Hotel guide

What a difference it makes just painting the basement of the house. The concrete was looking a bit scrappy so we've tidied it up with some grey paint... Cutting the grass also helped!

We've set up a little stall selling cherries down by the road! The cherry trees behind the house are absolutely covered this year and there's too many to eat ourselves. Will's mum is over for her holidays but we've got her working already.

We've done a load of work over the last days to try and bring back to life a bunch of apple and pear trees we have on the farm. There are 10 pear trees and 3 apple trees which haven't been touched in probably 10 or 15 years! We've pruned back an awful lot and cut back all the grass around them in the hope they'll do a bit better now they have some space and air. Let's hope for some fruit this year or next! It's cool to think that we're slowly turning this little farm into something it maybe once was. (P.s. we know this is the wrong time of year to do it but it was better than doing nothing ;) )

Just up the road at Granvinsvatnet this morning, it's often very still but never this still!

Back in February we started renovating the hallway, stairs and landing. We posted several pics during the work but never posted any pics of it all finished! So here you go, a little before pic to remind you of the lovely original colours and all the after pics. Mostly painting and restoring the old wooden floor.

We recently had a guest from the US stay with us, Seth only stated for a weekend but he got a lot done and he's rather handy with a video camera also. He put together a video of his trip and all the places he visited local to us once he got home, if you watch to the end you even catch a shot of the house! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNi8IPCzzQc&feature=youtu.be

We've built a little dry stone retaining wall by the entrance to tidy it up a bit and to try give the paths across the yard some proper edges. Some before and after pics below, now we just need summer to come along and make it all green again!

Marta and Juancar from Basque, Spain (a place we need to go some day for mountain biking!) stayed with us last night and left this lovely sketch in the guestbook. 😂❤️🐈🐕

A little drone video of Kvanndal and the valley behind the village showing how dramatic it is, because it is so steep and narrow it can feel very humid and almost tropical up there during the summer! The reason this video was made was to promote an application some locals have made to repair an old trail up to the mountain farms above Kvanndal. It will make for some great hiking once built (hopefully this summer) and give access to a bunch of other trails and mountain tops!

This makes us so incredibly happy! Solbakken Farm now has over 50 reviews on AirBnB and in these 4 photos you can read some recent favourites. No one had lived in this house for a long time when we came here, the first thing we had to do was literally cut the bushes down so we could get to the door. We have put our heart and soul into creating this place and our guests are actually not only guests at our BnB, but also in our home. I think that's why, when we get reviews like this, it makes me so happy I almost want to cry. A BIG thank you to all nice people that have come to stay here so far, and a big warm welcome for all the guests to come!

Little renovation project of the entrance/hallway/stairs/landing going on at the moment. What started out as 'we should paint the hallway, it looks crap in the yellow' has turned into a week long project including - building some new shoe/jacket storage, painting the walls, painting the stairs, painting the ceilings and most of all, taking of the crappy old vinyl flooring in the hallway. In the bedroom upstairs it was simple. Here it has turned into a long project! Ripping up the old vinyl floor was easy enough but underneath was some awful 'ullpap' (a sort of soft/mushy paper stuff) which was glued the floorboards with a nasty brown sludgy glue. Once that was scraped off there was/still is a layer of filler type stuff and a sort of wax treatment on the floorboards which needs to be scraped off before they can be sanded as the wax just clogs the sander. Currently halfway through scraping the wax off before we can sand and treat the wood again! Just a few more days...

To stay with us follow the links below, we have two listings on AirBnB. 1) Triple, double and single rooms (space for 6 people) https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/20253583 2) Double (king size) room https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/20253583

Bluebird skies here today and apparently supposed to continue for the next week!

We have made a workshop! When we moved in it was pretty damp and rotten in parts of the basement, first we fixed drainage outside to stop the damp (with help from Klara's parents Sune and Lena) and replaced the rotten wood on the walls and floor. Then made some storage, tool wall and workbench to create a nice space to fix some bikes and build some furniture!

Nora the Explorer is the latest addition to the Solbakken team! She's the Northumbrian border collie that didn't want to be a sheep dog and decided to come to Norway and be a trail dog instead. She's always curious and happy to go on adventures, so far she's already come with us to 5 different countries! However, for now she seems very glad to finally have arrived at her new home and is settling in well at the farm.

In the summer of 2017 we gave up our 9-to-5 lives in London and Gothenburg to go chase the dream of starting something on our own, and moved out to the mountains of Norway. Follow this page to stay tuned on what we are up to!

Fire wood gets you all warmed up twice: when you chop it and when you burn it!