Looking back, this is probably all my fault.
Working remotely gave us the freedom we’d always wanted. It also gave us far too much screen time, too little fresh air and a few extra kilos.
I’d always wanted a greenhouse and somewhere to grow my own fruit and vegetables. After what Pär would probably describe as relentless nagging, I finally convinced him that buying a run-down cottage was a much better idea than an allotment. There would be fewer people around, more space for the dogs and room for all the gardening projects I had in mind.
Pär wasn’t entirely convinced at first, but somewhere along the way he discovered that he genuinely enjoys digging. One spade somehow became a collection, and every now and then another Messenger link appears with a model that, according to him, is completely different from all the others. Of all the hobbies I expected him to develop, collecting spades definitely wasn’t one of them.
Buying a run-down cottage turned out to have one unexpected advantage: it was almost impossible to make it worse. Every project felt like an improvement, so we just kept starting new ones. The vegetable garden grew. Chickens moved in. An incubator appeared. The pantry gradually filled with homemade jams, marmalades and preserves until Tobias concluded that I was basically playing Gas Station Simulator: Real Life. Meanwhile, Pär kept expanding his spade collection.
Somewhere along the way we always seemed to have three or four projects going at the same time. Keeping family and friends updated became surprisingly time-consuming, so I started a blog instead.
Like many good intentions, it was updated… occasionally.
As the years passed, life changed too. Annie met Tyler in Scotland and now divides her time between Sweden and Scotland while preparing to apply for university. Tobias, meanwhile, remained convinced that life would be much better with fewer mosquitoes.
Every February the news would announce that spring had arrived in Helsingborg. Outside our window there were still metres of snow, and every project we started had to take nearly three metres of frost into account.
By September we’d finally had enough.
“Let’s buy a farm in growing zone 1“
By then we’d narrowed it down to a fairly simple wish list: growing zone 1, enough space for all our projects, a few universities nearby and direct flights to Scotland.
In June 2025 we found a farm that seemed to tick every box.
Neither of us had ever been to Skåne. We’d never seen the farm. We booked a digital viewing, read the inspection report and bought it anyway.
At the time, it seemed perfectly reasonable.
It turned out to be exactly the right decision.
When we told our friends we were moving, most of them agreed we’d completely lost our minds. They insisted on regular updates because, based on past experience, they had every reason to believe we’d keep inventing new projects.
That was enough to dust off my long-neglected blog, give it a new domain and promise—once again—that I’d keep it updated properly.
So here we are. This is my attempt to keep that promise.
We still have a habit of starting projects that somehow grow into something much bigger than we originally planned. We suspect that isn’t going to change anytime soon.
Welcome to Ctrl + Alt + Skåne.
