fub | Entries tagged with house

Our solar array is over-dimensioned for what we use ourselves. I don’t have all the numbers yet, but it seems like we produce more than we consume. Or at least: we feed more into the network than we get out. That will probably become costly from January 1st 2027, when “salderen” is ended. That allowed us to compensate our energy import with our energy export for the whole year. That’s great because in summer you have a lot of surplus, but in winter you don’t — and because we heat our house with a heatpump we use a lot of electricity in winter. But once that ends, we really want to maximise our use of electricity that we generate on our own.

One of the ways we could do that is by adding battery storage to the mix. There are now “plug-and-play” batteries available that you can just plug in that will charge and discharge from the same socket. Digital energy meters have a port that shows the current usage pattern, and you can hook the battery up to something that transmits that data so that it charges when there is a surplus of power generation and discharges when power is imported from the grid. They’re getting to a price point that I am seriously considering getting one, just a bit less than EUR 1400.

We have a “double tariff” for our energy: from 07:00 to 21:00 on weekdays we’re paying less for our energy. The idea being that on average, during the day, there’s lots of cheap solar energy available, so the price can be lower. This works out well for us, because we have a solar panel array on our roof as well. We want to use that electricity mostly ourselves, so we want to run heavy users (washing machine, dishwasher, baking and cooking) during the day as well. And we can: we both work from home. If we need more power than we generate ourselves, we import cheap(er) energy from the grid. So the battery would be best positioned for the energy consumption between 21:00 and 07:00.

And then the question becomes: how much surplus solar power do we generate on a day, and how much do we consume in the “expensive” hours? Because that’s the business case for such a battery for us.

And it just so happens that our Enphase solar array logs all the data. So I have for (most) of the year both our energy consumption and energy production per hour. (The integration with Home Assistant is not good and had lots of numbers that could not be right, so I downloaded the data through the Enphase app…)

With this data, I did the following calculations:

Let’s call the sum of the energy imported from the grid before 07:00 the “morning load” for a day;

Let’s call the sum of the energy imported from the grid between 21:00 and midnight the “evening load” for a day;

The evening load plus the morning load of the next day is the total “night load” for that day — that’s the total imported power from the grid that is the most expensive for us and thus the most interesting to get from the battery;

Let’s call the sum of the energy exported to the grid for a day the “surplus” of that day;

Because the battery has a 5kWh capacity, the “battery charge” for a day is the minimum between 5000 and the surplus of that day;

The power that we don’t have to import from the grid for a day, the “energy savings”, is the minimum between the night load and the battery charge;

The actual “money savings” is the price of the energy savings. For us, that is the energy savings (in kWh) times (the higher electricity price plus the feed-in tarriff (because we’re storing that in the battery, not exporting tot the grid) minus the price we get for a kWh from our supplier).

So now we have (almost) a full year of data to calculate with. Our savings up to date would be EUR 140. And it is all idealized, without conversion losses etc so the savings will be less. But they could also be more because the battery could also “dampen” our import from the grid during the day, even though the power has a lower price then.

But even then: with a price of EUR 1400, we’d break even in 10 years. That’s a long time, but with 6000 guaranteed charging cycles and assuming one cycle per day, that’s a lifetime of over 16 years.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: pensive

We’ve been living in the new house for 11 months now, but there were still two things that needed to be done to really complete the project. One was to replace all the windows — all 72(!) of them. It took our builder until September to do this, for reasons that are unknown to us, because it was clear when we bought the house that all the windows had to be replaced. And then he had to apply sealant to all the windows, inside and out, taking more time.

He did all the insides in a single day, which meant that the sealant of all 72 windows were releasing their solvent, which smelled strongly of almonds, all in one go in our open plan house. Luckily the weather wasn’t too bad, because we needed to keep the windows open to ventilate!

And then we had to make haste with painting the outside window frames, because it had been so long ago that anything had been done with them, and it was clear they wouldn’t hold out another winter. But of course it is impossible to find a professional painter who wants to take on a job at a weeks’ notice in October, so we had to do it ourselves.

We decided to keep the same colour scheme: bright red, deep blue and cream white. (There’s also some ochre yellow in a few spots, but that’s only inside and we will paint that over with one of the other three colours in due course.) But because the colours on the outside had already faded a lot (especially the red) we compared the “colour fan” we got from the DIY store with a doorpost inside the house. Clearly, it was RAL 3020, “traffic red”.

