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Now, that sounds like a real dacha! Where's the photo--I missed that. These days, it seems that everyone wants a dacha that looks like a smaller version of the Western houses they see on TV. This is "cool", this is "prestige". And we all know how important "prestige" is!
C'mon, erasure, get with the times! Get with the trends!
My grandparents' cottage was on an island in the Gulf of Finland. It had no electricity before the mid 80's, no running water, no sewer. You had to wash yourself with sea water, and believe me, washing your hair with sea water is not nice. The dishes were washed with boiled sea water mixed with cold freshwater. To get more freshwater you had to drive 20 minutes with the boat to the harbour.
I remember when I was a small kid we watched Miami Vice from a black-and-white TV! We peed in the forest and took number two in a dry closet.
I get the idea of romanticism, but summer after summer doing all this gets annoying.
Today, it's impossible to get rid (sell) a place which is in the middle of nowhere without the basic utilities.
The Russian pech' was a brilliant invention. I've been thinking about this for awhile. Log houses in the Swedish countryside, which no one lives in anymore, did not have a pech', only a fireplace. You could say that winters in Russia are more extreme, but it gets plenty cold in Scandinavia, too, and I wouldn't want to have to go through winter in a log cabin with only a fireplace. I don't know why the Russia pech' wasn't adopted by Finns and Swedes. Or maybe Finland also had it? Where is Ariete when you really need him?
We had an own version of it.
Remember that every house had a sauna in Finland, which is also a brilliant source of heat.
OK, Ariete and Maksim, tell me this: does the traditional stove heat mainly just one room? The heat probably radiates to other rooms a bit, but is it built to channel heat to other rooms?
In the villages on the Amur I saw something very interesting. I don't know if this is the result of Russia design, or if it comes from traditional Manchu construction. The pech' was set up so that you'd build the fire at one end of it, then it extended along the wall (between the walls, as far as I could tell) throughout the house, which had a long hallway with the rooms branching off of it. The "stove" was designed to draw the warm air from the fire throughout the house, and it did, indeed, keep the entire house warm. (Though I wasn't there to test it in the depth of winter.)
The Manchus in the old days had something similar, only it was under the floor, creating radiant heat from under the floor. This is how they survived the harsh winters in fishing villages throughout Manchuria, including Russian Manchuria (Amur). There are still a few houses like this remaining, on the Chinese side.
I don't think the Russia izba was designed this way; it was maybe just two or three rooms, each with one wall against the stove, right? So it was a small cluster of rooms around the pech', not a long house with rooms off of a hallway. That extended stove that draws heat through the length of the house also is a brilliant invention, IMO.
Thanks for the photos, Ariete. Those houses look very cozy. Does Swedish have a word for "cozy"? Norwegian has "hyggelig", but it's probably considered an antiquated word in Swedish.
BTW, Ariete, outside Vancouver, Canada, there are many islands. The small ones don't have wells. Vancouver residents love to go out to summer homes (which generally are modern and expensive-looking, like homes on the mainland), and live a little closer to nature. The houses have septic, but the only fresh water supply is from rain water that each house collects on the roof, or they have a cistern in the ground that catches rainwater from the roof. Some of the houses have a separate sauna, too. It probably rains enough in Finland that your grandfather's place, and others like it, could have designed a water catchment system?
OK, Ariete and Maksim, tell me this: does the traditional stove heat mainly just one room? The heat probably radiates to other rooms a bit, but is it built to channel heat to other rooms?
Houses here used to have one massive living area (where the stove was), a cold porch area, and one or two doorless chambers, one for the parents, one for the children. So yes, the heat radiated. Masonry heaters could have pipes in the walls, but that was mostly common among the richer bourgeoisie and the elite.
Sorry, small pictures, but gives some kind of idea: Ojalan torppa Tuiskulassa | Tuiskula.info
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth
Thanks for the photos, Ariete. Those houses look very cozy. Does Swedish have a word for "cozy"? Norwegian has "hyggelig", but it's probably considered an antiquated word in Swedish.
"Mysig" is the equivalent in Swedish.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth
BTW, Ariete, outside Vancouver, Canada, there are many islands. The small ones don't have wells. Vancouver residents love to go out to summer homes (which generally are modern and expensive-looking, like homes on the mainland), and live a little closer to nature. The houses have septic, but the only fresh water supply is from rain water that each house collects on the roof, or they have a cistern in the ground that catches rainwater from the roof. Some of the houses have a separate sauna, too. It probably rains enough in Finland that your grandfather's place, and others like it, could have designed a water catchment system?
We collected water from the gutters, but that was used for the potato field and flowers. It was not possible to drink it. To purify it would be waaay to costly.
We collected water from the gutters, but that was used for the potato field and flowers. It was not possible to drink it. To purify it would be waaay to costly.
I was thinking mainly for bathing, since you mentioned that shampooing with salt water was pretty unpleasant.
Houses here used to have one massive living area (where the stove was), a cold porch area, and one or two doorless chambers, one for the parents, one for the children. So yes, the heat radiated. Masonry heaters could have pipes in the walls, but that was mostly common among the richer bourgeoisie and the elite.
Sorry, small pictures, but gives some kind of idea: Ojalan torppa Tuiskulassa | Tuiskula.info
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Ah. Thank you.
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