D26 BLOG

Stead. Stead. Stead.

I’m told that D26 were the servant’s quarters. Apparently, there was a big house where the row of radhus - sorry, ‘town houses’ - at Nygatan 8A to C now stand. The rich folks lived in there, and D26 was for the staff.

The money always knows how to pick a prime location (called 'stead' back in those days), and D26 is in the primest of the prime.
   
Back in the day, it was right next to the town’s fresh water source - the town pump – now my guest bathroom. It's less than a minute from the railway station; but north, north east of it, so upwind of the NNE prevailing winds that blow over Mälaren, keeping the fumes from the steam engines away. And has easy access to the roads and tracks leading away to other neighbouring towns and villages. Including the then industrial hub of Åkers Styckebruk.
   
The house was perfectly positioned a street away from the commercial centre of Mariefred, with its wide range of shops and businesses. And close to the lake for boat trips into Stockholm.
   
A few minutes walk from the castle. Handy for the king to pop over for tea. And great views out to the west before the west side of Nygatan was built just under a decade ago.
   
They sensibly stayed a reasonable distance from the water’s edge. Back then, they hadn’t yet become caught up in the romance of water views. They were more practical, understanding that Sweden is mostly winter, and that a body of water is a huge cold sink, often with cold winds blowing off it from the east. Effectively living cheek by jowl with a huge block of ice that sucks the energy out of any house directly exposed to it. Just compare D26's drift cost per kvm of 169kr with that of Strandvägen 3 at an eye-watering 525kr.
   
Today, D26’s position is still hard to beat. Djurgårdsgatan is central, but quiet. Very little traffic, and not much footfall, even on busy weekends when the big events like Ångans Dag, or the Food Truck NM happen. And since the space in front of D26 was made a no parking zone a couple of years ago, it’s even quieter. Visitors sitting in D26’s garden forget that my green oasis is only a couple of minute’s walk from everything, it’s so peaceful.
   
Also, at D26’s end of the street we’re close to everything that matters, including the exits. You’re at Läggesta with the station and motorway access – even the återvinningscentral – in three minutes. You’re also walking distance to the first tee, whether full size or mini.
   
And, of course, we're closely surrounded by all of Mariefred's restaurants and take-aways. The residents of D26 have gone from being servants to the best served in town.

An Easier Way Of Life

Visitors to Mariefred think that the place is trapped in some simpler, slower time. Less digital, more analogue.
   
And they’d be right.
   
Personally, I prefer to visit the action and live in the relaxation. Have my calm and quiet outside my door and travel to the noise.
   
Right now, I’m writing this in the garden. The view is roses, clematis, fruit trees and my vegetable plot. The soundtrack is a blackbird, and somewhere over towards the centre of town, someone’s cat is crying for its breakfast. Probably Lennart. If you live in Mariefred, you know Lennart. Mariefred is Lennart’s town. We only get to live here because Lennert allows us.
   
And now the gentle chuff chuff of a steam train leaving the station, and its whistle announcing the weekend’s first departure. I can smell it. The slight whiff of steam train arriving on the warm southerly wind.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all genteel nothing going on. The town has a larger than average group of bundles of energy that organise regular events, and plenty of entertainment. From the big things like the steam weekend, to weekly events like concerts, outdoor fitness groups of all sorts, sports competitions, and vintage vehicle rallies. There’s a lot to see and do. If you want to. And none of it happens right outside D26’s door. You’ll need to travel. A couple of minutes by foot.

"Här får du mest semester för pengarna!"

In addition to lower house prices, lower food prices, much lower fuel prices (ved), and lower house and car insurance costs; holidays are also generally way cheaper when living in D26 compared to in and around Stockholm.
   
For starters, you’re living in one of the best holiday destinations on the planet, so straight away you’re saving a fortune by not needing to go anywhere for a summer vacation. The summer climate in central and southern Sweden is one of the best in the world. Not too hot, and almost every day has some sun. And in D26 and its town, you have the world’s best resort, with a ton of stuff to do.
   
Right there, you’ve saved around 100K by not dragging a family to some over-crowded, bin-odoured oven near the Med. Sure, you won’t be able to show off in the office by telling everyone you blew some coin on a few weeks on Mallorca. But saying, “We taught the kids how to scuba dive in one of the local lakes,” is way cooler (and you could buy them all the kit with the money you saved – hell, you could buy them a dive boat).
 
And you're not camping in an over-priced toy apartment and driving an expensive toy car. You've got your own stuff, all your own toys, your own bed, a reliable toilet, and water you can drink. You have a proper kitchen. Proper sized TV. Proper garden. And why not blow some of that money you saved on lots of trips to your many local restaurants and bars. Become a true local. You'll see a much better long-term ROI than chucking cash at some paella-slinging tourist trap.
   