So we had a 2,5 liter can of paint mixed for that. But it is bright.

So we stared painting (after we first sanded, de-greased, applied primer, let that dry, sand again and de-greased again), but it became clear that traffic red is not actually the colour that was used originally. At first we thought that it would maybe darken a bit when the paint would dry? But it didn’t and the difference is visible.

So then we took a closer look at that doorpost. It seemed that someone had just re-painted only that doorpost, and had used traffic red for it! The difference is subtle enough that we never noticed, but once you’ve seen it, it’s very clear!

But that can of paint was around 300 euros, so that’s what we’ll use. I kinda like it, it’s so bright!

The second thing that needed to be done was the construction of the shed. We ordered it quite some time ago, but because of reasons, it was only built at the beginning of October. We chose thermically treated wood, a process that basically boils the sugar out of the wood. That makes it unattractive to bugs and mould, which should help keep the shed in good shape for years to come. It is 2,5 x 5 meters, so a very decent size!

We put the back of the shed towards the parking spot, so that it creates a bit of a secluded area in front of the shed. We’re not quite sure what we’re going to do with the bit of garden there — it doesn’t get that much sun, so we can’t do anything too outrageous with plants.

We had our bicycles under a tarp, which made it inconvenient to go anywhere by bike — even though the distances are very bike-able, we ended up taking the car more often than not. We’re very happy we can put the bikes in the shed now, the convenience of being able to simply grab a bike and go has already proven to reduce our car usage!

We had a lot of stuff in the house that we would store in the shed, like tools and other bits and pieces. That all took up space in the house — we couldn’t even use the extra side door to go outside because it was barricaded with boxes on the inside. So we quickly got some shelving units and started re-organising. We now have a lot more room in the house, and we have emptied some boxes that were still left from the move and put those things in their definitive place.

There’s still a list of things to be done, but all the work that we needed to hire contractors for, is finished. I can’t think of anything I would have chosen differently. We love it here.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: pleased

We’ve lived in our new house for three months now (wow, it feels both much longer and much shorter) and it’s different than living in the city — in some subtle and some not-so-subtle ways. Here are my observations:

The smaller supermarket has everything but not every variant

The supermarket we visit now is of the same chain, but a smaller variant. It has everything we are used to, but not every variant of that thing. There’s foccaccia, but two variants and not three. There’s puffed cereal for breakfast, but not oats. It’s often not a problem, but sometimes it requires some planning.

There’s less turn-over in the supermarket

When a product is about to hit it’s use-by date, it gets steeply discounted. This is much more prevalent in this supermarket than the big one we went to in the city. Fewer people buying a similar spread of products means that some products just stay on the shelves. It’s really more pronounced.

People are up and about much earlier

I go to the supermarket early (I’ll be there around 08:20) and there are many more people there than in the city. Country people start moving earlier.

Stronger sense of community

I am aware that this depends strongly on the village itself, but there is a definite sense of “we’re out here by ourselves, gotta watch out for each other.” From the start we decided we’d invest in our life here, so we went to community events. It helps that everybody knows our house — it was, after all, the children’s day care facility so all the kids went here. So we can say “yeah, we’re the people living there” and the other villagers will know where that is and be curious about us. We went on some coffee dates that lasted from 19:30 until midnight because there was a ‘click’ and lots to discuss.

This sense of wanting to know the people who live around you, and helping each other out is certainly something we did not have in the city. As cliche it sounds!

You need a car

Public transport is… not great. After 19:00 it’s impossible to get to the village by public transport. So if you have business elsewhere and you know you will come back after that, you will need a car or someone who will come and get you. The distances are such that cycling could be an option, but that’s not very attractive if it’s the heart of winter. I am considering getting an electric scooter for medium distances, but that’s something for later.

Nijmegen is, still, the closest option for a lot of things

Living here felt so good right from the start that I had expected we’d only rarely return to Nijmegen. And it feels very far, but it’s only a 30 minute drive to the city centre of Nijmegen. That means it’s still the closest place to get some goods or services. We’ve been in Nijmegen more often than I had expected.

Youngsters are confident and friendly

In the city, young people often have to carve their own space in an overfull environment, and that makes them rude if they feel they have to defend their space. Out here, there is enough space to just fall through the cracks for a while and just do your own thing. Every young person I’ve met here is confident: they do not cower or get defensive when you ask something of them. But at the same time, they are polite and cooperative.

