The idea of weeknotes is that they’re, well, weekly. Unfortunately that idea clashes with my ability to actually be consistent, so they haven’t been and probably never will be consistently weekly.

Then I read something written by someone with a similar issue, and they solved the problem by dropping the “weeknotes” name and instead going with „Recently“. That nearly dodges the frequency issue, but also subtly implies some kind of regularity. So „Recently“ it is.

Progress on the house continues, in the sense that there’s more holes than it started (created by the electricians) and some of the holes have been filled up again (by me). The process started with ripping out the old 1970s DDR system, then involved carving new channels, threading new cables, and wiring up the new distribution board that covers an entire wall in the cellar.

It’s created an incredible amount of mess - the walls are plastered brick and despite the channelling machine being attached to a vacuum, there’s a thick layer of dust over everything. At this stage, it’s a bit difficult to see how it’s ever going to be clean again, especially as we are scheduled to actually live there in less than a month.

Drilling holes in walls did have one pleasant surprise, though - one of the old sockets was deep enough to reach back into the cavity between the two skins of brick of an outside wall, and it turns out we have cavity wall insulation. This wasn’t mentioned at all in the sales process, so I’d assumed we would have to do it and started the process of getting quotes.

I'm finding this an unusual experience - past results of poking holes in houses inevitably led to unpleasant and expensive outcomes.

Painting windows turned out to be the easiest job. We’ve inherited original 1936 Doppelkastenfenstern - they’re a classic “Altbau” feature, but because they’re two separate windows of single glazing in wood frames, lots of house have had them ripped out in favour of UPVC. That’s not as inherently sensible as it seems - the U-value of well-maintained examples isn’t much lower than average modern double-glazing. The main downside is maintenance - wood needs painting every few years.

Our new/old windows had clearly been looked after, but not in the last 10 years as the previous owners because too old to manage it themselves. I wanted to get this done before winter, so spent about 3 entire days sanding and masking and painting and then painting again.

I'm not saying I'd necessarily want to this professionally, but it turned out to be a suprisingly meditative job. There's something about sanding away the deteriorated paint, andconcentrating on the fine detail of masking, and painting neatly around the edges that makes it easy to get into a flow state.

Two take-aways from the job: having space to lay the frames out flat at a sensible working height transforms the process; and Doppelkastenfenstern are easy to work with to begin with, because you can simply lift each entire window from the frame one at a time.

Some links:

• A customisable QR code generator (which is completely client-side and therefore costless)
• Cargo Bikes Size Comparator - a neat way for getting a feel for relative sizes of different makes of cargo bikes (similar idea to carsized)
• A German-language alternative to Abebooks (who, I need to keep reminding myself, are part of the Evil Empire Amazon)