The snowball effect
We are now (hopefully) in our last two week of renovations. Our houses have been in dire need of not just upkeep, but improvement. On the top of my head, I can think of two reasons why everything seemed to break down at once. Some of the broken stuff should have been fixed last year, but much of the schedule had to be postponed due to a little baby boy. That’s the obvious one. The not so obvious one is that we might have started a momentum of fixing things, that is hard to stop once you get it in motion.
It began last autumn when our external lights died – all of them – in the middle of the darkest month, which is really saying something if you live in the north of Sweden. It is literally pitch black here most of the day, if you haven’t got your lights on. So, it started with a call to the electrician to come and fix the lights. But for every electrical error he found and corrected, we at least discovered three more. It was like cutting a head from the electricity hydra. I have lost count on how many days he has been here now in the past year. But this Friday it kind of felt as if we finally reached the stage of improvement, and not just upkeep.
Same thing with the roof. This spring I had a terrible surprise when I came into my office. Water was dripping down from the ceiling. During the winter, snow had blown into the attic and when spring arrived it started to melt. By divine intervention, I got no damage at all from the water leak. Just a big pool in the middle of the floor and nothing sensitive nearby. This incident started a major renovation project involving all the roofs on our facility, including a bunch of other things that we had talked about for ages but never arrived at.
The list goes on, with all the electricity and building issues getting solved on after the other, we finally pulled the trigger on a much-needed new FTX ventilation system and get rid of the old one that sounded reminiscent of having a cargo ship engine on idle in the kitchen. I also ordered a new air heat pump and finally retire the old one that was clinging on by a thread, turning itself into a block of ice as soon as it attempted to heat the house. Our second heat pump was about to fall off the wall, tearing the façade with it, so that one got a proper wall mount with effective spring vibration isolators. That’s another noise source that felt great getting rid of.
I have also been seriously troubled by our shaky 4G internet connection, so the momentum carried me forward and now we have installed double directional antennas which gave a nice boost from 20-30 Mbit average to 180-190 Mbit average today. I was not expecting that kind of improvement with an external antenna, so that is something I can highly recommend if you’re living beyond the reach of the optical fibers. With proper internet, it becomes natural to dig cable hoses and pipes between all houses and routing cat6 cables to every room, including a walk-in closet/media center. That’s another thing I have been thinking about for years. Now I sincerely hope that the winter will be somewhat more maintenance free and that we can focus a little bit more on the upkeep.
Isn’t it funny how easy it is to just keep going once you get started? It all comes down to a priority list. Had I known that I could six-double my internet speed I would have installed the antennas the first week I moved here. It’s an upgrade that will bring a tremendous increase in productivity. But there were so many other things in front of me, so I was never aware of it. And now, it is embarrassingly obvious. It all started with a broken cable to the façade lights.
I think this is the house owner’s analogy to making your bed every morning. If you start each day with a good action, it is very easy to do another one. And another one. And another one…
The beautiful thing is that once you get going, it grows exponentially.