As many of our latest weekends, this one was also filled with packing down the house. We did that friday evening and most parts of saturday. When it was 16.30 it was time for a coffee break, an idea is burned in my head. But I didn’t know how Fredrik should react (he knows that I sometimes can come up with really crazy ideas ?)
I came up with the idea to go to a hotel, just for the night and enjoy a room without moving boxes and packing. Normally you check in around 15.00 but now the time was already 16.30 ?
Both my husband and Junior really loved the idea, so we called our favourite hotel and checked if they had any rooms left, talk about luck, they managed to get us the LAST available room for the night and it suited us just perfect. We would’ve passed if it was a smaller room but this was really nice.
Me and Fredrik thinks that this is the same room that we had our wedding night in ?
Junior didn’t wanna spend all the afternoon in the room so we went down to the restaurant and ordered him a nacho-plate (and yes it’s apple juice in his glass)
After that we just wanted to enjoy the room and our beautiful view, so we ordered dinner through roomservice, and some of us (junior) used the bathtub and all the other things that the room had to offer, like snickers and coke from the minibar, one of the most expensive pieces of chocolate that I have bought in a while ?
Me and Fredrik enjoyed being away from our moving boxes for a while.
As the time between idea -> going to the hotel was like 20 minutes we didn’t pack much stuff at all. So roomservice was a perfect fit for us, so we could still chill in our ”work-clothes” for the day.
The day after we had great hotel-breakfast and a sleep-in before we went back home and back to ”work”. It was a really wonderful adventure and break from all the normal stuff that we do.
My father-in-law was back and picked up a lot more stuff that we are giving away, so nice !
We can really feel like we are getting closer now, the house is more and more empty, and more of the stuff is packed and ready for the trip to our next place.
As I told you in a previous post, we have bought a new camera, that both records and take picture in top-quality. We already have a great camera but the plan to record our journey to Portugal and perhaps release some material here requires a different type of camera. Our old camera is far too heavy to hold when you record.
We also need nice pictures to our instagram account ? you can find it here if you have not seen it before @motportugal.se
Junior got very excited when we talked about the idea and he really wants us to be a vlog-family. It seems like everyone in his generation knows a lot more about vlogs then we do ? but I didn’t know much about it before he explained to me that it’s like a blog but with video ? The eight-year old son teach his mom modern expressions ?
Junior starts by recording a lot of gaming videos as soon as the camera arrives ? (who really think it’s fun to watch other people play? ?) It’s really popular nowadays with gamers and gaming videos ? I also learned that they tend to have really weird names when Junior showed me some videos ?
I just have to add that his own videos are not posted anywhere as we think he’s a bit too young for being online.
But he’s a talent infront of the camera, not shy at all like his parents. The other day he was going to record a fortnite challenge (I think that’s the correct name), I didn’t know what Fortnite was ? as it’s not played in this house, but Junior quickly saved mom from the stone-age and got her back to the 21th century ?
He wants to record everything by himself and so he did this time too, he missed that the camera got a lot more than fortnite dancing ? checkout the video and find out what I mean ?
I really love his face expression when it happens, and then he continues to dance like nothing ever happened, he didn’t call his mom when he happened, the reason for that ? The content of the glass fell right down into a bag with towels so the juice ”just went away” ?
I know it’s a lot of pictures of bubblewrap and moving boxes now at the blog, but that’s what we do most of the time when we are free. I can guarantee you that we will take pictures of any other activities that we do so you get some variation ?
Worth to mention is that we actually have a really fun time doing this together, often together with our pretty lame but funny humour ? But most of all we know what the reward is and we look forward to that soooo so much !
Fredrik and me went to the recycling plant (again) and threw away a big load of garbage, so big that I couldn’t fit everything I wanted ?
so I gladly sacrificed some legroom to fit the two last bags into the car (clothes that was given away) ? perhaps not the most comfortable seating but clearly worth getting rid of two more bags ?
I’m FINALLY done with the bubblewrap! We have taken a pause now, me and the bubblewrap, for a indeterminate time. It became a big bunch of cute little packages that are going to go with us through Europe, a bit more packages then we calculated but ok … ? We really don’t want any of these boxes to get lost, it contains a lot of memories and inherited stuff, sending boxes via logistics companies has always worked very well but I would bet that the first time a box is lost is when we send irreplaceable, inherited memorabilia. ? Doesn’t feel like a good idea so we will bring them a long in the car when we go.?
The plans for a roof box is on the way, I think it will give us the extra space that we need ?
Junior was free from school one day this week, called ”Study day” in Sweden but we didn’t do much of that ? we spent the first part of the day together in bed, reading a book, playing some games and just enjoying each others company ❤ in the evening it was time for soccer practise.
