The renovation of our new home started in April during our trip to Germany. Perhaps new home is only a half-truth as it is on one hand our new place to be but on the other hand it is also a totally rundown apartment from 1972.

The previous owner lived there since 1976, tried to keep all useless junk in the apartment and to make matters even worse, he smoked there the entire time inside and in the end even up to 3 cigarette cartons a week! I believe now you may start to create a picture on just how messed up everything was there when we started. Sadly I don’t have pictures from before we started throwing stuff out but the several in the gallery might give you some idea how we struggled. These pictures were taken after most stuff had been thrown out and only some basic furniture was left.

I can’t give you any blueprint of the layout (sure I could draw one myself now but I am a bit too lazy for that) so I mention only the basics, 90m²/~968ft² with bedroom, children room, kitchen, bathroom, dining room, living room and most importantly for our little bunnies: a balcony.

In April we managed only to remove all the old stuff including furniture, wallpapers, carpet flooring and tiles in bathroom and kitchen. Especially the wallpapers proofed to be very hard work as nearly every room was decorated with Ingrain wallpaper, a nightmare glued to the wall…

Mother-in-law and my wife also helped a lot during the renovation process by cleaning the old radiators (there are several old cast iron ones!) and repainting them several times until they reached once again a nice white surface color. As the ceiling was very yellow due to all the smoking for so long time we had to prepare it before painting. This preparation meant we had to “scrub” the ceiling several times with a brush and washing soda until we could paint on few layers of special anti-nicotine color. At least my wife had some fun already by choosing the new wallpaper for each room with special focus for the baby room. Sadly we had not time to start put new wallpapers on the room for little Nathan as some guy still needed to fix a huge crack in the wall! (40 years ago the roof was leaking water in and that part of the wall settled a bit resulting in a crack in the wall…)

Now during our time back in Finland some professionals are installing new windows and water pipes as those two things are the original setup from 1972 and not working anymore as intended. In September we will then finally move to Germany but we will have to stay with my parents for at least a month as the apartment is far from ready. Tile and wood flooring are still missing and not to forget that there is no bathroom or kitchen yet. After all that we will have some busy time buying new furniture as we are selling most of our old stuff here in Finland to make the whole moving process a bit easier to handle.