Við áttum engan klósettpappír eftir heima, svo ég fór í búðina seint í gær.

Áttum is the 1st person plural past tense of eiga, which often means to have or to own.

• við eigum = we have
• við áttum = we had

This verb is irregular in the past, so the form looks quite different from the infinitive eiga.

Because Icelandic uses enginn to mean no / not any, and it has to agree with the noun in gender, number, and case.

Here:

• klósettpappír is masculine singular
• it is the direct object of áttum
• a direct object here takes the accusative

So enginn becomes engan.

In other words:

• enginn = dictionary form
• engan = masculine singular accusative form

Because engan already carries the negative meaning.

So við áttum engan klósettpappír already means we had no toilet paper / we didn’t have any toilet paper.

In standard Icelandic, you normally do not add ekki here, because the negative word enginn is doing that job already.

Yes, klósettpappír is singular here. Icelandic treats it as a mass noun, just like English toilet paper.

So the idea is not one roll of toilet paper, but simply toilet paper as a substance/supply.

If you wanted to talk about rolls specifically, you would use another noun, such as rúlla.

Here eftir means left or remaining, not after.

The pattern is:

• eiga eitthvað eftir = to have something left

So:

• við áttum engan klósettpappír eftir = we had no toilet paper left

This is a very common Icelandic construction.

For example:

• Ég á smá kaffi eftir. = I have a little coffee left.

No. The sentence is better understood like this:

• við áttum engan klósettpappír eftir = we had no toilet paper left
• heima = at home

So heima tells you where the shortage was: at home.

It is not directly linked to eftir in the sense of after.

Because heima means at home: it describes a location.

• heima = at home
• heim = home, homewards, to home

So:

• Við áttum engan klósettpappír eftir heima = We had no toilet paper left at home.
• If someone were going home, then heim would be the form you’d expect.

This is a very important Icelandic distinction.

Because the speaker is talking about a situation affecting us/we, and then about an action taken by me/I.

So the meaning is:

• We didn’t have any toilet paper left at home,
• so I went to the store.

That switch is completely natural. It suggests that the lack of toilet paper was a shared problem, but one person handled it.

Here svo means so, therefore, or so then.

It connects the two parts of the sentence as cause and result:

• We had no toilet paper left,
• so I went to the store.

It is a very common linking word in everyday Icelandic.

In this sentence, svo is acting like a conjunction linking two clauses, so the second clause keeps normal main-clause order:

• ég fór = I went

So:

• ..., svo ég fór í búðina ...

If you started a new sentence or used svo more like then, you could also get:

• Svo fór ég í búðina. = Then I went to the store.

So both patterns exist, but they are not used in exactly the same way.

Because fór expresses movement, and with í, movement into/to a place normally takes the accusative.

So:

• í búðina = to the store / into the store

Compare:

• Ég fór í búðina. = I went to the store.
• Ég var í búðinni. = I was in the store.

That is a classic Icelandic contrast:

• accusative after í for motion
• dative after í for location

Í búðina usually suggests a specific store, often one that is understood from context, like the store.

By contrast, í búð often feels more general, like:

• to a store
• shopping

So in this sentence, í búðina sounds like the speaker went to a particular shop.

It means late yesterday.

• seint = late
• í gær = yesterday

So the speaker is placing the trip to the store late in the day yesterday.

If they wanted to be more specific about the evening, they might say:

• seint í gærkvöldi = late yesterday evening / late last night

But seint í gær is perfectly understandable.

Yes, it is a normal everyday word. It is informal and natural in speech.

A more formal or official-style word can be salernispappír, but in ordinary conversation klósettpappír is very common and completely idiomatic.

So for a sentence like this, klósettpappír sounds very natural.