She has been Living in a Cabin in the Forests of Sweden for 8 years | Home Tour

Hello and welcome to my place. This is where I live together with my family. It's a rather big cabin but we only live on 15 square meters. The rest of it is a barn and this place is something that is called färbod in Sweden. A färbod is a place where you take your animals in the summer time because you want to save the winter feed around the village. So you take all your animals to the forest and a cabin like this and you stay there all summer. So the room that we live in are the same room that the caretaker of the animals lived in. The first space here is what we call fastu. It's an ongoing debate on this channel what the best English word for our fastu is. We don't think that any of the English words are a really good translation for the word fastu but the suggestions we have got is arctic entry, mudroom, foyer, vestibule and so on. We use our fastu as a storage but also in wintertime we can use it as a freezer so it's really handy. Come inside and take a look at our cabin. So this is our hallway. During our years here we have put in more and more stuff and furniture so I guess we are at our limit now. We made a simple hook from a tree. You can't see it now but like that. So it's made from half half a tree and the branches still left so it's really good to hang jackets on. Down here we have the cat door so they can freely walk in and out as they please. That's really good so we don't have to let them in and out but of course they prefer the big door so we do that anyway. This little bureau I bought on an auction and we just placed it here this autumn and it has been really good so far. So we have all our hats and mittens and Eva's all outdoor clothing so they are also stuffed with clothing. This door is from the late 1700s guessing but we have a friend that is really good on those things so I think he's right but the colors and how it's made and everything. But we have a problem it is a bit skewed so it has some holes here and the frame isn't straight either so we have some holes around it so it really cold draft from it so we are going to fix it somehow but so far we have made a woolen cover that we put in front of the door when it's colder outside. It works okay. We moved here in August 2012 and when we came here we had to fix some things so we changed the bottom logs and we have to lift the house up a little bit and we also changed the floor so the floors are completely new. We painted the walls and also the ceiling because it was really dark in here. Like I said before this is a færbord and usually they have sellers, earth sellers, to store things in but we didn't have it here because it's so close to the village so they took all the milk and everything up to the village instead. So we are now building one but it takes some time but eventually we are having one and until that one is ready we have two holes in the ground outside here and it works really good. This bureau I also found on a flea market a real find as you can hear I'm really fond of my old furniture it's a great interest of mine but here we have a lot of small stuff also but some toiletries and the toothbrushes I try to keep it organized but yeah. For now we have Ivar's clothing here and then I have towels and some of our clothing and curtains and tablecloths and stuff like that. In this drawer I have things to make my salts and creams we have strings and we have tape and all the stuff you may need and you know the drawer where you put everything you don't know where to put that's the one and in this one we have some equipment for our filming work. I have some photos here this is my grandpa on my mother's side and this is my grandma on my mother's side and my grandma and my mother and my mother. I have never met my grandpa so it's nice to have some pictures of him. My grandma is now 85 years old and she is still healthy and happy. Every morning we boil water so we have two big thermoses with hot water if we want to drink some tea or need it for something else and we do that so we don't have to light a fire and wait for it to boil and everything now we have it just ready to go if we want it. We are tea drinkers no coffee in this house so these teas are from our favorite shop in the nearest town. We don't have any electricity wired up in this cabin and we are not connected to any grid so we use a lot of these candles and we also have this kerosene lamp that we use a lot above the dinner table this is a new kerosene lamp that we bought when we moved in but we have also found a lot of these lamps second hand so we have some more that we are going to use in the new cabin and our headlamps are a really important tool for us especially in the winter when we need to go outside and it's really dark we have some batteries and a small solar panels that we charge our things with but in the winter it doesn't work that good because there isn't that much sun so we need to find a better solution for that in the future. The only electricity we need really is for charging all these things we have for running this youtube channel. Welcome to our kitchen only a step away this is where we do all our cooking right now we have our long fil standing here brewing we made it last night and then we just take some of the old long fil and put new milk on it and it's a kind of butter milk that had a very stretchy consistence and that we eat for breakfast every morning so this evening i'm gonna put it down in the cold when it's ready. So here we have everything we need for our meals good knives good cutting boards cups plates glasses spices we also have tea on bags this is stuff i use in my breakfast cinnamon coconut ginger powder we have some digital thermometers very good tools if you need to check your meat or check your tea temperature cutlery and this used to be a messy cupboard but since we got this ugly thing for the knives and it got more organized but mostly we have tools in wood or metal and we try to avoid plastic as far as we can maybe this also is a drawer for stuff we don't know where to put but at least we have some batteries and matches and stuff like that in here in wintertime we use this as a fridge and in summer when we can move all the food outside to our hole in the ground we can have other stuff in here so up here i try to have dry stuff like spices and teas and down here where it's a bit colder we have the butter and eggs with a lot of butter and egg cheese it keeps cold in here because we don't have constant heating in the house so it's a bit colder down at the floor level so it's a really good fridge it's keep about eight to ten plus degrees so almost all our food fits in here one of the most important things here the water here we have a bucket of water so that we fetch almost every day so we have fresh water we fetch it from the stream in these buckets we have two of them so we can always have one that is filled in the summertime we have our outdoor kitchen so we can do our dishes outside that's really nice in the winter time it's too cold and then we have a big bucket that we have here on the kitchen table and we have bucket to rinse the dishes in and then just put it on a table cloth on the other bench it works really well but it would be so nice with a real kitchen sink inside here but since we are working