that we needed a bold contrast treatment for this curved feature wall, but we didn't decide on this paper immediately because it's by far the most expensive wallpaper we bought for the house. I spent like a year looking for an alternative that we liked even slightly as much that cost less, and we could never find one that we could be happy with. You had to visualize the size of the curved wall and its place in the room, and it needed to be a bold pattern of a certain scale with a strong contrast in it, and it turned out that most of the alternatives I could find weren't available in bold enough colors or in the right scale. It isn't 1950s, but there was a trend of chinoiserie (of which this sort of trellis wallpaper is an outgrowth) and also a trend of trellis wallpapers specifically during the 1960s (and the bathroom itself, and hence the curved wall, were added to the house around 1960 - our house and all its DIY clones from the same plans are designed to be built in stages, initially without plumbing, with bathrooms and kitchen sinks etc added later when the family could afford it). This doesn't really look quite like the 60s ones I've seen, but the connection is enough to satisfy me. The kelly green harmonizes nicely with the muted blue-green shades that dominate in the kitchen. I liked a few Pihlgren & Ritola alternatives that all weren't quite right for some reason, like Snowflake (black and white is bold but we prefer colorful!) and Pinecone (same, but mainly the scale was just too small... I really love this print and I love foresty wallpapers), Pro Finlandia (the scale is bold but the color contrast isn't! 1970s art nouveau revival vibes, a little late for us but still in the window of possibility), Paradise (60s-70s folklore/primitivism, nice bold colors and large scale, but as you see in the wall shots, the lozenges tile together into a rather even print even in the really bright colors? And we weren't SUPER into any of the color combinations.)

Living room.
As mentioned above, I painted this room a medium green with an oil-based ecological paint, chosen over distemper because the final surface can be washed with soap and water or scrubbed. We love a medium green! We love this shade! ( Read more... ) For these reasons we will not be repapering this room until after both of our bunnies have died, so it will probably be a few years, but I have looked repeatedly:( Read more... )

Dining room.
The dining room is currently distempered with a beautiful light bluey aqua, really on the edge of off white, but it's got holes ripped in it by Anubis and spots worn out from my shoulders when sitting up in bed. We can't paint and wallpaper that room (it has a huge built-in cabinet and three small closet doors that need to be repainted in our trim color as well) until Cat Divorce is over, but we have looked and looked at wallpapers. ( Read more... )

Powder room.
The downstairs bathroom, or half-bath, or powder room, or WC, the one that was put in about 1960 and fully renovated before we moved in, contains the washing machine as well as sink and toilet, and because it doesn't have a shower, we didn't have to tile all the way up the walls. The wall covering should still be basically water-resistant in case of splashing of course, and there's all that construction waterproofing under the finish so the normal considerations about non-plastic wallcoverings in an old wood house no longer apply. We started with the floor tiles, which are a dark cobalt blue with a lot of color variation, again, leftovers from some local guy on Finnish Craigslist, and we got enough of them to do both our bathrooms. The upstairs is a little shower room, so the walls are tiled all the way up to the ceiling, and we chose white, so I thought the downstairs should have dark walls that blend into the floor to differentiate it. What I really wanted was this underwater wallpaper with swimming koi carp, Derwent by Osborne & Little, or Cole & Son's Acquario which has puffer fish, but I didn't consider them because of price. I was also into similar designs of blue sky dotted with birds like Daydream by Julia Rothman for Hygge & West. In the end we painted with a color matched from the tiles and then I did this undersea mural with white Posca markers and a spray-on acrylic waterproofing coat (there's a picture of it here - maybe I've never posted 360 photos of it).

Landing.
The landing is mostly painted a light sea green, but there is an alcove with this single roll of Pihlgren & Ritola Atom in a discontinued groovy lime green (here). The wall opposite the alcove is still the off-white of the stairwell panels, which we will repaint eventually I guess, but they will still be white. This wallpaper is also inside on the back wall of the wardrobe Wax built. The rest of the library is made of wood fiber panels with a finger gap, which makes it unsuitable for wallpaper. It is painted a very bright light aqua with mineral paint. We love this color, which is an outlier in terms of our palette, but the room always feels very light and bright.

Bedroom.
The bedroom was wallpapered before, and we stripped it, put up a layer of paintable brown paper and painted that with a sort of light khaki green clay paint. Love it! But in retrospect I think I would paper the room in a floral paper in a similar shade of green like Duro Vilhelmina or Boråstapeter Borosan 21 8618. Or if price were no object, Lim & Handtryck's Tjolöholm Slott.

I love William Morris's patterns so I'm happy that Morris wallpapers have increased in popularity in recent years and I'm spotting them everywhere. A local shop even carries them here in Pargas, a town of less than 20,000 people.

But on the other hand they are kind of a problem in historical 19th century production design, because it was a period when nearly everything was wallpapered (except for wooden panelling), and not all the wallpaper looked quite like Morris & Co, importantly because even then it was unusually pricey, and yet it is disastrously overrepresented in set design representing interiors of the period on film, even interiors representing this period in other countries, where the likelihood of Morris & Co wallpaper appearing at the time were probably quite low.