For instance, there was that one time when a group of kids decided to play around our house: it’s a playground after all. So I went outside to tell them that we lived there, and while they didn’t run away or got defensive, they did retreat after a short conversation. And when a boy climbed on the roof of the bike shed of the school next door, I asked him to be careful, and he thought about it for a bit and then said he’d climb down (which he did).

I kinda like it.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: pensive

I hadn’t done any serious cartonnage for quite some time. So when we made a box yesterday we kind of winged it, and while I was working with the board and the linen I remembered the cartonnage lessons and what we should have done — instead of what we were doing at that moment. We managed to make an acceptable box, but we took notes to ensure the next one will be better!

I glued the five sides of the box together and then glued strips of linen on the edges — both on the inside and the outside — to reinforce them.

We used a nice chocolate-brown linen on the edges and on the outside bottom of the box. For the four sides we dipped into our (large!) collection of Japanese washi paper: this is a design based on temari balls (balls made of colourful thread wrapped around a core of cotton), with golden accents. The design is kind of muted — compared to some of the other paper we have.

The box fits nicely in an Ikea Kallax case! We have three large Kallax units to partition off different parts of the open space in our house. I really like it: it keeps the space “open” but it also serves as a partition — and it adds storage! But not everything we would store in there is fit to display proudly on the shelves. We got some baskets from Ikea, but we want to make some boxes like these ourselves. We have a large collection of super nice Japanese washi paper that we hardly ever get to use — most of it is a lot more colourful than this. So we get to store our stuff more neatly and add some colour accents at the same time!

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: creative

In the house in Nijmegen, we had a sensor that monitored air quality (CO2 concentration, humidity and temperature) that could open the roof hatch for ventilation if any of those parameters go outside of established limits (and it’s not too cold outside and it’s not raining…) It’s amazing how air quality (especially CO2 concentration) affects your mood and energy levels, so we were very pleased with it. (Especially because we got it for free…)

Of course, since that was part of the home installation in Nijmegen, it was left behind for the new owners to figure out. But I wanted to get a similar monitor set up in the “new” house too. Just monitoring initially, but by hooking it up to Home Assistant, we could add some automations in the future. I decided on this home-made sensor because it’s much cheaper than the alternatives. And while it’s possible to run it stand-alone (it even comes with a built-in webserver which shows a dashboard!), I did configure it to send data to Home Assistant.

So in Home Assistant I have three entities added: one each for CO2 concentration, humidity and temperature. I added those three to the bespoke dashboard I created for use with the mobile app. And I thought it would be fun to add “conditional formatting” like in Excel: if the CO2 concentration is below a certain threshold, the text is green, between two values it’s orange and above a certain limit it’s red — making it easy to gauge air quality a a glance.

Various online posts assured me that this was possible, but I could not find a clear-cut how-to. I had to piece things together from multiple forum posts that each provided a piece of the puzzle. (I do not rule out that I am bad at searching and/or interpreting these posts, though.) So for everyone wanting to know how to do this, I provide this small how-to.

First, you need to install the card-mod extension. I think I used the HACS installation mode, that worked fine. Now you can add extra CSS styling in the YAML definition of any card.

So go ahead and add your card — because I want to display the values I added an Entities Card and added the three Entities I wanted to track. You can do this all in the visual editor.

To add the additional styling, switch to the Code Editor with the link ‘Show Code Editor’ at the lower left of the visual editor. You now see the YAML definition of the card. After each entity node, you can now add a card-mod node to add your custom styling. For example:

type: entities
entities:
  - entity: sensor.moresense_ms05_hetadres_co2
    card_mod:
      style: >
        :host { color: {% set ppm =
        states('sensor.moresense_ms05_hetadres_co2')|int %}
                    {% if ppm < 1000 %}
                    green
                    {% elif ppm < 1200 %}
                    orange
                    {% else %}
                    red
                    {% endif %}
                    ; }
  - entity: sensor.moresense_ms05_hetadres_humidity
    card_mod:
      style: >
        :host { color: {% set rh =
        states('sensor.moresense_ms05_hetadres_humidity')|int %} {% if rh < 25
        %} orange {% elif rh < 75 %} green {% else %} red {% endif %} ; }
  - sensor.moresense_ms05_hetadres_temperature

With the card_mod and style sub-node we define the CSS style to add. I did not know the :host selector, but it points to the container that the style is included in -- so basically the container for the entity display. Everything between {% and %} is code. With the set command I set the current value in a variable, which I can then compare to the limits I have set in a series of if / elif / else statements. (I don't have conditional formatting on temperature, because that's kept constant by the thermostat, it's not really that interesting.)

