Hello…?

Anyone still out there? 🙂

It’s been almost 6 months since my last post. It doesn’t feel like 6 months has passed, but I just read through my previous posts, and indeed last time you guys heard from me, I was battling the harsh Scandinavian winter, living in a tiny camper in my garden. The last couple of days has felt like summer. It’s been warm and sunny, and this is my favorite time of the year!

Status on the project

Here we are 6 months later, and we’re now (once again) BACK inside of our actual house!

It has been a mad rollercoaster of a winter, you guys! I don’t even know where to begin…

We moved into our “tiny home” on November 28th 2023, and for the past 6 months it feels like I’ve been working two jobs. One as a construction worker and one as my regular job (I work in IT for those of you who should have forgotten 😛 ). I’ve been getting up at 6AM in the morning to go work in the house. I’ve been a carpenter, a mason, a plumber and an electrician. Looking back it’s all a little blurry right now to be honest – luckily we have ALOT of pictures as proof. Proof that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger (maybe). At least that’s the mantra we’ve been citing to each other on the days where we felt like giving up.

For a while we had this ongoing thing where we would get up (roll out of bed) and put on our “construction clothes”, look at each other and say something along the lines of: “So, which compromises are we going to have to make today to move forward?”. It seemed like every time we’d get to a new phase, compromises would have to be made. When you’re the project manager of your project, you’re the one who’s responsible for finding solutions in the 11th hour – solutions that might not be perfect, but they’d be “good enough”.

We’d hired specialist to do major parts of the project, like new sewers, new concrete floors and underfloor heating, install new windows and build new bathrooms (including brand new plumbing, of course) and new electricals. But everything in between has been up to us to solve, and I can tell you that it has been no small task.

“Luckily” my wife was fired in December (yay!?), so her main job for the past 5 months has been to oversee and manage the builders – and that has been a fulltime job! She got 5 months severance, so that worked out perfectly!? 😛 She had been unhappy with her job for a while, so it was kind of a blessing in disguise. There is no doubt that things would not have turned out the way they did, if she had also had to tend to her regular day job. My wife is an excellent project manager. But there has been many tough days on the “build site” for the past couple of months. Many frustrations with workers that didn’t show up, or didn’t deliver what they promised.

It’s funny how I recall a lot of frustration during especially the first part of the “rebuild”, but I don’t remember any major details of the past couple of months (huh!?). The sewer workers were really an odd couple of guys that you felt like you had to keep an eye on every minute, or they were going to break something or fuck something up. It took them 2 weeks to finish laying down new sewers, and it was probably the most stressful two weeks of the entire process. – Until of course the next two weeks presented itself, in where we had to prepare insulation on the floors, because the concrete guys were supposed to start on the new floors. A lot of late nights were spend in the “sand” trying to make the bloody dirt under floors as straight as possible. We did most of it ourselves, but out of frustration and lack of time we ended up paying a worker €400 for 2.5 hours of work – just to get the job finished.

Then the concrete guys came – or actually, they didn’t. 5 days delay. Then they finally came, and two guys finished the whole house in 1 day. But as it turned out, they were supposed to have been 3 guys on that job. The result: a very uneven sub-floor. Definitely not something that we could lay a wooden floor on top of. After 2 more weeks of waiting on them to “come fix it”, I gave up and fired them. I then had to go find another guy who could finalize the other guys’ half-assed attempt at creating an even floor… And then from there on out it just continued with delay after delay. Problem after problem. All of which I can now say that we have overcome. And while I’m fully aware that this is a huge cliché; I do believe we’ve come out on the other side of this, stronger than when we began. We’re certainly a lot more knowledgeable about the process of doing a total renovation!

Would we do it again?…Not anytime soon 😛

And in all fairness, we’re still far from finished. Our house currently only has 1 internal door (the main bathroom door – the 2nd bathroom is still not fully done 🙁 ) and we’re missing the standard trims here and there. We’ve yet to install any storage cabinets, so all of our stuff is still sitting in a container in our driveway. But our daughters room is almost finished (just missing a door 😛 ), and the kitchen is pretty much complete too. We’re making slow progress every day, and it’s becoming a home little by little. So far we’re happy with the result. Whether the actual value of the house corresponds to the amount of money (and effort!) that we’ve put into it, we don’t actually know yet. We’d like to finish it completely (or 95% at least) before we go to the bank and ask for a new appraisal. Not that we need it, really – it’s just nice to know!

I know you guys love to look at photos, so here’s a few from the process!

Status on the finances

Unfortunately (as I fully expected before we began), we’ve blown past the reno-budget by a mile or two. The sewer work and the plumbing has been more expensive than anticipated, and just a lot of small items that add up – like buying new electrical sockets, and faucets, and doors, and floor board trim and so on and so on… I know it’s very uncool for someone with a personal finance blog to not have 100% control over the budget, but it’s just been too vast a project to control the spending – and like the example with the €400 2.5 hour floor job, we’ve had to pay for experts to come in and do some work, simply because we needed to finish that part in order for the next step in the process to begin. We’d been planning to install the wooden floors ourselves, as it’s something we’ve actually done before, and would normally enjoy – but we simply don’t have the time to do it. We wanted to get out of the tiny home asap. Not because we didn’t like living there (we actually kind of enjoyed it), but because it was a huge strain on our financials. We’ve paid about €2,000 per month (on average) to live in our own garden! We simply needed that money to go back into our household budget, to pay for some of the materials for the house. So we paid a carpenter €2,400 to install the wooden floors.

Our renovation account is now negative, basically. Which means we’ll have to spend the next couple of months re-stocking the cash stash. We probably won’t hit 0 again until the end of the year. THEN we can re-start the FIRE project (hopefully).

How do I feel about that? Well I don’t like having overspent, but there’s no point in crying over spilt milk. You live and you learn 🙂

Also, my wife is going to have to find herself a new job (not that she want to – she’s truly enjoyed not having to go to work for a while – but it’ll be tough without her income). Until she does, it’s going to be a bit uncertain how our finances are going to look. We’ll be ok, but there’ll be no fancy vacations this year that’s for sure!

I will do a complete financial update on the entire project (cause I know you guys love them graphs), once the dust has settled (pun intended!).

Status on my well-being

For those of you who’ve followed my journey, you know that I was very anxious and nervous about this whole project to begin with. It became a little easier with time, but there has certainly been times where I wanted to throw in the proverbial towel in the ring. I’ve wanted many times to just leave (and go where, Nick?!). But see that’s the thing, where would I go? I didn’t have anywhere to escape (I could go to work – which was actually a blessing sometimes, just to get away from all the noise and dust and the problems).

I’ve not had time to go to the gym, and that has started to affect not only my form, but also my mood. I’m looking forward to get back in the gym very soon! My motivation to get back in shape has not been higher for a long time (it’ll fade soon, for sure 😛 ).

I’ve been sick for weeks during the winter (but that’s pretty normal for me), however I’ve been battling a really annoying cough for months now. It’s at the point where I’m almost considering going to the doctor (almost – it’ll probably solve itself out over time, right?! 😛 ).

Anyway, I know that I function well when I have a set amount of tasks that can be achieved in 1-2 days. My wife is good with juggling multiple tasks at the same time – I’m not! I like to get up in the morning, knowing that I have 1 main focus – like eg. to finish X or Y. If you ask me about Z you’ll get a non-answer, as my brain has yet to reach that part of the equation – I have to solve X and Y first! This is somewhat frustrating to my wife, but that’s the way I function! I’ve tried to improve on this, but if I’m being completely honest, I don’t think this process has changed me much in that regard – I still work very sequentially 😛

See you soon! (probably not…)