2021-07 Excavator Help
Summertime was here but I was out of action, recovering from a back injury. We did however get a trip to the city to the north, Umeå. This was necessary for the final stages of receiving a permanent residence permit. We had been processed for this as a result of Brexit, since the EU self-sufficient route we had arrived under would no longer exist for us.
Umeå
We travelled up to Umeå via a buss and then a train. Once in Umeå we spent most of the day there due to the timing of the trains for the return trip. If you took a UK city, added more open spaces, removed about 70% of the people, reduced crime, and surrounded it with forests I think you would be close to Umeå. The northern towns and cities we have been to just feel a lot more welcoming than cities in the UK.
We had a local person offer to help with the garden digging using a mini excavator. They helped create two paths, following the route that I’d partially done. It took perhaps only 20 minutes and saved me months of digging. It left a really consistent edge and bottom. We lined it with ground control fabric and got a gravel delivery.
I thought I could make use of all the soil that came out while making these paths. In hindsight, I should have paid to get the clay subsoil taken away. The clay I mixed into the raised beds would be a poor medium for the plants. Our compost beds were news and not producing material we could mix in to the beds yet. The remainder of the earth sat in a pile for a year.
Basement Renovation
I painted the floor in the basement where the heating oil tank had been removed. The paint seems to help keep dust levels down. I used a water based floorpaint with a light colour. I hadn’t worked out what to do with the burnt wood uprights yet. I will likely replace them at some point.
Invest in Solar
As the permanent residence permission had now been approved, there was a lot less risk around residency. So the big decision was to invest in a solar array on the garage. It would be financially painful for the first year or two but should pay for itself after 9-14 years. Most of this would be via reduced electric bills from spring to autumn.
The garage roof was almost ideal for a first installation. The roof points roughly south-west which is good for electric generation. The shallow slope would be easy for installers to work on. The roof array and inverter would be easy to wire to the grid as the feed to the property was at the garage. I got two companies to quote, who were quite similar. The company we chose came and fitted the mounting brackets for the panels this month.
Lake Swimming
We’d been to the local lake a fair bit – my girlfriend really enjoys swimming there. I have to build up the courage to get in the cold water but once in it is fun. The Swedish have a name for someone that hesitates to get into cold water (“badkruka”) which my girlfriend likes to call me as I’m slowly edging in and plucking up the courage to swim.
House Networking
Working from home over wireless in the house, occasional networking hiccups were quite noticeable. To try and make the indoor house networking more reliable I fitted a device that used the old satellite TV coax cabling in the house. The satellite TV cabling had been diligently connected throughout the house but was no longer in use. By fitting a device on either end it became a gigabit ethernet cable and worked brilliantly. I now had much more stable networking for my working day. I’d like to put “the “real” ethernet wiring in the house, but this would be a much larger project.