I have not had reason to work with string values yet, but it will follow a similar pattern.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: pleased

I usually avoid retrospectives at the end of the year. But maybe I’m getting sentimental as I get older, or maybe this year was an outlier. I sure hope that it is, because I don’t want to have a year like this ever again.

It’s been one thing after another: getting the terminal diagnosis for my father in January, seeing how he deteriorated and then ultimately his death at the end of March. But meanwhile we had the stress of buying the (new) house, which started in February and culminated at the end of March, the day before my father’s funeral. And then there was the stress of getting everything in order for the actual transfer in May. On top of those administrative tasks, I also had to support my mother with the administrative tasks surrounding the death of my father — something that is not completely handled yet, even today. And then we had to work hard to clear out the (old) house to make it presentable for sale, in September. It is both kind of depressing and exhausting to go through all of your possessions, take then in your hand, and then decide if you are going to keep it or not. We worked so hard to make the house “empty and white”, and then there was the stress of the actual selling, compounded by the stress and sadness of losing Mikan in August. Meanwhile there was the stress of kicking off the renovation project: what will happen, when, what will the end result be, how much will it cost? And then there was the stress of packing for the move, the actual move itself, and then unpacking and finding a spot for everything. And then there’s some stuff going on with my job since October, and…

I feel like the stress and exhaustion has seeped into my bones. When I have time to rest, the exhaustion seeps out again, through osmosis, and I am just… tired again. We’re very happy in the new house, but the happiness certainly has a thick layer of sadness surrounding it. I hope that 2025 will give us some time to recover and a reason to look forward, to allow the layer of sadness to be worn away by the passage of time.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: exhausted

One of the things that needed some re-thinking was the lighting in the house. (I almost wrote “new house” here, but it’s now the only house we own, it’s where we live. Therefore: “the house”.) When we bought it, there were fluorescent tubes against the beams running the length of the space, hidden behind ochre yellow boards. That wouldn’t do, so we removed all those. We made an inventory of which wall switch worked on which ceiling connection and where the cables led — something we also needed to keep in mind when the wall for the bedroom came in! And extra isolation was put against the ceiling, so all the original standard light pots were replaced with tubes with the wires coming out. Luckily we can screw light fixtures to the wooden beams, but it required some improvisation in a few cases.

One important part of the house where we lacked proper lighting was the kitchen. The main part of the kitchen is about 2m70 long, jutting out from the outer wall into the room. It also doesn’t help that the countertop is black, so there was very little usable light when cooking. Clearly, we needed something there. But I wanted something that could be bright when needed, but more dim and ‘warm’ as circumstances allowed — to have a bit of ‘mood lighting’. This is important, because the kitchen is a large part of the space, and the lighting there affects the other parts of the space as well.

I had discussed the possibility of putting in smart lighting with my builder. He had experience with a certain platform and he showed me a brochure of it. Nice stuff, but very expensive and it required a connection to some cloud instance and an account… That does not fit my requirements: everything has to stay within my house, on my own network. So I did some research and settled on Home Assistant, an open source project for smart home. It has some integrations itself, but there is also a large community that make integrations that can be hooked into it. So one evening I took a spare laptop and installed Home Assistant OS on it. I didn’t have anything concrete I wanted to automate at that exact moment, but someone had made an integration with the heatpump we use, and the whole Enphase solar panel array was automatically discovered(!) and added to Home Assistant. Now I have historical data of power consumption, which will help in balancing our power demands in the future.

But that didn’t fix my kitchen lighting issue. For that, I got a set with a 2m LED strip, an adapter and a Zigbee controller. I also got a LED driver that I could hook up directly to the mains to replace the adapter — there’s no power socket there. And I also ordered some profiles to put the LED strips in, so it would look a little nicer instead of the ‘raw’ LED strip.

First step was to get a 2m70 lath and paint it black to go with the countertops.