It's like if historical films set in the 1900s costumed 75% of the characters in recognizable iconic couture pieces. (In filmmakers' defense, filming on location increases the likelihood that the historic building you've chosen comes with Morris & Co preinstalled, and in that case there's not really anything they could have done.)

Wax and I put a great deal of research into renovating our house, which is a wooden house built in 1950. It had to be completely replumbed and rewired before we could move in and the walls of all the rooms had to consequently be resurfaced, and in the course of a million hours of research I bookmarked several domestic/regional stores specializing in renovation materials for historical houses: Rakennusapteekki, Domus Classica, Sekelskifte, and a bunch of wallpaper shops that carry paper wallpapers. And in all of these Morris wallpapers are front and center - usually they are one of only two or three brands carried by the shop, although in point of fact there are a large number of manufacturers that make a few paper wallpapers alongside their normal ("non woven" and vinyl) selections (Seinäruusu has a large selection). (William Morris's designs are my favorite wallpapers EVER, but they are minimum forty years too old for our house, and in completely the wrong style - our house is a minimalist, strongly functionalist-influenced, humble traditional cottage. So I would never have considered them anyway, but they are also at least twice as expensive as the most expensive wallpaper we bought.)

Wax's brother is arriving from Seinäjoki today with his wife and two daughters. They're not staying with us because Tristana's so afraid of other cats and they are bringing their two kittens with them, so they have an airbnb in town. He made us promise not to cut down the Christmas tree in our yard until he comes, so I guess we will be decorating it together tomorrow or this evening.

It rained all night and is above freezing again, which may help the tree feel less shocked, but looks dismal out again (yesterday it had snowed just enough to be adorable).

And the to do list we made is basically done!! There are NINE tins full of homemade cookies and a quadruple recipe of rocky road waiting, plus a tin of Danish butter cookies, a pyramid of Ferrero Rocher because it's my favorite, and all three of Wax's mom's candy dishes full of store bought candy...

2024 Christmas Dessert menu

• Ronneby pepparkakor (half plain, half iced)


• Painted sugar cookies


• Peanut butter cookies


• Pain d'amandes


• Pecan rocky road (half +coconut)


• Chocolate pretzel sticks (half white chocolate, all with sprinkles or crushed peppermint candy)

...We realized afterwards that we might've overdone it a bit. And that we should not make a cake after all. Somehow after the first day of baking we still thought we should make another recipe of painted sugar cookies and quadruple the rocky road. Only when I finished filling the tins were we like "Wait...".

Also I finished the necessary cleaning and hung up the star window lights in every room except the living room, where we have white paper stars under the plant lights in each window.

Benzodiazepines for as-needed anxiety management work very well when used intermittently, but if you use them too often you build up a tolerance which makes them not work when you need one (hence that time I had to call my doctor in panic to ask if it was safe to take a third pill in 24 hours - it was). You can safely take two in a day with some recurrence but you CAN'T take two in a day EVERY day for very long. Basically, you can't use them daily for more than a couple of weeks without that tolerance forming.

So when I had a nervous breakdown in August, I briefly took them more frequently and they stopped working, when my use pattern before that was maybe once a month or so. Thanks to waxjism's support, after a few weeks of babying myself I managed to mostly stop taking them again, going several weeks without, and typically just taking half again. Unfortunately, then the pipe connecting our tenants' drains to the sewer broke, sewage started coming up in the basement, and we started being unable to find a plumber who could come and bypass the broken pipe. We are stumbling along with a sump pump that has to be raised and lowered out of the septic tank full of sewage and a hose leading from it to the adjacent septic tank and into the working pipe that leads to the city sewer still from our side of the house. This works, but we have to periodically check and reposition it if the hose comes loose, the pump tips over, the water freezes, etc. The sewage-filled tanks are standing open in the yard and the hoses and cables are smeared with poop, of course, so it's all nightmarish. This has been going on FOR WEEKS because none of the local plumbers on our list can find time until sometime next year.

And we got one LAST recommendation for a Finnish-speaking plumber, but Wax is at the stage of nervous breakdown where she can't make herself call, so I'm trying to do it, only he had to be the Finnish one OF COURSE and my Finnish confidence is much lower, so this is now day three when I've taken my anti-anxiety benzo and my ADHD methylphenidate with breakfast and then sat there, staring at my phone, fists clenched, trying to will the anxiety levels to go down low enough to let me call this guy with the Finnish script all written out in front of me. No go so far.

The thing is, the last few days I've been trying to do this, I've taken the benzo but felt no noticeable effect. Because I've been taking them too often recently again, evidently. I can either take two, which tends to actually make me WHOAwoozy but maybe that would be okay, or I can try something else. Obviously willpower is out when you have ADHD, even after the methylphenidate. I've rewritten the script twice, I've made a physical to-do list and marked it up with symbols, I've taken deep breaths. But it doesn't work! Maybe my system needs a shock of some other kind, like you do when you have hiccups? Like maybe if I did something that would make my brain whirl around fast enough and trick it into not falling into the panic spiral, would I then be able to quickly dial?

