Home Sweet Home

Last week we (myself and my three roommates - Zohreh, Marzi and Jin) moved into our new apartment which is in a complex owned by the company StudentStaden. We had at first not expected to be able to move until Monday, September 3rd (because September 1 fell on a weekend) but the old tenant was out early and we were able to get keys.

Moving was relatively uneventful although it's outrageously expensive here to rent a van to move furniture - 800 SEK (or $120 Canadian) for 4 hours and the companies are sticklers that you must have it back right on the dot when your four hours is up.

As mentioned in an earlier post delivery of my items was included for free but believe me I paid for it psychologically! As I'm sure many of you know sofabeds weigh a ton and the day that we moved was drizzly and miserable - plus we are up a flight of stairs (no elevator). The Swedish approach to transporting the heavy bed was to split it into two pieces - the sofa frame and the mattress inside. But even this was very awkward to get into the apartment as there are several tight turns on the way to my room and the doorways seem exceedingly narrow (taking the doors off of several of them was required).

Altogether it took the two guys doing the moving almost an hour to get my three items (wall cabinet, sofabed and secretaire) up the stairs and assembled (the sofabed had to be put back together). One of the guys told me that the shop has decided that they will no longer sell sofabeds because the delivery is such a hassle. As I expected the sofabed is really too big for the room - when it is unfolded the room is all bed - but so be it. I am very happy with my room although its location off the kitchen means that I have had to be a bit strict and ask for a cessation of activities (cooking, kibbitzing and the like) by 10:30 pm at the latest on weeknights. This is a bit tough on my roomies who tend to eat rather late (by my standards) but it's all part of living together right?

View from my room into the closet I share with Zohreh - pre-furniture arrival

View out the window looking north

The secretaire and other odds and ends (Zohreh gave me the candelabra which she was going to throw away saying it was too 'churchy' for her taste)

The room-dominating sofabed

View into the kitchen

Kitchen is big enough for table, couch and my cabinet

Another view from the 'galley' part of the kitchen - yes, the stove is weird - it has only three burners (which one of my Swedish classmates remarked is not typical for Sweden at all)
Fat Ball Frenzy

I love birds and the tree outside our window seemed like a great place to hang treats for them. So I bought fat balls (yes, that's really what they are called, it says Fat Balls in English right on the package), hung them out and was quickly rewarded with a non-stop parade of birds squabbling over them and reducing them to forlorn looking empty-nets in no-time. So far we've only had four kinds of birds actually eating from them - blue tits, great tits, tree sparrows and house sparrows. I'm hopeful that we might get something more exotic in the future - grosbeaks or crossbills would be wonderful as would some of the other finches. But even watching the common birds is very enjoyable - their fluttering of wings and puffing themselves up to convince other individuals to let them feast on the ball solo and the way they line up on the branches looking like an orderly queue of Swedes waiting their turn for customer service is great fun to watch as you linger over breakfast or a cup of tea.

A great tit enjoying a fat ball



A blue tit waits his (her?) turn for a go at the fat ball

All Bed!

Just a couple of pictures to prove that my room becomes basically 'all bed' when my sofabed is unfolded for the night.

View looking toward the head of the bed



View looking toward the foot of the bed

Goofy design

Lest you think everything in Sweden is elegantly and thoughtfully designed I present to you some of the more puzzling and irritating design faux pas (at least that's how I think of them) present in our apartment. And, let me just have a moment here to rant in a 'first world problem' fashion - although I am very, very happy to have found a place to live it does disappoint me that I've come all this way to study in a city with a rich and colourful history and many beautiful old buildings and ended up living in a 70s box with about as much character and architectural quality as a prison (and significantly less than Wilkinson Road Jail I'd say). Okay, end of rant.





First up is the stove - three burners? Really? A couple of Swedish people have told me this is not typical and certainly Gunnel's place in Flogsta had a 'normal' stove with four burners but as far as I've seen every flat in this complex has a stove with three burners. Basically it means that each person has to cook on their own since usually when you cook a meal you need at least two burners - i.e. one for the pot containing the water for the pasta and the other for the pot containing the sauce. Makes for a very inefficient bottleneck when everyone wants to make a cooked meal.





