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Frostheim Fixarhelg
Jul. 11th, 2021 08:13 pmThe Shire of Frostheim is lucky enough to share a home island with the Scouts. Grundet is a small island in the Luleå river by the village of Sunderbyn, which was briefly famous in the 1990's at the filming location of Swedish TV's series Bondånger (which I had never heard of before yesterday).
The island had been used as a center for timber collection back when logs were transported by floating them down the river, and the various buildings left over from those days are still present, including the smithy, which is used by both Frostheim and the Scouts (especially when we teach workshops for them).
The building in which the smithy is located is a long one, clearly built in segments over time--the smithy end is concrete block construction, but the far end of the building was timber-built. That end had been partially damaged at some point by fire, and, much more recently, the roof caved in from heavy snowfall. The city, which now owns the island, and hires it out to our two organisations, looked at the damage after the roof collapse, and decided that the cheapest thing they could do would be to send out some bulldozers and level the whole building, including the smithy and the other segments between the damaged one and the smithy.
However, both Frostheim and the Scouts like having the smithy, so we got permission instead to dismantle the damaged end ourselves, and this weekend we had a working weekend, with a bunch of us from Frostheim and a smaller group from the scouts hard at work.
Saturday was hot and sunny, and we started with the dismantling. Since we like heights Kheldor and I went up onto the roof and worked to free up the bits of roof still attached to the walls, tossing stuff into the middle of the house, while the rest of the crew worked outside to remove the boards covering the timbers, expose the windows (which have been boarded up for years), and take them away. Eventually they opened enough of the wall on the side where the roof had most completely fallen in, at which point they could start pulling out boards and stuff while we continued to dismantle the remaining bit of roof on the far side (and switched to throwing bits down on the outside, since there was no one working there any longer.
Meanwhile some others cut down some of the trees behind our archery range, and then used a tractor to extend and level the archery range, which will be very nice for being able to find the arrows that fail to hit the targets.
We were at it from just after 10:00 till almost 18:00, with a pause for fresh baked pizza for lunch (one of our members has a new, portable, wood-fired pizza oven, that cooks a small pizza in around 90 seconds, Yum! Followed by a quick swim in the river (wearing our clothes, which stayed wet long enough that it was much more comfortable to be up on the roof in the heat).
This morning when it was time to return to the site it was pouring down rain, However, we also had work to do inside the smithy, so that was today's focus. While some folk fixed the ventilation and electric the rest of us washed the walls and then gave them their first coat of "whitewash" (calcium/lime water-based paint which, in this case, is actually a little pink (probably coloured with a bit of iron oxide, I would guess).
You can see photos from the weekend on Frostheim's FB page, and, even better, there is a delightful time lapse film of the work they did on the back side of the house, from first starting through to getting the (rather large) windows out and taken away. Since that was the side we couldn't see from where we were working on the roof, I was delighted to see the film.
It will be a bit more work later this summer to finish dismantling the damaged part of the house, but we think there will be enough good timber in the pile to make a sauna for the site, which will make our camping events and fighter trainings much nicer.
The island had been used as a center for timber collection back when logs were transported by floating them down the river, and the various buildings left over from those days are still present, including the smithy, which is used by both Frostheim and the Scouts (especially when we teach workshops for them).
The building in which the smithy is located is a long one, clearly built in segments over time--the smithy end is concrete block construction, but the far end of the building was timber-built. That end had been partially damaged at some point by fire, and, much more recently, the roof caved in from heavy snowfall. The city, which now owns the island, and hires it out to our two organisations, looked at the damage after the roof collapse, and decided that the cheapest thing they could do would be to send out some bulldozers and level the whole building, including the smithy and the other segments between the damaged one and the smithy.
However, both Frostheim and the Scouts like having the smithy, so we got permission instead to dismantle the damaged end ourselves, and this weekend we had a working weekend, with a bunch of us from Frostheim and a smaller group from the scouts hard at work.
Saturday was hot and sunny, and we started with the dismantling. Since we like heights Kheldor and I went up onto the roof and worked to free up the bits of roof still attached to the walls, tossing stuff into the middle of the house, while the rest of the crew worked outside to remove the boards covering the timbers, expose the windows (which have been boarded up for years), and take them away. Eventually they opened enough of the wall on the side where the roof had most completely fallen in, at which point they could start pulling out boards and stuff while we continued to dismantle the remaining bit of roof on the far side (and switched to throwing bits down on the outside, since there was no one working there any longer.
Meanwhile some others cut down some of the trees behind our archery range, and then used a tractor to extend and level the archery range, which will be very nice for being able to find the arrows that fail to hit the targets.
We were at it from just after 10:00 till almost 18:00, with a pause for fresh baked pizza for lunch (one of our members has a new, portable, wood-fired pizza oven, that cooks a small pizza in around 90 seconds, Yum! Followed by a quick swim in the river (wearing our clothes, which stayed wet long enough that it was much more comfortable to be up on the roof in the heat).
This morning when it was time to return to the site it was pouring down rain, However, we also had work to do inside the smithy, so that was today's focus. While some folk fixed the ventilation and electric the rest of us washed the walls and then gave them their first coat of "whitewash" (calcium/lime water-based paint which, in this case, is actually a little pink (probably coloured with a bit of iron oxide, I would guess).
You can see photos from the weekend on Frostheim's FB page, and, even better, there is a delightful time lapse film of the work they did on the back side of the house, from first starting through to getting the (rather large) windows out and taken away. Since that was the side we couldn't see from where we were working on the roof, I was delighted to see the film.
It will be a bit more work later this summer to finish dismantling the damaged part of the house, but we think there will be enough good timber in the pile to make a sauna for the site, which will make our camping events and fighter trainings much nicer.