We screwed the included ‘profile holders’ to the lath and attached the two 1m pieces of profile together with tape and clicked those into the holders. We drilled a hole through the lath so we could bring the leads from the underside (with the LED strips) to above, where we’d install the controller and driver.

With the LED strip installed in the profile. You can clearly see the two colour LEDs and the resistors. The set came with connectors and all, no soldering required!

The cover for the profile is milky white, to hide all the electronics and diffuse the light a bit more.

The smaller white box is the Zigbee controller. On one end it has the three leads that are connected to the LED strip on the underside, the other side has a power connector. The power comes from the LED driver that’s above the controller: 230V AC goes in at the top (we got a nice power cord for it, covered in braided fabric) and at the other end out comes 24V DC to feed into the controller. This is going to be hooked up to the fixture connector in the ceiling.

So far it was a breeze, but hanging the lath level above the kitchen, suspended from the wooden beams in the sloping ceiling required a bit more work. We used steel washing lines with a rubber covering — easy to work with, but very sturdy.

Such bright light! This is the cool white light at maximum brightness.

The work surface is illuminated very brightly, so much better than trying to cut your veggies in the dark!

We got the official Home Assistant Zigbee USB stick (which you have to connect through a USB extension cord because Zigbee uses the same frequency as wifi, which means it’ll get too much interference if you keep it close to your hardware…) and the light was automatically discovered, along with its capabilities. Here is a clip of me controlling the LED strip with my phone through Home Assistant.

But it soon became apparent that controlling it though the phone was a bit irksome. I was ready to buy one of those control panels when we remembered we still had a spare Ikea Tradfri 5-button controller lying around… Tradfri uses Zigbee as well, so connecting it to Home Assistant was a breeze. Scripting what needed to be done required a bit more work, but that’s all working now too. We have the button lying on the other countertop, ready for use. Super convenient. Here is a clip of me controlling the LED strip with the Ikea button.

We’re very proud of the result, and it’s now a pleasure to cook at a well-lit area — and then turn the light to warm and dim it a bit when the cooking is done and we want a more cosy lighting.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: pleased

After three months of intense renovations, the house had to be ready for us to move in. We had worked hard with the things we could do in the new house (putting together the kitchen cabinets, painting, some bits and bobs here and there) and also worked hard in the old house: to make it presentable for sale and to pack everything up. Friday November 29th was moving day, and it was stressful and exciting. We hired the same moving company who moved us the two previous times and it was the right choice.

Even though we got rid of about 1/3rd of our possessions, it’s still a lot of stuff if you see it all boxed up and stacked high! And because we did not have a clear picture of where things would go, for the first week we kind of wandered around in a labyrinth of boxes. But we quickly got our wardrobe, bookcases and the kitchen set up, and we could put the contents of a lot of boxes in their place! Especially the kitchen was a bit of a challenge: since the number and size of the drawers in the kitchen is different, it was a challenge (and still is!) to find the right spot for everything. And still we haven’t memorised every location: if we need something in a hurry we’ll just open every drawer in a panic… We’ll get there eventually.

We spent some time cleaning the ‘old’ house, and a week ago we had the official transfer to the new owners. It’s now officially theirs, and we have a large amount of money (or at least, it’s large to us!) on our bank account. But we also know that we’ve already used it all up in the renovation!

It felt immediately good to live here, even though it still is a bit of a mess. It’s very satisfying to gradually make the space our own, and to shape it into something that fits us. Yuzu is taking well to the space too: it helped that she found the familiar couch waiting for her, to use as her “home base”. We’re not letting her outside (yet).

Living in a tiny village has its charms: it’s much more of a community than the city. We’ve already spoken to more people here than we did in Nijmegen. We also introduced ourselves to the head teacher of the school that is our main neighbour, it was fun to look around this tiny country-side school in a relatively big building.

We’re heading into the Christmas period, with quite a few days off for me. Next to spending time with family, my goals are to rest up (these past months, and really this whole past year, has been stressful and exhausting) and make some good strides in putting everything in its place. Surely the next year will be better for us.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: exhausted

We’ll be moving in less than three weeks. Packing-wise, we’re in good shape, though there are of course still a lot of things left to pack. The renovation project for the new house is also progressing nicely — but there are a lot of details still to fill in and work to do. Some things will have to wait until after the move, but we should be able to live there with a bit of improvisation left and right.

