Renovation Recap

This is a picture from five years ago,
when it had slowly started to dawn on me
that the yellow house would eventually become my home,
one day, in the distant future.

In order to shed some light on what on earth is going on here to all those who do not read Finnish, I decided to save some time in my quite hectic mother-of-a-toddler day-to-day life and explain the whole thing in one go to everyone at the same time. So. Here you are.

I've lived in Pori for nearly twelve years now, thanks to my dear Husband, and pretty soon I realised more-than-half serious conversation about his childhood house staying in the family had been going on for some time. In fact, for such a long time that there would really have been no sense for me to struggle against the idea but to slowly conform, although I very hard tried not to at first.

The house itself is handsome, a wooden semi-detached house with hiiigh ceilings, built in the 1920s by Husband's great-grandfather just off the town centre. Like, even closer to everything than where we live now, and we're already at a walking distance from both the market square and the beautiful Kirjurinluoto park! There is also a garden that reaches perhaps 20 metres behind the house, and at the back of the garden there is a little brick house. My mother-in-law lives in the main building, but when I moved here, her mother-in-law, that is, Husband's grandmother, still lived in the little house at the back of the garden, as she had done since the mid-seventies, having moved away from the main building with her husband to make room for their son's family.

Now. My mother-in-law retired a couple of years back and soon after began hinting that the house had begun to seem too spacious for her. By this time I had accepted / been brainwashed to the idea that it would actually be very cool to take responsibility of the old house, and even living right next door to Husband's mother felt perfect now that we had come to know each other well: not only would we keep the family tradition alive, but having three generations right there would also be plain practical! We would help her out with whatever she needed and our kids would have an extra grown-up around the house to go to. Veera will turn seven this August and go to school, and with the Finnish first-graders' school days being on average four hours long while we both work full time, it's a very relieving thought to have Granny at home.

The problem is, the house needs serious renovating, because with my Husband's older children (16 and 14 this year) there are six of us altogether, and there are now only three bedrooms and one bathroom, and the kitchen is too small for a table big enough to seat all of us. I've sketched the changes we need to have done, so here you can see the top floor with the two existing bedrooms and the attic that we'll turn into a bedroom / dressing room loft-like thing and add a tiny bathroom; this is the ground floor, which can stay pretty much as it is, just that we'll turn the one bedroom into a dining room / study and try and fit in stairs so we can get to the basement. Which of course doesn't exist yet, except as an open space with an earthen floor and the ceiling up at about 190cm. Husband's 198cm tall. So we'll have to dig a little to fit in a proper bathroom and a small sauna, a laundry room and a man cave (!). Plus the plumbing and insulation etc. We'll keep the potato (/wine/beer) cellar that's already there.

All this takes some calculating and engineering abilities and knowledge about constructions we are not in possession of ourselves. We haven't been very quick about this: we first told Granny we would indeed like to move in the house in October 2013, a day or so before Kerttu was born, so there were some other things to take care of first. I finally got around to searching for a civil engineer to make the technical plans for the renovations in September. Found one, a sympathetic older gentleman, who came to see the house, took some notes, and told us the plans would be ready in two months, enabling us to get the bureaucracy going for the building permit, which takes a minimum of four weeks to get in the wintertime when it's quiet. Two months passed, I called him, he told me it would still take him about a month. So we met again in mid-December, he came to see the house, took some notes, and told us the plans would be ready in a month. You may see a pattern evolving here... This time, when I called him several times at the end of January he wouldn't even answer the phone anymore.

After wasting a total of five months we now have a new engineer working for us, and now it all seems to be going forwards at a faster pace. It's just that with a semi-detached house there are some regulations that include both ends of the house, of which we didn't know, so we now have to have talks with our neighbours-to-be before the engineer can actually get on with the work. But the talks are on tomorrow's agenda. Will give another report once things have twitched.

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