Swedish houses-little museums in the forest

Yesterday we went for a nice sightseeing of the area and we payed a visit to a 68 years old lady named Lillian. She used to be a scout and worked for a long time at Kopparbo.

She lives by herself in the forest and takes care of her beautiful house that really looks like a little museum in the forest. It's a little museum because the house was built in 1913 by her grandparents and used to be an important place in the community as they had a store where villagers could buy almost anything.

You can find so many old objects that could serve as museum pieces like tools for making butter and cheese, gardening tools, bottles of beer, mouse traps, almost anything.

Lillian still live in the house and takes care of the property, but only in the summer time, as it would be really hard to live the in the hard winters.

It was really impressing to see in one of the rooms a quite new computer seated on a furniture that is almost 1oo years old. In fact, all the house is like that, an interesting combination of old and modern. Lillian lives here alone and sometimes her children and grandsons visit her. She spends her time working around the house, planting flowers, gardening, going fishing, reading a lot and playing computer games.

But the main occupation is taking care of the house and her yard. This is something like a moral duty for her, and for all the swedes that own a house.

Swedish houses are like little museums: always clean, ready for guests, at least one special corner with old stuff or artsitic objects like artefacts, new technology is a must and all the modern facilities that makes your live easyer.

If you take a look at the house from outside you would say it's a pretty small house, but you have a shock once you get inside because you can not understand how suddenly rooms become so big, how so many things fitted in. We think that swedes are specialists in room management and using every single centimeter. (Even in our little room fitted three beds, lots of drawers and is still a lot of air to breath, and we were thinking that back home we would use two rooms for all it's in there.)

Also, swedes prefer to buid their houses on their own, it is something like a local culture. If they can not do it on their own, they tell the building company how it should be built.

Almost all the swedes have or at least want to have their house in the forest, it is part of their way of living, the desire for personal space.

We feel like we want to have swedish house too. DON'T YOU?