We’ve sold the ‘old’ house, and the official transfer will be two weeks after our move, so we still have some time to clean it up and to get rid of anything we don’t want to take with us after all.

As more and more reports come in of extension authors not publishing on wordpress.org anymore, or even taking their plugins away from there, it is clear that the WordPress ecosystem is showing more and more cracks. Therefore, conversion of this blog to a static blog powered by Hugo are continuing, but I don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to it — there are some things I’ll have to add myself to the site, such as comments and the likes. It doesn’t help that I insist on hosting everything myself, without any external dependencies — but that’s part of the fun.

For some reason, cooking features quite prominently in most of the manga I am reading. One of those, Shinmai Shimai no Futari Gohan, features recipes at the end of every chapter with instructions on how to make the thing that the characters cooked in that chapter. I heartily recommend their pudding recipe — it’s certainly a lot easier and faster than the recipe I used before. And let’s face it: pudding is just a protein shake that’s been steamed!

Another fun thing I do is to see if there are vegetarian or vegan options for things I’d usually use meat for. Sometimes the approach is obvious and you’d just use a meat replacement, like for minced meat. But sometimes there’s a way to prepare something that unexpectedly turns out to be similar to meat, which opens up new applications. In that category is the recipe for shredded tofu that produces something that is, indeed, similar to shredded chicken and can be used as such. We’ve been eating it in wraps, and it’s so good! I season it with salt, pepper, smoked paprika, onion and garlic powders. I highly recommend it.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: hungry

“A rational home buyer would start with the floor plan, to see the layout and the sizes of the rooms, and only then look at the photos,” our real estate agent said. “But home buyers in the Netherlands are not rational. They start with the photos.”

The largest website for real estate in the Netherlands is funda, which is run by the largest real estate agent association in the Netherlands. You can filter on criteria (location, price range, minimum number of bedrooms, minimum size, etc.) and lots of people have a saved search with their ‘hard’ criteria — sometimes because they’re seriously looking, and sometimes just for fun! (This is also how we found our new house!) As a seller, there’s not much you can do to influence the ‘hard’ properties of your home (though you can set the asking price to either include or exclude a certain price range…). But there’s a lot you can do to influence the result.

To make a good sale, you need to get a high bid. And getting more bids means you have more choice — and if potential buyers know there is a lot of demand for the house, the bids will generally be higher. In order to get people to bid, you need to get people to do a viewing. And in order to get people contact the agent for a viewing, they need to decide they are interested. And, because most of them are not rational, they make that decision based on the ~vibes~ of the photos. The photos with our furniture, that will be removed when the buyer would get the house, etc. In fact, critiquing photos on funda is some kind of national pastime…

So to get viewings, you need to have the right photos. And the type of photos that work best, is where the rooms are mostly empty and white. Because you’re selling the space, and the furniture only serves to ‘define’ the space.

And our house is anything but empty. We complained to the agent that it would be a lot of work. He shrugged. “You have to clear out everything anyway!” And he was right.

The past three months we have been working so, so hard to present our house optimally. We have a family home with the two of us, so it was easy to acquire something and just put it somewhere it would not be in the way — so there was never any reason to clean up. But now there was a very good reason: we want to sell our house as good as possible — we have massive budget overruns in our renovation project in the new house! And we’re not quite finished, but it’s nearing completion. The appointment for the photo shoot has been made, and the viewings will be scheduled while we are away on the annual vacation on Texel.

We got rid of a lot of stuff — either through a second-hand shop, through friends, but also a lot of things were simply discarded. A lot of things had been given to us. My father was fond of saying: “Small gifts keep friendships lively” and while that is true, his favourite type of small gift were cheap sets of tools. Always useful to have a set of screwdriver heads, but we probably do not need seven… And there were also some things we inherited from grandparents, great-aunts and uncles. Some of it is very nice, like a set of gloves and matching handkerchiefs from the great-aunt, but there is no realistic scenario where we would ever do something with them. And we don’t get the people back by storing their stuff somewhere in a dusty corner of our house… It had to go.

That’s another thing. We lived here for 19 years. Our parents helped us get settled in when we bought it: our mothers hung the wallpaper, our fathers hacked away a piece of a doorpost so the washing machine could fully open, my father-in-law helped us saw and install the stone for the edge of the pond klik dug. We’re leaving all those things behind — and while our mothers are alive today, our fathers will not place their stamp on our new house. Mikan will never explore the new house. We’re leaving a lot of things behind, though of course the memories will stay with us.