Holidays last all year around in Mariefred, and you get to squeeze every drop out of all of the seasons. Summer is longer because you're in a place where you get to use all of it. When you have a garden, outside is a step away. And a garden means it's never too hot. The nearby lake helps too. So does being surrounded by restaurants and forests.

The autumn is pretty special around here, with lots of excellent foraging in the forests. We have a path we found that is so filled with different berry bushes and mushrooms that we named it The Food Court.
   
And winter is filled with skating and skiing. The shuffling kind right outside your door, and the whizz downhill kind a couple of hour’s drive away. Why spend a fortune on a week in a packed somewhere over sportlov, when you can spend every weekend in a half-empty nearby? Or bunk off work on a weekday, turn right rather than left on the E20 in the morning, and have the place to yourself.
   
When I’ve asked friends who live in expensive apartment boxes in Stockholm why they chose to go to Spain for a couple of weeks in July, the response is often a slightly snarky, “Because we don’t have the luxury of living in a house in Mariefred.” 

I’m already home

Recently, I realised that Mariefred is one of the best capital city commuter towns on the planet.
   
I often meet up with friends in Stockholm, and I usually take the train. Earlier this year, I met a friend for dinner in the centre of the city who lives in Gustavsberg. At the end of the evening I headed to Centralen to get the train, and he took the bus back to Värmdö. Later, he called me to suggest that maybe next time he would come out to Mariefred to save me from having to travel all the way into Stockholm every time we had dinner. I asked him where he was. He told me he was on the bus.
   
“I’m already home,” I said.
   
He was surprised. Most people who don’t live in Mariefred usually are. They think that we’re miles and miles away from the city. The fact is, we’re closer than most. At least by time. And that’s all that really matters.
   
I used to live just outside Vaxholm, on Karlsudd, and would commute to the city from Monday to Friday. It was closer by distance, but public transport took well over an hour and was irregular. Whether by Vaxholm’s båt – which stopped a hundred metres from my house – or by bus - that had a stop three kilometres away. And travelling by car also took an age because the E18 is one long traffic jam between Arninge and Roslagstull in the morning and evening.
   
On the other hand, the drive into Stockholm from Mariefred during the morning is swift as there is relatively little traffic. Most of it is, in fact, coming the other way with people commuting from southern Stockholm to industrial jobs in Södertälje.
   
It’s interesting to use the ‘Time to Travel’ faciility on Google Maps and see how long it takes to travel by public transport from, say Gåshaga or Sticklinge on Lidingö to the centre of Stockholm. A lot longer than travelling from Mariefred (and houses in those places cost double that of a house in the centre of Mariefred – and the quality of life is nowhere near as nice as living in Mariefred).
   
Having a large car park at the train station is also a huge benefit, and pretty rare elsewhere. My Värmdö friend doesn’t have the option of driving to his bus and parking cheaply for the day. He needs to walk a couple of kilometres, adding even more time to his commute. It takes me three minutes to drive to Läggesta.
   
Not only is it quick, but the trip by train from Mariefred is far more pleasant than the public transport trips from almost all other towns around Stockholm. Even before the new double decker trains arrived.
 
I used to accompany my kids to their schools in Stockholm when they were young. I’d prepare a breakfast of fruit, sandwiches and juice and we’d eat it while sat around a table on the train playing board games. Very pleasant. And beat the hell out of a bus from Värmdö. 

Another zig. Or is it a zag?
   
It’s time for another change. I’ve had a life of doing wildly different things. Different hobbies and different jobs. And as I approach my final chapter, different is beckoning again.
   
As soon as life gets comfortable, I can’t seem to help pushing over the table and starting again. I prefer being a novice than an expert. Not sure why. Maybe it’s the reduced return on investment as I get good at things. Lots of practice creating pretty much the same result. I prefer the speed of going from the thousandth best to the hundredth. Then the fiftieth. And then top five. And then it gets boring, and frustrating. And it’s time to stop and try something new.
   
Some interest or activity that I’ve never thought about before. Something that I stumble into. And then fall in love with. If you come and take a look around D26, you’ll see the evidence of the rather eclectic set of activities that I discovered and then threw everything at. The new one is sailing.
   
What’s funny is, I owned a house on the sea for 18 years just outside Vaxholm, and never had any desire to float on it. I spent all of my time flying above it. Or climbing on cliffs next to it. Or mountain biking in hills and forests hundreds of miles away from it. Or working on classic cars within view of it. Or bringing up kids. Okay, I did teach them how to dive under it, but I was never into boats, apart from a purely functional RIB that never went further than an island nearby called Getfoten, that had a restaurant on it.
   