The rest of the evening was celebration and good food thanks to a very successful meeting during the day, a meeting that can change our future.
It was celebrated with good food, some very nice flowers and lovely company ❤
When this post is uploaded it will be weekend and by then we know what’s on the schedule, more packing ?
We have invested in a new camera so we are planning on recording our trip through Europe, I asked on Facebook yesterday if that is something our readers want to join and watch? Both me and Fredrik is not really comfortable infront of the camera ? so please comment or Like this post if you want us to record our trip and release here ? So we know if we should start preventing our stage fright now already or not ?
After all the bubble wrap yesterday we decided to get away from the house a little bit, a good friend of ours told us that we need it sometimes ?. We don’t think about it while we are in the middle of everything, we try to take any free time to work with the packing and that leaves us stuck at home very often.
We decided to treat ourselves with some good food, so we went to Söderköping and a fantastic china restaurant, I’ve been there before, I was not very impressed by either the food or the service, but it was a couple of years ago and we’ve picked up some take away since then which we really enjoyed so we decided to give them another chance.
We don’t regret it, we couldn’t decide for one dish per person so we ordered a few more that sounded really good ? The waiter looked sceptically at us and explained that it will be a lot of food but we went forward with it ? look how delicious it looks.
The food came in very quickly and it was really well-cooked and tasty ? A lot of food on the plates and the best of all, it tasted very good. The service was awesome and the nice staff made sure that Lukas had ice cream with caramel sauce twice ? well it’s not very often that we are at a restaurant so we had to give him some sweets ❤ It was very cozy to have a family-dinner and a break from all the packing and bubble wrap ?
One of many funny moments during the evening was when I saw something I had not seen before, at the other end of the room was a man and his wife and they sat just below a lot of lamps, but this gentleman thought the light was a bit bad ? I guess as he magically pulls out a little bag which held a pretty big, portable table lamp that was able to light up the whole restaurant ? a really clever thing ? when he was done eating he folded the lamp and put it back into the bag, brilliant ?
Fredrik took a picture of the brilliant, portable lamp but sadly the guy was also in the picture so we cannot use it here ? Instead we give you another picture of the great food that we ordered, thanks to his beautiful lamp we managed to take great pictures of the food ?
But now it’s monday and the packing is on again, I told Fredrik a couple of weeks ago that we should test-pack the car before the day comes when we are going to go our 3500 km across Europe towards our dream-house.
So when I had empties the card this morning I put some boxes in to see how many we could fit ? Fredrik didn’t really like the result ? He thought that we should be able to fit more boxes on top of each other then we could. So I sent him a proposition today, about a roof box ?. We normally keep in touch most of the day when he is away on jobs and normally it’s done via WhatsApp. I really had to save this conversation, I haven’t laughed so much in a long time, first you can see how uplifting he is but he quickly realise that we have more stuff to bring down with us, for example golf-stuff ? it will most likely not fit inside the car. So I suggest a roof box on the car, it takes a few minutes for him to think the idea through and then he realise that it’s actually a pretty good idea, as long as it’s not ugly (we agreed on that pretty quickly ?).
Sorry for only having the print screens in Swedish.
(I am the green box and Fredrik is the white one)
It feels like a long time since I laughed so much, during a couple of minutes my sceptical man goes from not wanting to have the roof box, for different reasons, to start looking for a box to buy online and then realise that he might even be able to bring his own golf clubs if we buy a box ?
Love you honey ❤ Thanks for all the laughter and smiles you always give me !
Now when the snow has finally disappeared we are back on track, we were too lazy to switch to winter-tyres on our trailer ? so it was stuck in the snow with a lot of stuff in it that we were going to throw away. It’s pretty hard to continue cleaning out the house as we are missing a lot of space in the house due to moving boxes and trash bags taking up much of the space.
Just getting to the sofa to watch tv is a hassle ? it requires a small portion of acrobatic-moves and a lot of keeping the tongue right to find the way ? We realise all the time that this can not go on, especially as we frequently has kids over for Lukas to play with and they want to watch tv and play in the house.
So last friday my father-in-law arrived and helped us empty the trailer, Fredrik and him went to the recycling plant with a big load of garbage. ? We also got rid of a lot of boxes with give-away that he took with him. The area now looks like a small ballroom compared to how it looked before ?
It’s really nice that we have a recycling plan pretty close, buuuut now I have to whine a little so if you don’t feel like reading that, scroll down..