Seeing the house become more empty is a reminder that in three months, it will not be our home anymore. And after nineteen years, that is a reason for some contemplation.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: contemplative

There were some hurdles with the mortgage, as the building we’re buying is not a standard house — so the mortgage provider needed some more guarantees. But we cleared all of those hurdles, and on May 31st we inspected the property one last time and then went to the notary to sign the papers for the official transfer of ownership.

On Tuesday evening, we had an appointment with our builder at the house, at 18:00. He spent 3.5 hours with us, going through the space, discussing possibilities etcetera. We already did a few things like put up a house number — the address had changed, so there was no house number visible from the street — and putting up a mailbox.

Today, we put up some outside lights with motion sensors, as the house is at the edge of the village and there are no street lights: it’s dark there at night. Not that there is anything to steal there (yet) but we might as well get this done now.

But the most important thing we went to do there was to simulate our furniture being placed in the space. With paper painter’s tape, we put the outline of the furniture on the floor. We had prepared for this by cutting out pieces of paper to scale and populating the original builder’s drawings, but doing it in 1:1 scale really allowed us to experience the ‘flow’.

In square meters, the house is equivalent to where we live now, but our current house has different rooms with walls that you can put storage against — and we need quite a bit of storage. The mover who came to look at our inventory remarked that we owned ‘more than average’. We can thin that out a bit, but we are certainly not minimalists! But in the new house, in such a large open space, you can’t put storage without making a ‘zone’ feel boxed in. So that’s going to be A Thing going forward.

But we have also decided on all the ‘hard’ infrastructure: a completely separate bedroom and where the kitchen has to come. Everything else will be ‘soft’ and can be moved around as we see fit. Who knows, we might live there for two weeks and decide to swap things around. That flexibility really feels luxurious.

As the address of the house had changed, the fibre optic cable terminating in our house was still registered to the old address, but luckily it only took a single email to rectify that. We had decided against getting a landline again — everyone we want to call us on the landline also has our mobile numbers, and the rest are spammers. And as we’re moving out of the city, the landline number would change anyway, so it feels like more trouble than it’s worth.

What also helped in that decision was that I selected a provider for internet that doesn’t provide telephone services in our area — we’ll be getting 1Gbps for less than I now pay for 100Mbps!

But reception on our mobile phones is pretty bad in the house. So I studied the map of cell phone towers for the Netherlands, and we are indeed quite far from the nearest tower on the network of our current provider. But there are two towers for another network that are closer — so we should have better reception if we switch to a provider that uses that network. That has been initiated as well, and with number portability we’ll keep our phone numbers too.

Meanwhile, we also need to clean up our (current) house so it is fit for showings. That’s a painful process, but we’ll get through that too.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: tired

A long time ago, we took a look at a U-shaped bungalow that was for sale. Same-level living is attractive to us, and this bungalow had lots of light and space. For several reasons, we never made an offer. And ever so often I think back to it and feel regret that we didn’t at least try.

One of the national pastimes is to look at every house that’s on offer on the site of the largest real estate association, and to find the weird/ugly/special places. As an idle thing, we had created an alert for bungalows within a certain radius of Nijmegen with a minimum size and a maximum asking price, and spend every so often scrolling through the houses on offer.

And then one evening, we found a very interesting object: a former child daycare facility in a small village somewhere south of Nijmegen. It would need a lot of work to make it a home, but it ticked quite a few of our boxes: single level, large open space, free standing… Certain nice, but it would be a lot of work. And then we said to each other: “If not now, then when?”

So we called the selling real estate agent, made an appointment to take a look that Saturday (we were the first in a long line, people came even from The Hague to look at it!), arranged for our own real estate agent as back-up, went to look at the house again with him on Thursday, discussed our bidding strategy with him, arranged for a mortgage guarantee and put in our bid — a cool 31k above the asking price… The whole process was stressful, not in the least because the day our bid had to be in was the day before my father’s funeral, so we got to arrange everything for that on top of the arrangements for the funeral.

And then, the next week, we got the confirmation that our bid was accepted. Then we got the concept of the sale contract, and we had a long list of things that needed to be changed! Not in the least the fact that, if read in a certain way, the municipality could fine us 250 euro per day once we took possession of the property!