• Spinning around in a spinny chair until I get dizzy. I used to do this as a child, but when I've done it as an adult I've found it might make me queasy instead? Also we don't have a spinny chair



• What about standing on my head for a minute and a half first? IDK



• 1 minute of jumping jacks doesn't do it. Already tried that before.



• Oddly enough, I thought of cough syrup. Cough syrup tastes INCREDIBLY disgusting - in Finland it's flavored with salmiakki or black licorice. I have to hold my nose while swallowing the spoonful. I don't have a cough, though. And we don't have anything else salmiakki, because I hate it and Wax doesn't care



• Drinking something else really disgusting??? But the only things we really have are a little box of tiny bottles of Swedish snaps, mostly herbal-flavored liquors that you throw back in one before singing. Most of them are fairly mild but there's the infamous bäska droppar, the worst snaps of all, the one flavored with wormwood. I have tasted it before, not the full glass because I was just trying it, at family Christmases before the children when my in-laws were singing snapsvisor. This would definitely shock my system, but maybe too much? Wax recommended against it and I'm inclined to agree.



• We have this herbal drink called Greek Mountain Tea (genus Sideritis) that is very weird and I thought brewed strong it might have that effect, but it wasn't weird enough; it is still a bit like camomile. (We accumulate weird herbal infusions from time to time, because people know we love tea and don't realize that we love tea, camellia sinensis, not tea, any old random infusion of plants). Anyway it wasn't pleasant, but that small cupful, overbrewed, failed already.



• Maybe brandy? That's what you give a lady who fainted, right? The one and only time I was given brandy to try, it induced a strong coughing fit, so it probably WOULD be shocking, right? But I perused my MIL's liquor stash (most of the liquor we have is inherited. The only things there we've replenished ourselves were the amaretto and cointreau, both for baking) and she has no brandy. I poured a shotglass half full of Southern Comfort, which smelled worse than the other whiskey, but my hopes aren't that high.

My parents: Do you need money?
Me: 😭 No, we just need a plumber who will COME HERE!!!
Mom: You mean they're busy?
Me: They're like "We could do next year".

Our basement is literally flooded with sewage! Turds are floating in our sauna! Whyyyyyyyyy aren't there more plumbers😭😭😭

If you own a rowhouse you don't have to kneel in the falling rain and snow raising and lowering a sump pump into a nasty old tank that has poop floating in it even though it isn't supposed to. There's just a company that handles all the upkeep on the property on behalf of the group of owners! Not that we ever were trying to buy a rowhouse, I just frequently think of it because it's the next less demanding level of property ownership.

Plumbing disasters keep happening to us and we are SO ILL-EQUIPPED for this. Every time there's an emergency situation that requires calling a tradesman or whatever, we both need three days of bed rest to recover, but we NEVER GET THEM because Wax has to work all the time and NEW DISASTERS KEEP HAPPENING.

In related news: it rained all night so even though we successfully pumped septic tank #3 (the one with the broken drain to the city) into septic tank #2 (the one with a new, functioning plastic pipe) just yesterday in the falling snow, the basement is full of sewage AGAIN because of the rainwater that ALSO gets into the septic tanks even though it isn't supposed to, so the pump has now been working all day and is still working and the basement is going to have to be disinfected AGAIN.

Also Wax talked to 2? plumbing professionals who didn't know whether the broken pipe is our responsibility or the city's, so now I've sent an email to the city water department just now asking. They only have one general email for the whole department and a long list of phone numbers. I know old tradesmen prefer phones and that makes sense for them but seriously.

In conclusion, don't buy a house, ever. I hate this house. I hate old plumbing designed and installed by some guy named Bob and I don't ever want to look at a septic tank again.

The septic tanks for the tenant wing that we couldn't afford to replace with new connections to the sewer when we bought the house have been giving us trouble since. The pipes themselves are degrading and it's worse all the time, but there are two floor drains in the basement under the cement floors, unfortunately.

Last week the septic tanks were drained and just like the last time, only six months ago, the drains were still stopped because of how the old pipes are so easily clogged - they're so rusty that chunks of them are falling off and they're full of cracks that get things stuck in them and produce clogs. We had the guy with the truck to blast the blocks out with water on Wednesday and then today sewage started coming out of the floor drain in the sauna again.

We got lucky though - today the blockage is between the third septic tank and the street. It can probably be fixed just by bypassing that tank with a short bit of new pipe out in the yard.

But the plumbing on the tenant side is not going to last long, according to the plumbers we've had. We have a little money unexpectedly inherited from my great uncle, and we wanted to replace the roof once we find out how much of it we owe in taxes... we don't even know if it would be enough for that, but now it looks like we have to get quotes for this plumbing instead and it might not even wait long enough for us to get a response from the tax agency.