Ingy the mad Finn

It's election time here in Finland so around the corner where I walk Honeybear every morning and evening is a row of political posters featuring mugshots of all the hopeful candidates for parliament. Going along the numerous posters for the 10+ different parties there was one at the end that made me giggle; no. 225, Heikki "Brian Ingerson" Rosti running as an independent. Heikki and Ingy look almost like twins and it makes me feel a little bit more at home here in Helsinki...even if I don't have any clue what he's on about with that YAML stuff :)

Just say "No" to wallpaper

Since my family has been sending me email asking for pictures of our new apartment in Helsinki I thought I'd save the time and effort of sending them around and typing the same thing a dozen times by putting them here so everyone can vicariously enjoy my personal vendetta against wallpaper.

The house is fundamentally very nice as it's a rather roomy 103 sq. meters [ roughly 1,100 sq. feet ] but over the years some bad choices in home improvement led to more bad choices in home improvement which is where we are now. Some day I will look back on these pictures and laugh but I'm working hard to muster the enthusiasm for fixing up this place after having done a lot of work on a house I just sold. :)

Jarkko's father, Erkki, had a professional come in and refinish the floors in the livingroom [ olohuone ], diningroom [ ruokatila ] and the bedroom [ makuuhuone ] before we arrived since the wood was exposed but in need of a sanding and coat of finish. The floors in the entryway and the office, however, remained covered by a dull grey vinyl flooring which the floor man mentioned probably had wood underneath. One evening I started ripping up the nasty grey flooring stuck to the floor with nasty grey caulk which was on top of 'wood grain' vinyl tile. What motivates people to think that fake wood-like tile is more attractive than actual wood flooring is not something I can comprehend. Sadly, the office floor had been the victim of this tile since a radiator leak some time ago had lingered on the wood and discoloured it but the entryway floor seemed intact. Jarkko and Erkki were more in favour of them buying some laminate flooring and laying it themselves but I really wanted the floor guy to come back and give us his professional opinion before giving up. They sanded and polished the entryway floor and put in a new floor in the office. It looks so much nicer and brighter and was worth the expense. Good riddance ugly grey vinyl flooring.

Every wall except for the bathrooms and the kitchen were covered with textured white wallpaper crowned with an ugly textured pastel border. I'm guessing that this was installed by someone who wanted to sell the place by covering up problems as I don't think a woman would put the same wallpaper in every room. It must have been sometime in the early 1980s when pastels like that were really popular as I keep hearing bad 80s pop music in my head every time I look at it. Die wallpaper! Die! :) Erkki found a trick to removing wallpaper on the net and we've managed to remove nearly all of it fairly easily. The downside is that it was covering a lot of fast cheap patches and such that will have to be dealt with. There are 3-4mm cracks in some spots which is fairly large, almost too large, for a house settling over less than 100 years so the cracks and other damage may be from the Russian bombing of Helsinki in 1939-40.

The baseboards are original complete with about 12 coats of paint, grey being the colour of the last coat. It's not a light grey or a dove grey it's an institutional shade of grey that you usually find in basements. They also have been abused by people with a hammer and cable tacks to run cable on top of the board which were then painted over with several coats of paint. The baseboards must go. Before spackling, sanding, priming and painting the office walls the baseboards were removed where we found some old wadded up pages of a 1924 Helsingin Sanomat newspaper used as some sort of insulation behind them. We've been looking at new baseboards which also feature a gutter behind them for phone and coax cable but if the wood for the floor was any indication I'd better start selling blood plasma on the side to help defray the outlay of cash.

One interesting thing about homes in Finland is that it is customary to take the ceiling lamps with you when you vacate a property as they aren't considered part of the building. It's a bit odd, especially if you arrived with a big dog, 5 suitcases and didn't think to pack a chandelier in your bags before you left. Jarkko's parents were immensely helpful in having a few chairs, dishes, curtains in the bedroom, a few lamps and toilet paper in the apartment when we arrived. I've been looking around at various ceiling lamps and trying to find something that will go with the hook fixture in the old building and look a lot less modern than the majority of lamps in some of the bigger stores.