on a little bit bigger cabin just beside here we don't feel it's necessary to put down a lot of work in this cabin since we are going to move someday and it works really good as it is the little wood stove we had a bigger one before but it had only a small hole for the fire so it took hours to get it warm in here but this one has a really big fire and that's really good so maybe half an hour and it's really warm and toasty in here we can keep our clothes here and they are warm and nice we also have a big pot of water that we often have on the stove so we always have warm water for dishes we have two of these our tea water boilers that we'll fill the thermoses with later not so good looking shelf but it works really good we can put gloves and hats up in here if they're wet and they dry really fast also have some string and nails down here so we can hang things to dry i like to pick a lot of wild herbs and plants so we have put up drying frames in the roof so they are drying really fast because it's kind of warm in the ceiling it can be a bit difficult to take the frames up and down but it's really nice to have them out of the way i said water was one of the important things and firewood is equally important we have our wood store out in the barn so we try to keep this filled all the time so we just can put a fire in the stove we also have a bucket of these smaller sticks so it's easy to light the fire and when the firewood have birch bark we collect it and have it in a bag behind here so that makes it so easy to light the fire we also have a bucket for compost almost all of our pots and pans that are stainless steel we have bought second hand so we are always in the lookout for them because they are really handy and we like them we try to avoid plastic as much as possible so we always search for the stainless steel or the glass things my plan is to make a lot of more cheese since i am an educated artisan cheese maker and then we are going to need a lot of I really love our bedroom it's so cozy it's a bit dark here because it's only a small window but we have our small lights we built this bed for Ivar but he hasn't slept in it a minute we only use it to change his diapers he sleep with us in here it's only a 120 bed so it's a bit cramped but so far it works it has also been really good because when he sleeps on the outside of me I don't have to worry that he's going to fall off the bed so it's a secure thing I use cloth nappies for Ivar so I fold them in beforehand and have them here up here I'm not going to show you because it's so cramped with stuff but we have bed covers and sheepskins and our clothing more clothes for Ivar and board games everything you can imagine fits up here we get more and more books so in the beginning we only have books in the dining room but now we also have in the bedroom more shelves so a lot of books and clothing in these baskets that Ivar is using right now and if we take a look under the bed so we share this cabin with two dogs two cats and we are three people this cabin wasn't intended for winter use so during our years here we have put strings of sheets in some places between the to fill up some small gaps the windows were also single single windows so only one sheet of glass we bought some special extra second layer and put on and that was really good because the first winter was really cold so there is none extra insulation in these walls only the 15 centimeter of log and that would be enough if it was built correctly but this cabin has been moved a lot so it's kind of a puzzle in some places and because it was only intended for the summer use they weren't that precise when they put it up again in the floor and on top of the inner roof we have a lot of shavings wood shavings so that insulates very well this is the cupboard where I keep almost all of our toiletries and some things for the kitchen and candles so tea lights soap toilet paper dishwashing liquid and yeah napkins stuff like that and this is me and my sister she lives about 100 kilometers from here so we see each other quite often and lastly our library and dining room and also the area for washing our hands in winter time we have this inside but so it's more cramped winter time summer time we can take these things out and have them outside these books are about handicrafts and arts here we have about homesteading and gardening politics down here we have about cooking and fermenting and animal books about dogs cats horses some ethnobiology and clinging and carrying children regenerative agriculture more cooking books magazines these are about yoga feng shui colors meditation and these are about ethnobiology the sami people about the thing we're living from the past some biographies and how to write about children and up here we have novels so all of this shelf is fantasy and sci-fi and here are other stuff but we do love our fantasy and our favorite authors is joe abercrombie patrick ruthless michael j solvang neil gaiman and terry pratchett so those are the ones we enjoy reading the most our art wall from different places and people this is from a photograph that matthias took so someone saw it on instagram and painted it and sent it to us and my sister has painted this one so yeah some different things that we like this is a very obscure piece of art so if you know who this is you are one of very few and on this side in this shelf we have our paperworks and children's books yeah and other things so you can see we have a lot of shelves and we started with the one we have all our plates on and then we got this one for it was supposed to be a shelf for putting all our fermentings on but yeah now we have other stuff there and then we built on the bookcase and we built it on one more time and we did this one and then we had two shelves into the bedroom so it starts to be very cramped in here something we have heard a lot since we moved here is it works now but wait until you get children then it will be very difficult but i must say it works really well and we haven't encountered any problem that we haven't been able to solve so we're still here so i guess now we will here wait until they get older so we will see so our dining room slash living room slash working space we spend a lot of time in this corner we eat our meals make our videos we have a 10 year diary in the window there that we write in every day so we can see what's happened from year to year and yeah it's a really nice space to be and Frasse likes the sofa here we often get the question why we live like this and it's a quite a hard question to answer we need to write a standard answer that we can give but some of the answers is because of the resiliency we want to be able to fix things by ourselves and if we want to we can pour out the water and lock the cabin and be away for a couple of weeks and it won't freeze and break something another reason is our quest to find out what is truly sustainable and also the possibility to just walk out the door and into the forest and truly be a part of the forest and the nature around us so now you have seen every nook and cranny of this place and i hope you enjoyed the tour so the space we live vegetables a basket with vegetables two so that insulates in summertime we have stuff in here because it's in summertime we have stuff in here okay i'm gonna go down