It was my eldest daughter that had me testing sailing. She went away on a number of sailing camps as a kid. Later crossing the North Sea and the Baltic on various courses in her mid-teens. I bought her a sailing dinghy to zip around Mälaren on. And when she later went off to university, I looked at it gathering dust at the back of one of the garages and thought, “How hard can it be?”
   
I read a 'How To' book, and after dragging it down to the slip next to the old, abandoned restaurant, I rigged the little boat and hopped aboard. And then fell out. After righting the dinghy, I wriggled back in, got blown fifty metres or so parallel to Strandvägen, where an audience was beginning to gather, and fell out again.
   
This sailing technique was repeated along a more or less a U-shaped path out towards the entrance to the guest marina and back to the starting point at the slip, where I received a round of applause. At a guess, I probably spent 80% of that ‘sail’ in the water. And this may sound strange, but I had fun. I’d found something new that I was truly shit at.
   
After packing up, dragging the boat home, and re-reading my book, I tried again the next day. And I was off and running. Zipping around very inexpertly with only a couple of capsizes this time. In my mind, I was crushing it. I was Sir Francis Chichester. I was taming the oceans, and harnessing the wind. Ready for my first solo circumnavigation. Of Edsala Grund.
   
And I was bitten. And bitten hard. And the plan was set. I would spend my decrepit years drifitng around the warmer parts of the planet aboard a hole in the sea into which I would throw my kids’ inheritance. Which meant the house needed to be sold. Which is why it’s for sale. I’m outahere! I’m off to explore the seven seas!
   
Maybe. As we all know, gods definitely laugh when men make plans, and certainly no plan that I have ever made in my entire life has actually come to fruition, so if you want the house, act fast before some new idea comes along. Or reality bites (I’m no spring chicken). 

Cheap cosy

I guess the energy needed to heat D26 was as pricey per joule when it was built as it is now. Probably more expensive. Which explains the design of the house. It was built to extract and retain as much heat energy as possible from anything burned.
   
The main heat source is the fireplace. It’s positioned right in the very centre of the house, surrounded by thick stone walls. These act as a massive storage heater that the living spaces wrap around.
   
Back in the day, I’m told that they would burn charcoal that was stored in the cellar – delivered through what are today’s basement windows. By lighting a fire first thing in the morning, the core of the house would be warmed, which would then radiate that heat throughout the rest of the building during the day. With the heat rising to warm the upper floor by bedtime.
   
The same process still works today, but is made more effective by a network of tubes that run from the fireplace out to the upstairs bedrooms, the kitchen, and the dining room. A fan blows air warmed in spaces around the fireplace along these tubes and into the rooms. It’s effective, and with a cheap source of firewood from one of the local farms, very efficient.
   
Another very effective source of heat, even in the winter, is the sun. Being low in the sky, it streams through the windows on the south side of the house where all of the ‘living’ rooms are (living, dining and bedrooms) and quickly warms up the rooms even if it’s freezing outside. And the building’s massive brick walls keep the heat inside. In fact, the wall on the east end of the house is a firewall designed to protect the building if Mariefred ever caught fire, and is over a metre thick.
   
That same design keeps the house cool in the summer. With the sun higher up, the angle of incidence against the windows is more acute and less heat energy comes in, while those thick walls also insulate against the warm air outside.
   
The one ‘living’ room not on the south side of the original building is the original bathroom – now the downstairs toilet – which is tucked up against the rear of the fireplace. Smart.
   
The dark metal roof plays its part too. Heating up in the winter sun and slowing the escape of heat from the house during the day. The thick insulation in the attic space is almost more important for keeping the heat out in the summer as it is keeping it in at night and on cloudy days during the winter.
   
One final design that helps to retain the heat is having just the one exterior door on the north side of the house, opposite to where the living rooms are. It helps to minimise any loss of heat from those areas when the door is opened. It also improves security as you have to come all the way into the garden to enter the house.
   
With all of these smart designs, I almost never need to use the modern heating systems in the house. Only when it gets really cold. And even then, only on the north side of the house.
   
All of the clever ideas from 125 years ago, combined with modern insulation upgrades made over the years, has produced a very energy efficient building that squeezes out and jealously guards every calorie of energy I buy. 

Bo and Bi makes no sense
   
Within D26, I have two boyta bedrooms that no one ever goes in for weeks on end, and a bathroom that’s used for maybe 20 minutes a day. There are several large pieces of furniture, like a large dining room table, a large kitchen table, a large coffee table in the living room, and various cupboards and shelving units that totally block several square metres of boyta, making it inaccessible and essentially useless other than as storage.
   
