Well, you can’t really call it a house. It’s more like a fisherman’s cabin or a little holiday home. 

When the reports for the sale came in, it said in column “walls” = “wood and painted paper”.

There’s practically no insulation, just chipboard and some wallpaper, single glazed windows and a French door, which unfortunately has a rather big hole on the bottom. It’s weird to believe that someone has lived there full-time for over 14 years. I guess the wood burner was constantly well fed over the colder months.

The layout is very awkward and the linoleum floor is horrendous throughout. The bathroom is dark and dingy, the shower doesn’t work and if it would I probably wouldn’t want to use it anyway. The only thing I like about the whole house is the sink. The sink is beautiful; a solid ceramic old French sink, very big and heavy and I will not let go of it. 

The house does have a ‘garage’ underneath which is also the home of the well for the water supply to the house. Not really very well thought out, I’d say, but on the other hand it’s nice to never have to pay a water bill ever again and the idea of a very small house delights me: less rooms to clean and less space to keep stuff which means I can’t collect any junk or unneeded things no matter how “good they still are” and that they “might come in handy in the future”. It’d be nice to live a life without too many belongings. 

My big plan, for hopefully some time in the future, would be to tear the whole house down and start from scratch.  Maybe slightly bigger, but not much, have an open living space upstairs, a big kitchen/dining area, a chill out sofa area and a small loo and then downstairs one or two bedrooms and a bathroom. The downstairs would be kind of nettled into the earth, well protected and shielded from everything. I can’t shake the idea of sleeping in Mother Earth’s womb. I like that idea very much. A little house built out of natural materials that just morphs in with its surroundings, with a green roof and a green house or closed glass veranda on the south side and an open balcony towards the lake side for (vegan!) BBQs and stargazing nights. I’ve got it all mapped out in my head already – now all I have to do is learn how to draw so I can put it all on paper. 

Until then, I’ll happily live in a caravan, yurt, wooden hut or whatever. As long as Barrie is happy to come and visit me regularly. I might even make the house liveable for another few years even though I don’t like the idea of putting money into something that will be torn down anyway. But see for yourself, I made some videos of the current state of the house.