A never ending story
Being the lucky owners of three barns, one huge residential house and a stabbur is a never ending story of maintenance, worries and planning.
However, last but not least it is also a never ending story of tingling inspiration and exiting ideas!
We are making plans for “Kåret”.
First of all, “Kåret” is a traditional name for the part of the residential house where the family’s elderly lived.
This my friends, was long before it became common to ship your elders away to a nursing home. Instead, they moved in to the far end of the house - where they had their own entrance.
Our “Kår” is a two floor unit of about 165 m2, approximately the six windows you see in the picture above. It contains three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom/wash room, a living room and two hallway areas.
And it’s more than ready for an upgrade!
This is (one of) my inspirational boards for the project. All the images are collected from Norwegian and Swedish homes, so if you read this and recognize your interior - THANK YOU for being an inspiration.
I have been collecting “historical (and country-life) interior magazines” for years and they finally came in handy. In addition to this board, I have also collected pictures and style-typical information (1750 - 1920) in three different scrap books over the last 15 years. Working for 5 years in a open air folk museum with over 30 historical buildings really strengthened my knowledge on historical building techniques and interiors. And I’m not talking about my knowledge on viking age and middle age techniques and interiors. We are definitely not going down that rabbit hole.
Anyway!
These scrap books have remained a secret - until now. I don’t really know why, but for some reason I was a bit embarrassed about making them. But now that I can lavish in 450 m2 of interior possibilities, I decided to put them to use. And to show them to Christian. He thinks its adorable. Bah.
So where do we begin?
By opening the door and looking back!
On the other side of this wall, there is an old door hidden by some chipboards and tapestry.
It used to connect the two sections of the house.
Like the Berlin wall, we will tear the chipboard down and re-unite the west and east of our house!
The old door is wooden and painted many times during its life time. My guess is that this particular coat of paint was added in the 1960s. The colors are typical for that time period and we know there was some refurnishing done in the unit during that decade.
Luckily we have several of the other old doors stored in the barn. While inspecting one of them we uncovered (behind a large board that was nailed to the door) the old paint. Although we are not sure if it’s the original paint, the doors in this house were all, at some point, painted in brown and deep yellow colors with a marbling technique.
Sweet.
On one side of the door you can see an old hand planed panel. All the planks are in different width. Very charming indeed. On the other side is a timber log wall (main construction of the house). My qualified guess is that this wall was also “raped” in the 1960, when some nifty person painted it with grey oil paint.
Not so sweet.
We recently learned that - since the mid 1930s - our Kår has been rented out to several different families and people. Christian was a bit startled (and exited) when we learned that German Nazi soldiers occupied the Kår during the Second World War.
That explains the swastika carved on our barn door! And here I was thinking that the people who used to live here just had a weird sense of humor!
Christian is expecting to find a whole lot more “nazi memorabilia” once we start removing chipboards, cardboard and 1960s tapestries.
As many old buildings, this one has also been renovated and re-decorated several times. Old panels and timber walls hidden behind newer “fresher looking” materials, original wooden floors hidden under laminate, new coats of paint covering old paint and patina.
Digging into this, looking for the details, is kind of like being on a treasure hunt or doing a archeological excavation.
We were also lucky to find information on when one of the walls were put up in the late 1800s.
If you remember my post about clothes from the 1800s - I concluded that the clothes I found in the attic above kåret had to belong to Sofie as she was the last elderly person of the family to live in kåret.
Anyway, when she moved in her son Generius inherited the farm. Strict rules and regulations were made about the use of kåret. Sofie was given her share of the fire wood, permission to get water from the well, as well as permission to use parts of the hallway upstairs and downstairs. A wall was put up to create what was then the kitchen and living room. Later, in the 1970s, two other walls were also erected.
We will look info tearing them down to re-introduce some of the more original flooring plan.
Our goal is not to restore the interior back to its original 1835-state.
We have to make some adjustments, both in style and function.
First of all when the building was completed in 1835 the walls were all unpainted timber. We don’t want unpainted timber walls as its both unpractical, cold and aesthetically unsatisfying.
I’m going to elaborate on this in a later blog post - but to keep it very short: Let’s not romanticize too much about the past. There is a Norwegian word: “Armod”. It’s hard to find a suitable translation - but something like a combination between the three words “poverty, suffering and sparse”.
We are not making a museum but a functioning unit and we really want to avoid “Armod-romance”.
Second, the Kår did not have a kitchen in 1835. Cooking was done on an open fireplace in the living room, and we have no intention of rebuilding the fireplace. We will however look for a cool iron cast oven.
Also, the Kår definitely did not have a bathroom in 1835. Nor did it in 1850, or 1900. Or in 1920. Not even sure they had one i 1950. However, in some parts of Norway - people started installing bathrooms with running water in the 1920s. And even though this was most likely not the case in the rural parts of regional Norway (haha) at least we can find some stylistic traits and replicas of the interior that was used.
Stay tuned as we progress in transforming the Kår into an early 1900s Norwegian country home!
And in 100 years someone will decide to redecorate again, thinking “what the actual fuck were these people up to!?”.
XoXo Galadriel
