Backdraft..........

So as you might have gathered we are back from our easter (påske) expedition to norway via lots of trips to ikea ( well 3 in total, with 1 self inflicted due to buying the wrong fridge and freezer!) but it's been an amazing trip. 

We had the now routine meeting with the builder who very kindly gave up a morning of his holiday to see us ( thank you Magnus and Ivan). I managed to build a bench for the dining table from old bits of wood I found including old barn timbers, reassemble the beautiful tall woodburner, survey the barn (låve) and more importantly install a kitchen! ...as well as go skiing, dog sledding, attend a few easter parties (more on those another time ;) )

Now you might be thinking when did we get water installed, but you'd be wrong.....we still have no water! Well we do but it's about 100 m up the side of the mountain in the well, buried under snow......

So it was our first time all sleeping in the house as a family ( which was great and made better by the purchase of a new sofa bed from ikea......for the record one of neighbours pointed out that other furniture shops are available in scandanavia .lol ) 

2 weeks without mains water or drainage has its challenges. We of course bought water for drinking, but it's not cheap, so  you don't want to be doing the washing up in it (or washing the kids in it) so we had to get water from other sources.  

We started for the first couple of days constantly melting snow in an old pot on the woodburner, but you have to melt a lot of snow for not much water. What we found much more successful was collecting already melted snow (ie water ) from the roof during the day when the overnight snow melted for a few hours. We easily collected about 25 -50 litres a day with this method, which would have taken a huge amount of snow melting.

It's amazing when you have to collect your own water how careful you are using it! But also it gives you a real indication of much water you actually waste during the day in our normal tap turning on luxury! 

Once we nailed the water collection ( took about 3 days) then we finally bathed the kids in a washing up bowl in front of the fire (lots of fun) and managed to indulge in our strip washes (which I haven't done since I was about 5 and used to stay at my great grandparents house with my folks at the weekends!)

At the end of the first week most of the kitchen was in, including installing the sink with a tap ( looked nice anyway) and waste that went into a bucket! It sounds mad, but a sink at a decent height is so much easier for washing dishes and yourself in! 

You might recall that on our first trip last October I flew over with a toilet in my hold baggage ( well camping kharzi, ie a bucket with seat) and this proved to be a great indoor companion which was emptied into our composting loo in the barn on regular occasion.  I personally ( is this too much information.....) quite enjoyed using the outhouse ( even at -11...it focuses the mind) but after 2 weeks it was getting a little whiffy. The science of a good composting loo is worthy of a blog post on its own, but one of the things you do need is a good sawdust flush! So I found a good source of sawdust which was is now neatly bucketed with a spade for ease of use. 

I did however find you need to be careful of one particular aspect though....backdraft.....different to the American 90s classic firefighting film but with similar devastating, albeit non life threatening  effects...... So when you utilise the sawdust flush make sure you don't lean over the pan if it's windy outside, otherwise you get an upwind of saw dust in your face......never good.....

By the way, I should mention our toilet is a 2 person affair ( if you feel that way inclined) amazingly one of our friends said he remembers his grandmas outhouse  which was a seven seater! Now that's being sociable :).