Ahh, the refrigerator. Barely bigger than what I would call a bar fridge in Canada. We each have a shelf (mine is the top, then Zohreh's and then Marzi and Jin's together) and the shelf above the crisper drawers and the drawers themselves are kind of a free for all. The door is also not 'divided' into territory. The freezer is about the same size but has drawers instead of shelves which is actually worse since it makes it harder to jam stuff in. Maybe if we were a normal family (i.e. mum, dad and 1.5 kids) this space would be adequate but with four adults it is way too small. There is ample cupboard space in the kitchen and I think that the landlord should consider replacing one of the cupboards (or the weird space - see below) with at least another fridge or ideally another fridge and freezer.





What is this weird space about? As you can see it has a wooden chopping board just underneath the counter and rails for another one a few inches below that. Jin's theory was that perhaps it is for old people (did he mean me?) who might like to sit down when they're chopping vegetables. All I know is every time I look at it I think that it should have either a fridge or a dishwasher in it (though it has neither electricity or plumbing connections). Theories? Anyone?







And now for the pièce de résistance - the bathtub. The tub, which is otherwise quite adequate, does not sit in an enclosure smack up against the wall as I am used to from Canada and other places I've been either in people's homes or hotel rooms (like the UK or the United States). Instead it is in its own freestanding metal enclosure with a gap of about an inch and a half between it and the wall. This means that any water you slop over the wall side while bathing or showering goes onto the floor and because of further illogical design it seeps over to the floor on the other side of the tub where you step in it and track wetness all round the bathroom. Most frustratingly this seems to happen very slowly so that if you have the bath mat down while you are bathing it stays dry (except for your footprints on it when you get out of the tub) but if you go back later you'll see that a puddle has formed in a different spot.

This is further aggravated by the abbreviated shower curtain - what's the point of one that doesn't go all the way round - though I suppose we could buy another. And also you have to hold the shower wand because the holder for it that was on the wall was too high and the hose wasn't long enough to reach. Fortunately the sauna room in this apartment complex has two beautiful showers with proper 'handsfree' shower heads - I often go over there and take a shower when I don't feel like grappling with this whole dysfunctional bathroom. Oh yes, the final photo - the tub is not properly plumbed in but instead the outgoing water flows into a hose which then goes through this drain in the floor. Ick!

Anyway, enough complaining - following are some photos of the lovely fall foliage around the apartment complex. I guess the Swedes can't take any credit for that but it sure is beautiful.







6 comments:

  1. happy house-warming!
    cheers, mm

    ReplyDelete
  2. So nice to see that you have got yourself a nice place and roommates! Warmest greetings from Flogan!
    Kristina

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm not sure that I've ever seen tits (birds) before but the great tit sure looks beautiful!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Kristina - thanks for the greetings! I miss Flogsta although it is lovely to be within shorter walking distance to school. I do so much prefer jogging in Flogsta where I can be in the forest within a few minutes whereas around here is so suburban. Rebecca - we don't have any tits (birds :-) ) in Canada but they are common in Europe. Although I guess that isn't strictly true since we have bushtits. Also many of the other tits that are on the page of my bird book that contains the great tit look very similar to chickadees to me (and I see that chickadees are indeed part of the Paridae family which includes tits - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-capped_Chickadee)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Susan, in 2003 Dave & I spent a year living in Montpellier, France, a university town. We discovered, to my chagrin, that 'unfurnished' really does mean 'unfurnished' for renters. The place we ended up renting came as follows: no light fixtures at all - wires were literally hanging from the ceiling; no appliances at all - we had to buy a stove, fridge and washer; etc. Turns out that this is the usual situation for renters in France. Harsh!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Yes, I've heard that about France. I am mostly pretty happy with the apartment but had expected a higher degree of design esthetic from the Swedish :-).

    ReplyDelete

Keep it friendly please!