homeownership
aardvarchaeology | April 23, 2009As a scholar working in an abstruse subject I live a life largely divorced from what concerns most people. We have no newspaper subscription. I really don't have much of a clue. But I am aware of the poor state of the world economy. Now, how has it affected me so far?
The only effect of the financial crisis on my life that I am aware of is that the mortgage my wife and I took out in December is absurdly cheap. We currently pay less per month to live in a 114 sqm house than we did last year to live in a 80 sqm apartment.
In the long run, it seems the crisis will have both good and bad effects…
aardvarchaeology | March 30, 2009We recently installed an air source heat pump to heat our house. If you heat yours with electricity from the grid, and if the structure isn't divided into many small rooms, then a heat pump will cut your power consumption so dramatically that the whole $2500 installation pays for itself in two years. And power consumption equals environmental footprint.
It's quite a fascinating technology, and friendly to the environment too as long as you don't rupture a pipe and release circulation fluid. You know a fridge? An air source heat pump makes your house into a fridge turned inside out.
Heat is…
aardvarchaeology | January 19, 2009
My experiments with the wifi installation in our house and the excellent Bredbandskollen TPTEST bandwidth tester (mainly for machines in Sweden) has taught me a few interesting things about wifi.
Your operating system may report the quality of the connection in percent or columns or somesuch. This is not directly proportional to the actual bandwidth you're getting. One percentage estimate may correspond to a wide range of bandwidth figures.
The bandwidth of a wifi connection is extremely sensitive to obstacles such as walls, doors, even waste paper baskets.
I started with the access point…
aardvarchaeology | January 16, 2009After a bit less than a month's wait our new house is finally on-line! The winter of our off-line discontent dissolvèd made glorious broadband summer. So far only at 11 Mbps when we were promised at least 12, but the ADSL modem isn't currently on the first phone socket, so I hope to eventually be able to squeeze some more bandwidth out of the setup.
I now face the slight problem of how our desktop machine will interface with the modem in the long term. I was planning on going wireless to eliminate cables, but so far the USB dongle I bought for the purpose isn't working very well. When it…
aardvarchaeology | January 2, 2009The houses in our new neighbourhood are clones of one basic design: an L-shaped single-story structure with a fenced yard inside the angle of the L. The main entrance (1) is on one of the L's outer long walls. The grubby-boots entrance (2) is on the gable adjoining the wall with entrance 1. Finally, there's an entrance from the yard (3) which in many cases is fitted to be unlocked only from the inside: it's how the architect intended us to reach the yard from inside the house.
Our particular specimen of this design only has entrance 3, combining the functions of all three entrances from the…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2008
Today marks Aard's second anniversary. I'm still having fun and hope you are too! Looking at October and November, the blog had about 950 unique readers daily and was ranked #24 out of 74 blogs on Sb. I recently updated the Best of Aard page for those of you who want to check out some past goodies.
For much of these two years I have bragged in the left-hand side-bar that Aard had the highest Technorati rank among the net's archaeology blogs. This is no longer so, and the main reason is that I have stopped hosting blog carnivals. Technorati ranks a blog according to the number and quality of…
aardvarchaeology | December 18, 2008
Very timely, a friend told me that his ex-employer is getting rid of furniture. We have enough for about 90 sqm, which leaves us with 24 sqm to furnish in the new house. So, I took the opportunity to grab a 1940s mahogany laminate table with six matching chairs and a 1990s Gärsnäs solid-birch sofa.
aardvarchaeology | December 16, 2008
Here are two snaps of my new home, taken just after breakfast today (the first bread I've baked in the house!). Both are taken toward the north: one from the kitchen door toward the dining room, the other standing just west of the dining room and looking down the length of the living room.
Note:
Many Swedes hang a star-shaped lamp in their windows during December. It harks back to the star of Bethlehem but is really just a feeble attempt to alleviate seasonal affective disorder (cf. our celebration of St. Lucy).
The semi-assembled book case ended up like that because I haven't found the…
aardvarchaeology | December 15, 2008I'm typing this on my smartphone while digesting an evening meal of ramen noodles, egg and Chinese Sauerkraut from the tin. I'm in our new house. It's a mess, boxes everywhere. My wife is having a foot bath. Juniorette is playing with legos in her room. Both are singing in Mandarin.
Yesterday a crew of about fifteen friends & family moved our stuff here -- many thanks guys! I am very proud to have so many good people in my life whom I can rely on.
Today my wife and I skipped work and spent the day getting things into order. I've done some washing and assembled two book cases and a high…
aardvarchaeology | December 12, 2008
After a bit more than seven and a half years, we're leaving our apartment on Burbot Street and moving to a 114 sqm house on Shroud Street. Fisksätra's four main housing areas have street names themed for fish, fishing gear, boat details and sea birds respectively. I've lived on Carp Bream Street and Grayling Street before. Spent most of my young manhood in those three apartments. And now Junior deserves a room of his own and my wife wants a corner for her easel and a few flower beds. Me, I want... I don't actually want anything I haven't already got (except a uni job). But I look forward to…
aardvarchaeology | September 13, 2008
For the past ten years, I've lived with my family in rented apartments in a 1970s housing estate that covers the erstwhile infields of the poor tenant farm of Fisksätra. Yesterday, my wife and I signed a contract to buy a 114 sqm house on one of the surrounding hills, Båthöjden, "Boat Hill"!
We need another bedroom for our 10-y-o, and we calculate that it won't be all that much more expensive to pay a mortgage on the house than it would be to rent a four-roomer instead of our current three-roomer. The main proponents of buying a house have been my dad and my wife. My conditions were that…