The last piece of wallpaper

Finally, after nine days of hard work, Matts came to the last piece of wallpaper. After some additional painting, our living room is finally done - apart from the skirting that we haven't decided on quite yet. Tomorrow we'll clean our whole house from dust and bits of this and that that have spread all over the place and then it's time to re-furniture the living room. I sure look forward to it!

Muffins - again

We had some really small and tiny bits of rhubarb left in the garden and I decided to do something with it. I googled and found the recipe for these delicious muffins.

Rhubarb muffins with white chocolate and cardamom, 12 small ones

Rinse and cut 150 grams rhubarb and add 2½ tbsp sugar to them. Put aside. Beat 100 grams of butter with 1 deciliter sugar and ½ tbsp vanilla sugar. Add 2 eggs, one by one and then 1 deciliter milk. Mix 2½ deciliter flour with 2 tsp baking soda and 1 tsp ground cardamom in a separate bowl before genlty mixing it into the butter and stuff. Add 100 grams white chocolate in chunks as well as half of the rhubarb and then distribute the batter evenly in 12 muffin cups. Spread the rest of the rhubarb on top and bake for approximately 20 minutes at 175 Celcius.

Simply delicious!

The Knivsta Hedgehog

Yesterday we got a visitor coming by after dinner outside. And today, the same visitor came once more - a hedgehog. This time I followed it to our flowerbed where it turned out to be a true epicure, enjoying escargot for supper...

Hard work

To strip the living room of it's wallpaper has taken days. But eventually it was time for Matts to apply the spackling paste, and after some polishing and painting (the ceiling as well as the walls under the windows) today was finally the day of hanging the new wallpaper. It sure looks fabulous and I can hardly wait until it's all done and we can move back into our living room.

Let your thoughts fly away

While Matts worked on the living room and Inga played in her baby pool next to me, I lay on the deck watching the blue sky and the swifts that flew by.

Taking the wallpaper down

This is what our living room looked like yesterday morning. But after lunch it all changed. We moved the table into the guest room, hooked down the curtains and pushed all the remaining furniture to the middle of the room. There they are now, covered in plastic while Matts works on the wallpaper. The wallpaper is an old structure one with small small bits of wood in it to give it structure. Probably very modern in the late 70s, but now, more than three decades later it's about time it disappears from these walls. Not the least since it's broken in one of the corners where the walls have moved. Luckily Matts is doing a good job, taking down the terrible wallpaper, inch by inch.

Raspberry-Chocolate muffins

Today I baked. It's my favorite thing to do in the kitchen, but lately I haven't baked much at all. This time I made a batch of muffins. So easy and fast to make, and nice to eat as well... I found this recipe in a book that I was just about to return to the library and they don't have much sugar in them. Originally the recipe said to use white chocolate, but since I only had dark at home I simply used that instead. That might be the reason why they aren't so sweet. Not that that is a problem in any way...

For 12 regular size muffins I beat 200 grams of butter with 1,5 deciliter sugar. Then I added 4 eggs, one at a time. I mixed 4 deciliter of flour with 1 tablespoon of baking soda and added that together with 100 grams of frozen raspberries as well as 75 grams of dark chocolate. After about 20 minutes in 175 C they were ready to enjoy.

Our gardens

Yes, I know. I have been terribly bad when it comes to updating my blogs. But I haven't forgotten about them so don't give up on me quite yet.

We have some projects going on both inside and outside our house. Most of them are still only in our heads, but since Matts will go on vacation next week we'll have more time to actually get started. First we (that is Matts) will work on the walls in the living room. We already have bought the new wallpaper but before we (that is Matts) can put it up we (!) need to tear down the old, structure one. Hard work, but it shouldn't be impossible.

What we have done is some work in the gardens, both front and back. But we have lots of plans for these parts as well.

The first picture shows that some flowers, in this case geraniums, really can make a big difference. We still only have our small balcony table that we bought in Lund, but for next year we plan to buy a bigger table with a sofa and two chairs to go with it. If we are lucky, we'll find it on sale later this summer.

The second picture shows our front garden. The flowerbeds really need some work and the lawn is not as green as we want it to be. But in a couple of weeks we will do some work on the lawn and the flowerbeds will be upgraded as soon as we have time and energy for it. At least our front garden is not the worst in our area (luckily, this is Sweden and not Switzerland!).

Thirdly you can see our letterbox that is almost buried under our spiraea... We have a brand new pillarbox that we (that is Matts again) will install probably during next week. Eventually we'll do some work on the spiraea as well.

On the fourth picture you can see our jungle, aka back garden. Matts already did some work there, taking down some Alpine currant shrubs that had really gone crazy. They are already coming up again (you can see them in front of the "log") and will probably become a quite nice hedge when taken care of. But there's still much to do. We have some beautiful flowers; a sweet pink peony (that's now owerblown) and a gorgeous red rose (that you can see in the background) as well as both rhubarb and strawberries. But we also have lots and lots of weed that needs to be taken away... The plan is to plant more berries and stuff along the white wall; American blueberries, blackberries and red currant, as well as work on the lawn parts here too.

As you understand, we have quite some work to do - and this is not talking about everything we want to do inside as well. We try not to be totally stressed out about everything and focus on the things that we can do right now. Not everything will come true this year, but we plan on staying here for a while, so there's really no rush. Except when it comes to the so-called doorstep to the left: it's really dangerous and the plan is for Matts to build a new one as soon as possible.