Winter vibes

For a while we thought that spring is already coming, but the last days showed us that the winter stays with us still for now. It has been snowing a lot and the days have turned colder, but luckily there's a lot of light already this time of the year. The squirrel above couldn't find his acorns underneath the snow, so it's stealing food from the birds - a daily routine. We are doing lot of things here, only not renovating. Actually we enjoy the situation pretty much, altough there's a lot of renovation work still waiting for us. This post is about our winter here, how beautiful the surrounding nature can be. One of the most stunning winter sights are the misty winter days. There's just something mesmerising about fog. The sun is at the day time so warm, that it melts some of the snow and at night everything freezes again. Here has been quite slippery lately. Two impressive sights in our forest are the sun and the river. The light is stunning, when the sun shines low just above the horizon through the trees. Water in our river keeps always flowing despite the coldness and the ice above is creating beautiful pieces of art. Yesterday we visited the town Karkkila and the lake Pyhäjärvi. The wind had created fascinating textures on the snow. We made a little walk through the lake. This was the most beautiful day of the year so far. The snow, the light and the wind created this illusion. From the near the snow looks like ice mountains in a snow storm. Really cool! If the days are continuing like this, please winter stay still for a while and show the best of you! These days are not giving so much motivation to renovate, we just want to go out and enjoy the sun and snow. We swear, that in the next post we have something to show. Till then, enjoy the beautiful views!

Further with our floor

Slowly we are getting further here. The latest achievement was the finishing of the basement floor. Our goal is to have the working spaces finally ready. In November the lights and rails for electric cabels were installed. In December we finished the air ventilation system, but after that the rooms have remained empty and the floor has been left as it was after the concrete casting. We decided to have an epoxy coating, because it is fast, inexpensive and stable solution. First step was to grind the floors to remove curing compounds, sealers and laitance. This makes the floor clean and even, so the epoxy will attach well and create a good surface. We rented a grinding machine for one day and went through all the floors - office space, workshop and the hallway. After five hours and a lot of sweat the work was done. After vacuum cleaning the dust the work with epoxy was ready to begin. We started the work with transparent epoxy. The process was like painting the floors, but in a certain time. After mixing the two components we had about 40 minutes to work. We mixed always only a little epoxy at once to make sure, that we will make it before the epoxy turns hard. We painted the floor twice, but the result wasn't pleasing. The floor had turned yellowish. We decided to make one more layer to fix the floor, but with transparent cold grey from Teknos. All the layers had to be done in 24 hours after making the last one, otherwise the floor needs to be sanded again. Tobi built these spike shoes for epoxy work, that it's possible to walk on it while painting. They did their job well. We like how lively the color turned out. In some parts can be seen more gray and in some the original color of the concrete. We are not so sure about the shiny surface, but we decided to let it stay like this at least for now. On the photos can be also seen two of the doors, which we repaired. They are both originally from here, still a bit work in progress. We are about to paint them in some point. This was a tiny update, how we are doing here. Today we celebrate in Finland the day of Friendship and that's why we want to dedicate the dusty heart above to all our friends. Many hugs and thank you for reading our blog.