Humble beginnings

On the 24th of July in 2023, after a decade of dreaming, I became a cottage owner. 

It didn't seem likely to happen, as my budget was tight. I made my best offer on an old cottage, sitting on a smallish plot of 2000 square meters, in a little village in southern Finland. I wasn't too surprised when my offer wasn't accepted. Mentally, I moved on. But it seemed that the house wanted to be mine. The sellers later contacted me with a counter-offer, and other details also fell into place serendipitously.

Soon, I found myself on a street corner, nervously clutching an antique iron key the size of my palm. I was the proud new owner of a little red cottage! Later that day, I went for my first visit as the owner.

The cottage is small, about 30 square meters plus a cold veranda. It first appears in the building register in 1920, but the seller estimated it was built earlier, in the late 1800s. It's built the traditional way, out of solid timber in a log construction, with a vertical wood siding, and painted in a traditional red paint. Originally, it was a family home. It had stayed in the ownership of the family's descendants, but later only as a summer house.

The cottage hasn't been actively used for at least a decade. Trees and bushes are growing wild all around the garden. You can barely get a car into the driveway. It's safe to say that the garden needs a lot of love.

Can you spot the garden path? It's hard to capture the place in photographs, with everything so overgrown. This is from the corner of the house, of a path that leads to the back of the garden and the outhouse. Invasive lupins, roses and maple saplings have taken over. In the background, there are old apple trees. 

The outhouse was a sad sight. A tree has fallen over it, making it dangerous to access. To top it all off, I found a mummified family of rats inside the composting toilet. There were claw marks inside the outhouse which suggested they hadn't been able to find their way out. Nature was coming a bit too close for comfort.

I must admit, at this point, I was starting to wonder if much like the rats, I'd bitten off more than I could chew. I don't have other pictures from the first day, as I was feeling very overwhelmed. I wasn't able to get the electricity working - nor the water well. I also realised that mice and rats had lived inside the house and left evidence thereof. Once it occurred to me that there might still be rodents frequenting the place - well, let's just say I didn't get very much sleep that first night.