So, after my camera warmed up upon its return from the trans-atlantic voyage, I took some pictures which the floorplan may help to put the overall picture of the house together.

I'll start at the front door, the little WC is on the left and the big closet is on the right, which was taken from the doorway of the diningroom. The little WC is complete with an antique toilet and an antique sink which someone painted, ceiling included, an awful dark shade of aqua. I must be fated to buy homes with the WTFWTTB until I die. The plaster and primer should be a good enough prep for the walls but I'm a little worried about the water tank since it's actively rusting so, aside from the silver rust retarding paint I have for the exterior, I'm going to try to dry out the tank at some point, scrape and paint the parts that make sense to paint unless there's a more sensible way of doing this sort of thing.

From the front door you can see the diningroom and the little archway. On the right you can vaguely see a little patch of yellow with bits of white splotches where the disco mirror array, affixed with double-sticky tape, was before I ripped them off one afternoon. I'll have to scrub the splotches with goo-gone to get the sticky bits left on the wall off before prepping and priming.

The little room from the main hallway which leads into both the dining room and the living room has a lovely old fireplace which is crowded in the photo by empty boxes and packing paper.

The dining room [ taken from the door of the kitchen ] which now contains the table from home, a door to the bathroom and panel doors to the living room. The ladder doesn't lend enough scale to show how tall the ceilings are as they are about 10 feet or 310cm high. There is also a cool little pocket closet by the window and a door to the bedroom along with the monster flat screen TV Jarkko wound up buying :) Through the pocket doors, which no longer close properly due to the layers and layers of paint that will be removed to expose the solid red pine underneath, you can see the living room piled with lots of unpacked crap and the Lord Hotel across the street.

The bedroom is much more exciting now that our bed arrived to replace the air mattress we had been sleeping rather restlessly on for a month. There is a door to the bathroom from the bedroom but the handle was removed for some unknown reason so we'll have to buy a handle to take advantage of this convenient little portal.

The bathroom/laundry has been renovated at some point and isn't all that bad. I miss my nice, large Maytag Neptune washer and dryer set rather badly as the ones here in euroland are so tiny :) I don't really need a dryer though as the climate is dry enough that clothing dries pretty quickly when hung to dry. A sauna was added on to the bathroom sometime in the 80s by one of the owners. I have to admit that I am learning to like Saturday night sauna rather quickly.

The kitchen [ Jarkko took this picture before we moved in ] was also renovated recently by the people we bought the apartment from. They took the door to the dining room off and opened it up to let the light from the window come through and closed of the door from what is now a large closet in the front hallway and installed a refrigerator and cabinets. I haven't gotten the 'zen' of the kitchen as I haven't cooked anything yet and cabinets seem to be in odd places but I like the wood, the appliances and colour they selected. I can understand why they chose to move instead of enduring months or years of moving stuff around from room to room while removing wallpaper and such. It's much easier to renovate a place before you really settle in.

The living room is spacious and reasonably sunlit when the sun is out. It'll look much better, of course, when everything is fixed up. All of the windows have a wide ledge which I may put cushions on and make into window seats. HB likes the living room even as it is :)

The office, though filled to the gills with boxes of books and other stuff, is the one room where the walls have been stripped of wallpaper, prepped, primed and painted and should get new baseboards this weekend. Erkki took the door to the small closet home with him to try stripping the paint in his heated garage to see if the wood is ok and guage how hard it's going to be to do this to all the doors in the house. I'm really hoping that it will be possible to have natural wood doors around the house.

Well, that's the new Finnish paradise. If you want to come visit us you'll have to call ahead and smuggle some tools, cheese-its and goodies into Finland via your luggage for us and Jarkko's parents :)