However, I use my basement gym every day for an hour. The garages are constantly used, housing boats and motorbikes. I use the guest house as a workshop pretty much every day. And the parts of my bedroom where the roof slopes to below 1,9 metres are just as useful as the taller parts as I sleep under both.
   
So why do we have bo and biyta? They’re both as useful as each other. Both as valuable. It’s an entirely pointless delineation. Something made up by tax people. Which offers a significant opportunity for buyers.
   
By not blindly using a tax person's definition of bo and bi, it’s possible to unlock huge amounts of value by defining your own bo and bi based on how you will actually use that space. Often, a mäklare will completely miss huge areas of a property because they don’t fall under the tax person’s definition of bo or bi.
   
When I bought D26, the mäklare got no further than looking up the tax documents, and sold me 152 kvm of boyta and 19 kvm of biyta, basing the price on that area. Which meant I got 87 kvm for free. And if you add the garden, that is one of the most used boytas for almost half the year, it’s even more.
   
Before realising this, I always wondered why I managed to buy D26 for half the price of a house just across the road that sold a few months before, when D26 is only around 27% smaller – and arguably nicer, and in a better location.
   
Always buy based on what’s useful to YOU, not the tax authorities. Because when did they ever do anything that profited you?

A convenient wilderness
   
I get to wake up, get on my bike, and blast around a forest for 20km or so.

During that trip, I’ll not only be immersed in the trees and other plant life, I’ll see plenty of wildlife. Birds of prey, woodpeckers, capercaillies, deer, often moose and wild boar. Sometimes it feels a little like scuba diving through untouched undersea landscapes, watching life go about its business. Sometimes you may meet a fellow diver, but that’s rare. You’re almost always on your own with the beauty. And your thoughts.
   
Three quarters of an hour later, I’m home, and pumped. Full of energy, ideas and solutions for the day. The noise has gone and the signals are strong.
   
Crank some tunes, then twenty minutes downstairs in the gym to add a little strength to the cardio (I also have a stationary bike down there for the slippy winter months), and then it’s time to fuel up for the day. Breakfast.
   
Ever opened the fridge and picked up the milk carton to find it’s too light? Not a problem in D26. I have another fridge packed with all the milk I’d ever need two minutes walk away. It’s called ICA (or COOP if I’m in the mood).
   
Handy.

Eat yerself fitter
   
I love having an edible garden. It was my eldest daughter’s idea. Yes, we always had the fruit trees and bushes, but she came up with the veg. It used to be a relatively useless patch of grass. And then we dug it up. Boosted the quality of the soil, and planted a random selection of seeds. And they grew.
   
We didn’t really know what we were doing back then, and ended up with more lettuce than ICA. We’re better at apportioning the land now, and get a wide range of eating. This year’s discovery is beetroot. I’d never eaten it before other than pickled, out of a jar as a kid. And I have no idea what made me decide to plant it, but I’m happy I did. Roasted with a little garlic, it’s spectacular. And roasted with goat’s cheese, it’s sublime. And the leaves are like a nicer, more interesting spinach.
   
Last night’s simple dinner of roast chicken, roast beetroot, steamed beetroot leaves, and freshly dug potatoes and carrots, with my favourite sauce made from home-made chicken stock and blackcurrant jelly (made from blackcurrants out of the garden), not only tasted incredible, it might even have made us all a bit healthier and fitter.

I do love a wet summer

Summer’s on. It’s taken a while to get started. And it’s still spluttering like an old car that needs a new spark plug or three. But at least the temperature’s turned up – and we get a day or two of sunshine each week.

There isn’t much better than waking up, sliding out of bed, flipping on the kettle, and wandering out into the garden to absorb the morning rays. See which flowers are out, and which parts of the garden are ready to eat. And then sit with my tea and plan the day.
   
The first sail of the season happened a couple of weeks ago. A few sunny, gusty days. I dusted off my daughter’s little pink dinghy, found all the bits, and dragged it down to the lake. A careful rigging – I usually forget something on the premiere – and then launched into an offshore breeze.
   
The boat’s quite unstable with my fat arse on board. It’s like balancing on a beach ball. But the challenge of getting as much speed out of it while keeping it upright is fantastic fun. Even when I fail and take an unplanned swim.
   
After a couple of hours skimming over the surface of the lake with one of the world’s most beautiful views over my shoulder, I’m ready to drag the boat home and collapse into a seat in the garden with a silly grin plastered across my face. I’m sure there must be nicer places to live, but I can’t think of any during those moments.