Ch. 2 - The Big Move
Our First Year at Baggebo Homestead, June 2023
As with many other moves ours was done in a hurry, and time was very short. You see, we had hoped to be able to move in a bit earlier, since we needed to be out of our little cottage at the end of the month. But we could not move in or get the keys until the 15th of June, which left us two weeks to make the house that had now been abandoned by the previous owners into a livable home.
When it comes to preparing a whole house to live in, including cleaning, painting and moving in furniture, two weeks is a very short time, and in the end we were indeed short of time. That first June seemed to pass by in the blink of an eye.
However, the month did not start out that way. Instead it started out slow and happily with a big celebration for our childs first birthday. We had asked Herlufs parents if we could throw her birthday party at their place, since ours was far away and packed up in boxes. During our stay we lived in their small camping wagon, and while the little one slept the day away, it was a lovely and sunny day, as all days seemed to be back there in June.
The day before the party, Herluf, our child and I had drove to the forest just behind our new house that we so longed to enter, but couldn’t just yet. I had the baby in her wrap tight around my waist, and we walked into the woods where old beech trees grow in circles and the little brook run just beneath them. We heard deers run off into the deep, and the baby quickly dozed off to the buzzing sounds of the summer forest.
We continued on our path that went uphill through a plantation of spruce trees and then went straight on to what seemed to be an old orchard with hazelnut trees and elderflower trees in bloom. At this point I was almost ecstatic with what the forest in our soon to be back garden had to offer. “I will be able to make so much elder flower concentrate now!” I told Herluf. “At this point I don’t really care about the house, but this forest, this feels like home. I would have bought the place just for this,” I proudly exclaimed.
The saying echoed through the next day party, and made many of the partygoers ask if they could drive by our new house on their way home from the party. We said: “Why don’t we all drive by!” Back then we were still blissfully ignorant of other’s thoughts and impressions and all we wished for was to show them what we could see: a simple and quaint house that could once become the loveliest of homes if only someone was to care for it.
I don’t think I shall ever forget the look on my grandmother’s face when the car passed the house. Usually my grandmother is very civil and polite, but looking at what must have seemed to her a house that were about to fall down, I could see the shock in her face and almost taste her distaste. “Is that were you are going to live?” she said. “Yes, grandmother,” I replied guilty.
And so we welcomed a series of many unfortunate encounters with good-minded family and friends, excited to visit us in our new place, but being distraught and confounded once they were welcomed in. Often they would try to stay polite, until at last they could not bear it anymore. You could see the worries build up in their eyes for each room we showed them, until at last, they could not bear it anymore and had to exclaim: “I would have never bought such a place that’s is for sure!” or “You have so much work to do here, it would be better to start from scratch,” or simply: “You paid way to much money when considering how much that needs to be done. No normal family can live in there!”
That’s how, when we finally received the keys to home, doubt moved in alongside us. Suddenly the charming red brick floors in the kitchen, entryway and bathroom were no longer charming, but a nuisance, impossible to clean and damp, somehow always damp, even in that first sunny June. The exposed beams where full of cobweb and the timber ceiling we once had thought of as a great addition to the house smelled of nicotine that seemed like it would never go away no matter how much we cleaned it.
We moved Herlufs parents caravan out in the plot, struggling to find an even spot where it could stand as everything was growing wildly and had been unkept for 25 years. In just 10 days Herlufs family would go on a three weeks camping trip and they would bring the wagon with them. By then we would have to have the home move-in-ready for us, Herluf had to finish his last exam in Aarhus, and we would have to have all of our furniture and boxes brought up from Aarhus.
We did not go into the task lightly, but had divided our efforts the best we could. I had a plan, you see, to only focus on one room. The bedroom. It was one of the easiest room as far as I could tell, and it would allow us to have a clean and proper space where we could relax and the child could sleep and play in peace of dust, wet painting and electrical tools.
Our days started early, with our little one rising by 6 o’clock, and we would not stop working until nightfall, sometimes late in the early morning too, as our child had a peculiar sleep pattern where she would often rise at about 3 o’clock in the morning and go back to bed at 6. In those hours too, Herluf worked, and I looked after the child.
Luckily we had help from our families almost everyday in that very first month. With our fathers Herluf managed to install a door into the bedroom, where there had not previously been one. I had sourced some doors that were appropriate for the home’s age and that fit the best I could into the opening that was already there. Our mothers helped us clean the whole room, wiped the ceilings down and scrubbed the floors, and we painted. Before the room had been green, but now our sisters had painting them stark white, and the light from the south facing windows were bouncing in the room once again. Herluf himself worked away at a running soot-covered chimney and I chose a dark deep blue to paint it.
The old piano that, as far as we could tell, had been there since the house had first been built 100 years ago was cleaned and let stay. I reused the old curtain rods too and sewed new curtains on a sewing machine I had received as a gift that very Christmas.
With a limited space to improve indoors, it allowed us to also have some freedom in the tasks that we wanted to get done, but weren’t pressing, such as getting rid of all the trash that had gathered around the plot. An old and rotten wagon, a rusty tractor no longer able to start, let alone drive and somehow only half of a trailer with paint buckets were just some of the things that awaited us in the high grass and overgrown gardens. Herluf and his father would fill another trailer full of stuff during the morning and drive off by midday, and so it continued until the only things left on the plot were the house, the porch and the camping wagon.
When the day finally arrived where Herluf had to take his exam in Aarhus, we planned it out so that he could leave a day early, fetch a trailer, pack the rest of our stuff down, go to his exam the next day and move everything out right after.
Now this was done with almost no planning from my side, as I would have never suggested such a tightly packed and high-tension move. Herluf, however, is cut from a different fabric, and when it comes to powering through pressing situation and doing what has to be done, I have never met anyone like him. He packed up our stuff, moved all the boxes and furniture including our bed and table into the trailer, scored an A on his exam the next day and drove home with everything neatly packed.
When he finally got home, it was dusk, and the child was ready to go to sleep. Her grandparents, Herlufs parents had been and collected the camping wagon earlier in the day. I had been alone with her for 2 days, in the camping wagon, and since we technically had no place to sleep that night, seeing Herluf again, with all of our old and trusted things including our very own bed were one of the biggest reliefs I have felt in a long time.
Finally we were able to move into our little south-facing bedroom, sleeping now with the piano on our side and the child next to us in her little crib. That first night, we had the most loveliest of sleeps. Mine was a sleep of relief, finally being able to close the chapter that was selling, buying and moving houses. Herluf, I think, slept the deepest of sleeps out of pure exhaustion, having pulled together our biggest, and hopefully our last, move ever.
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