Couple Living alone in the Swedish wilderness

Hi, my name is Tova and this is Mattias. We live on an off-grid homestead. And the name of the place is Talaspuan. And in this video we would like to take you on a tour and show you our home. So this is the road to our home. You can see the roof of our cabin project peeking out behind the trees there. In summertime we can sort of drive our cars to our place. It's about 500 meters to the main little road. To a better road. Better road. But in the wintertime we have to park our cars out with a bigger road. Because we have no means to plow the snow. No. And it's also so bad condition the road. So it would be hard to plow the snow as well. So let's go and see. So welcome to Talaspuan. Don't mind the temporary gate. When it's getting more calm in the winter maybe we'll have the time to fix a beautiful one. We have fencing around the whole homestead because of the sheep. So the sheep keeps out from the yard and won't eat our berry bushes. Our whole yard is a construction site. So we apologize for the mess. And hope you can overlook it. With this video we hope to show you our vision. How it's hopefully gonna be in a while. So let's go and have a look. This is where the dogs live during the day. This is Mysak. He's 13 years old. Paralien bear dog. This is Malva. She's younger and she's a Siberian husky. This dog yard is really newly built. And we didn't really know where to have it. And the only really good place we could find was exactly beside the chicken coop. So this is the chicken coop. And they have their yard on the other side. Beneath these tarps we have gravel that we are using for masonry and reclaim. So we need to cover it up so it won't rain on it and get wet. Because then we have a hard time to use it. That's why the tarps are here. Our chicken coop. At first we built the house and this first pen. And after a year we also built another one because it was too small. Now it doesn't look that good because we have started to do the autumn cleaning. So yeah, it's stuff everywhere. Our chickens are a Swedish heritage breed. So we're in a program to preserve them. They're all the same breed even though they look very different from each other. And so far there are only a couple of hundreds of individuals of this breed in the world. So it feels good to be in a program to help rescue them or preserve them or how to say. The chicken coop is wildlife secure. So when we are not at home we have them inside. But when we are at home we let them out and let them free range. So they can eat grass and bugs and whatever they find in the nature. So this is going to be our front room house project that we are building right now. It has been standing still most of this summer due to other projects coming in the way. But I hope to continue on this very soon. So this is going to be the front room and the house is going to be here. Yeah, you'll see if you continue watching our future videos. And when you walk down the path here you come to our stream where we get our water. So this is where we get our drinking water, water for the animals and also all the water we need. And it's also the place where we go swimming. And hopefully we will have the time soon to build a sauna here. And Antova also wants to have a creamery here somewhere. Because when you make cheeses and stuff like that you need very much water. This is going to be our earth cellar. We have planned to make a few rows before winter. So the dirt walls around it won't collapse of the snow or something. The cold weather isn't that good for the mortar. So we are unsure how long we are going to continue. But hopefully some weeks more at least. The cellar is something we really need. We're going to show you how we do it right now. But yeah, we long for the earth cellar. So the entrance is going to be up here. And it's really close to the house that is here. So this is going to be our cabin, our bigger cabin. You'll see soon why we need a bigger cabin. So there is going to be a kitchen and a living room. And this is going to be the front room or fastu as we say in Swedish. And that was what I was showing earlier. We're going to tear it down piece by piece and build it and put it in place here. So we have put some more logs on top of the old house. To make it a one and a half storey house or so. So there's going to be a bedroom on the second half. So hopefully this is going to be warmer and better. And a little bit bigger than what we are living in right now. For now we are using it as storage or drying house for the chicken feed, the winter feed. So Tuva has been gathering nettles. So we give them one of these each week during the winter. So they have some greens too. So this is the cabin we currently live in. It's 15 square meters and the rest of it is a cow house. These are the winter cages for the rabbits. So right now they are out in the summer cages. But I guess soon we're going to move them here. Right now they are tool sheds. So I guess we have to clean them out before they move in. This is our beloved outdoor kitchen. In summertime we can't use the stove inside that much because it gets too warm. So we have our kitchen outside. And we love to be in here and cook and make stuff and do the dishes as well. So it's a really good place to be. So these two are our current earth cellars or fridges. But it gets cramped really fast. So it works really well in the spring, summer and fall. But wintertime we can't have anything in here because it freezes. So then we have need to be cold stuff inside the house in a cupboard. So it's gonna be really nice with a real earth cellar. Where we can keep our food all year round. So this is where we live. And this is the wall that separates the cow house from our living space. So we only got this, I don't know what it is, three or four meters wide. And five meters the other way. But it's 15 square meters. And this is where they had the cows when this was a fair board many years ago. And hopefully we will have cows here as well. So that's why we haven't expanded our living quarters. Because we hope to use this as a cow house someday. But for now we are using this as woodshed, tool shed. A shed where we collect our trash and so on. It's not so nice in here but I can show you my woodworking bench. These are our sheep. It's also a heritage breed called Helsingeford. And they live here. We have also built a new pen for them. So we're gonna build a new house. So their old pen can have some rest. They are also free range. So the entire summer they go in the forest and do as they please. But of course they want to go into the yard more than anything. Even though they have the whole world to explore. So this is mother Dunöra and her daughter Selma. And over there we have our barn for the hay. This year it's completely full so it feels really good. Last year we had a very dry summer and we didn't know if the hay was going to last. It did. So it feels really good to have a full hay barn. That also makes it possible for us to keep some more of the ewes that we got this spring. All the rams are up in the village and grazing. It's about two kilometers from here. This is our summer cages for the rabbits. We move them around but the grass is starting to get really bad now. So they are in their final place for this year I guess now. Just collected some grass and give it to them. And the structure behind there is the house for the pigs we had last year. Unfortunately we didn't get any pigs this year. This is our little garden. It didn't produce that much this year. But it's still fun to try to grow some vegetables. We live in a very cold area so the only thing that grows well here is grass. So we grow meat here instead. But we have plants on a bigger garden on the other side where you saw the rabbits. We had to fence in this garden because of the chicken. They eat everything and destroy everything if they can. So this was a really good idea. So this is where we live. So this is the hallway. And if we go here we have the kitchen. Our stove. And then we have the bedroom. So here we have our library and our music room. And of course the dining room. This is Krösa Maja. We also have another cat named Frasse. But he's in that bone right now. And they have their own entrance here through the wall and into the cow house. As you can see we live in a very small space. And now after seven years of living here it starts to be a little bit cramped. We have a lot of stuff that we don't know where to put anymore because it's full. And yes I guess we could make it more efficient with more shelves and cupboards. But we also know that we are hopefully soon gonna move to the new cabin. So it doesn't feel necessary to start with something new in here when we're gonna move from here. It has worked really good these last seven years and it still works. But it starts to be a little bit cramped. So now you have seen how we live. Hopefully you found it interesting. We've been living here for seven years now. The first couple of years we didn't know if we were going to stay here or not. But eventually we realized that we liked it here. So we stayed. Yeah we bought the logs to the new house. New old house. I guess it's a couple of hundred years old those logs. But it's going to be great for us I guess. It's gonna be nice. So this video is a little bit different from our regular vlogs that we make. So if you're new to this channel you can follow along on all our projects. In our vlog. We try to make vlogs fairly regularly. Depending on how much it is to do and stuff like that. Thank you for joining us on the tour of our home. And thank you for watching. And hopefully we will see you in our vlogs. Hello! Maybe you should have opened it in a different way. Yeah I did. Antova also wants a primary. But it's still try... But it's still fun to try to grow some vegetable... I can't say that word.