This is because the address of the house changed, as the main approach is now from the other side. The contract between the municipality and the current owner specified that they had to create a car entrance and two parking spaces on the lot within six months. If they failed to do this, the could be fined 250 euros per day. And the current owner has, so far, not created this entrance, and we would become the official owners after this period of six months had passed. We needed assurances from the seller that the municipality would be cool with us taking some time to create the entrance. That took some time, but we got that confirmation today, so we signed the contract.

It has been hellishly stressful (on top of all the other stressful things), but now the real fun starts with arranging for all the renovation work. There are quite a few things to do with lots of interdependencies between work that is done by different people. Luckily we have an excellent relationship with a builder, so let’s see what comes out of that.

The inside of the house: one big open space with enough irregularity that you can create different ‘zones’. There are some separate rooms for bathroom, toilet and storage. There’s windows on three sides and an awesome row of windows on the roof for maximum light!

The back door. You can see how the roof is split in two: in between is a row of windows to let light in from above. I like the small windows on the right side, and the little door is cute (and has a fun story to it).

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: stressed

Yesterday, usmu came over to visit — it had been a while since we had hung out together, and the last time we visited him in Utrecht. We picked him up at the train station and drove to Weurt, a small village at the side of the Waal to the west of Nijmegen. There is an old gravel pit outside of the river dike that is now unmanaged and left as a fishing spot. We walked towards the viewing platform and had a picnic lunch there. Afterwards, we walked along the river around the gravel pit before retiring home for tea and cookies and dinner.

There are wild horses roaming the area, they keep it from overgrowing. They had little foal! As we approached the two were annoying each other, but when we got a bit closer they got curious. The parent kept an eye on us, but we kept an acceptable distance as we passed.

When we returned, it was naptime for the foal. So cute.

The wisteria on our shed is happy it’s spring again — it’s growing and covered in flowers!

We hung a trellis on the side of the shed so it had something to hang on to, we might have to extend that. It makes me happy to see it grow so abundantly.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Current Mood: calm

Actually, it’s been about one month and a half since we had our air-to-air heat pump installed. Since it was installed, we have stopped using gas for heating — and what with the political situation, I’m all for reducing my gas usage in order to not fund a genocidal fascist regime. But it’s certainly different from the gas-fueled central heating we used before.

The unit is in a corner of the living room, which means that in order to spread the heat more throughout the LDK (Living/Dining/Kitchen) the fan is set to blow diagonally into the room. But that means the air stream is directly on the couch, so if we’re sitting there, we sometimes let it blow straight in the front: still comfortable on the couch, but more localized heating.

The outside unit is amazingly quiet, even at full blast. That’s a relief: I would not want to get into trouble with the neighbours over any noise. But then again, we live near the last bit of highway, so there’s always sound from there. You can’t hear the unit over that, and since it’s on the roof of our extension, it’s also not near where people are in the first place.

The thermostat works quite well. Put it on 20 degrees, and it will start heating. When the air around the unit reaches the desired temperature, the system will shut down and only start up again to keep the temperature on that level.

It’s also quite efficient: only with the really cold day on Friday did we ever go over 4 kWh of electricity used in a single day. I do not know how much gas we would have used on such a day though.

We only heated the ground floor of our house, so it was easy to just switch completely. One thing I noticed is that the rest of the house is much colder: our house was built in the 80’s, and the heating pipes are all on the walls, not inside. Which means that the hot water for the radiators would circle through the rest of the house to and from the ground floor. That is, of course, a loss of heat, but it did keep the other rooms somewhat warmer than they are now.

When you turn of the system, it starts to cool off immediately. There is no ‘residual heating’: once the flow of warm air stops, that’s it. Not a problem, but different.

Our home office is at the front of the house, furthest from the unit. That part doesn’t heat up like the rest of the LDK, but we have been supplementing with an infrared panel when needed.

Overall, it fits really well on our situation. If we wanted to heat rooms upstairs, we might have had to rely on multiple units or a multi-split system (where multiple indoor units are connected to a single outside unit), with the associated costs. As it is, it is still a hefty investment — and the price difference between gas and electricity is not such that we can expect to earn the money of the installation back within a reasonable time frame. Though if you have a lot of solar panels and produce more electricity than you use, then it might be a good way to turn that surplus into direct savings on gas.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.