So what's this blog all about?

Suddenly I realised we have been blogging totally in Finnish so far! So it might be worth giving our non-Finnish speaking friends a short update on what the hell we are doing right now :-)

So the short version of the very short story so far...
Just over a month ago, we were visiting our friends' summer house in Kotka, and after the lovely weekend we began dreaming of a small summer house of our own. Kimmo was browsing through some property advertisements and just after couple of days we spotted an ad for a 65 sq.meter two bedroom house, built in the late 50's near Tampere with a 1400 sq.meter land area in a very reasonably price!

We then contacted the real estate agent and went to see the place. At the first glance we thought the place was a dump, but after couple of minutes, we began to see the opportunities it had - the wooden frame and the structures seemed ok and sturdy, the house itself obviously needed a facelift from the interior right away and some fixing on the outside later on. The garden was nice and large enough, and the sauna building was ok as well.
So, we made an offer that was accepted and we became property owners!

The house and some before shots and the sauna+storage building

The floorplan (in Finnish, sorry...) this one shows the closed window but not the closed door, that would be on the top of the picture, on the left side of the window in the smaller bedroom.

And then began the renovation...
So, what we have been doing so far? We decided to start the renovation from the bedrooms. The larger of the bedrooms will be our master bedroom, and the smaller one the guest room. It all began with tearing numerous wallpaper layers off the walls, when we discovered there has been windows and doors that are now closed. Based on the closed door and window made our conclusions on the original layout of the building. Perhaps there has been a large stone oven in the middle of the building before the kitchen area was added later on to the house.  

The first surprize, closed window in the log wall.

Numerous layers of wallpaper - some of them seem to have been rather colourful :-)

We also peeled the floor to its foundation last weekend in the larger bedroom, and found out that the renovation that was done to the floors in the 90s was done using insulation materials that attract rodents to nest in them... so had to be extra careful when removing the insulation material as it was totally filled with rodent droppings.

This is how the floor looked like after removing vinyl carpet, chipboard layer and hardwood panels. 

As you can see from the pictures, there's a lot to do until both of the bedrooms are done, not to mention the livingroom, kitchen... And as you can see from the picture, we also have a radiator system at the house. Most likely we will get rid of the system as it seems to be in rather poor condition and it leaks. It's a shame as it is a genious system - it's integrated to the iron stove that warms up the water circulating in the system and heating up the house. Also the stove would need some fixing... 

Some beautifully preserved log wall - but I guess the AMAZING lamp shade caught your attention :D

But anyway, our blog entries are mostly in Finnish, but keep coming back and check out the photos, they give you at least some idea what we have been doing so far :-) 

And we try to make these short recaps in English as well from time to time!