The first thing that bothers me is the plants opening hours ? They close at 16.00 already ? How are you going to manage that when you work? Really strange when the plan is to recycle and re-use all our things in todays society, it’s a really good idea but hard to do when the plants are not open.
So now you think that they have open in the weekends so normal, working people can throw out their stuff, we thought so, but we were wrong. It was totally closed. They are only open at saturdays on even numbered weeks ? if it’s not a holy-day, then it’s closed. ? I didn’t know that you had to own a week-planner to manage to throw out some garbage ?
But it’s always good to learn something new ?They actually are open to 18.00 at Thursdays so if you can fit that into the weekly schedule you are fine. We might just call it Trash-Thursday from now on ?
Ok enough with the complaints, I’m going to show you some pictures on how far we’ve come. The cabinets are basically empty in all the rooms and the content is either given away or packed.
We are fixing downstairs and in the laundry room now. All these clothes that you have a use for here in Sweden is totally meaningless to bring to Portugal. A pair of snow-clothes is as foreign in Lisbon, Portugal as a flamingo in Sweden ? We really try to give away all the clothes we don’t keep and we hope that it can be used by someone else who needs it.
Now we have filled the trailer again with trash so we cannot throw out more stuff at the moment ? I’ve also managed to do some magic and filled our whole car with garbage bags ? So I guess I have to take another trip to the recycling plant before we go on any more family trips ?
I want to get rid of my passenger as soon as possible ?
As you all know I’m a pro avoiding bubble wrap now, it’s boring and takes a lot of time but I FINALLY faced the bubblewrap and fixed it today ?So now is a full dinnerware wrapped and packed and number two is also being wrapped, so I feel pretty proud ?
It’s a pretty original title, right? But the reason for that is that our blog is celebrating one year ? It doesn’t feel like we have been running this blog for one year already! It feels like we just bought the house and started this funny and amazing adventure.
But when we started going through all thousands of picture that we have taken we realised that it was almost a year ago since we bought our house ? We started the blog a couple of weeks before we even knew that we would buy our dream-house during our weekend trip to a beautiful Lisbon.
We really recommend that you visit Lisbon if you haven’t been there, the trip from Sweden is around 4 hours which is perfect for a weekend-trip and you can go around by foot in Lisbon, just enjoying the city and all the beautiful houses and architecture.
Or you can just grab a cab or a tuk-tuk pretty cheap ? We tried this tuk-tuk when we were in Lisbon the first time, we walked a bit too far away from the hotel and didn’t have the energy to walk back ? It might not be the most beautiful means of transportation ? but you will see a lot and it’s good for the environment as most of them run on electricity ?
When we started to work on this post we quickly realised what an amazing journey we had already done. Buying a house, getting a real-estate agent, lawyer, electricity, gas, water and making sure that we had all the necessary papers, numbers etc that we need to be able to buy a house and live in Portugal. When we think about all that we are truly overwhelmed and very happy that we come this far ❤
This picture is one of the pictures from the start of our first Portugal adventure.
Already at our first trip we fell in love with this country and we had not even seen our dream-home yet ❤ But check out this approach that Lisbon (and TAP) gave us ?So amazing and beautiful and so mighty to finally be there ❤
The bridge is called Ponte de 25de Abril, it’s so beautiful when you see it from the air during inflight but also very powerful if you see it from the ground ? If you have the luck to come in from the right path and the weather is clear you will see most parts of Lisbon when you are going to land, it’s so beautiful. You really land in the middle of the city. ?
Portugal really showed it’s beautiful side after we had checked into our nice city-hotel. Warm weather and beautiful colours. So during the next couple of days we just enjoyed all the beautiful things to see. After that it was finally time to check out some houses!
We had already researched the areas and decided on what houses and areas to look for a house in, and when we finally arrived in that area and saw this beautiful sight we were sold! ❤
The picture is taken at one of the beaches that is around 10 minutes from our house, sadly the houses we wanted to view was not what we wanted when saw them live ? but thanks to our real-estate agent that quickly understood what we were looking for showed us another house that she had found on her own. And the rest is history, we fell in love with both the house and the area directly. Then there was no choice for us ? We didn’t have to think long, this was just our house from now on.
Everything went so fast after that, from putting in an offer on the house to getting our sought-after keys to the house. Thanks to competent and helpful people (for example an awesome lawyer) around us we succeeded to complete most parts of it from Sweden.
A really mighty day! The day when we finally got our keys ❤
Ofcourse there is a big part of the journey left as we have decided to trade our planned summerhouse into a permanent home ? But oh my god how much we are looking forward to that journey too ❤ It’s been crazy, stressful and nervous during the historic part of this journey but most of all, it’s been CRAZY fun! ❤
