It has taken some time, but now we can finally say that we are ready for winter. Temperatures drop, minus 15 degrees Celsius we had for a while, the first snow came and the days are getting shorter and shorter. What we do in wintertime, we try to open a book about our way of living. Follow the tips and trics about living in a Nordic country like Sweden.

Our first winter, March 2023

Kim and I moveved to Bjästa, Sweden in March 2023, after we bought our house a few months before that. Our house had been empty, or not lived in for about 5 years, that is what us was told. The previous owner had left to a nursery home and some family members took care of the house in the meantime.
After the owner died, the house was sold to us. In Sweden normal that what you see is what you get, so all the plusses and minusses with that. But the year we came had a extra late snowfall period. From almost gone at the middel of March, there came 1,5 meter of snow just a week before we moved.
Impressive when you come from the Netherlands, where the most you get is about 3 cm in a year…

It was cold, minus 20 was normal. After removing snow, took us a whole day, we could start moving things around. Our lives in Sweden had started. Two and a half years later we are here still.
Ready with the renovation of the house, started our company and living the lives we dreamed of, but it sure is not all good.

Our daily routines, animals

We have our daily routines in summer but also in wintertime. We have some chickens, 46 hens we have walking around. In summertime they go outside, but in wintertime they prefer a place little wamer. The stable is made for them, good insulated and enough space to provide a happy live in return for the production of eggs. In the morning we do feed all our animals, clean out the boxes and make sure everyone is counted for. We have a bunch of squirrels visiting us, so we have haselnuts for them too. The birds get their sunflowerseeds and some gease balls to give them some extra fatt for the cold temperatures coming. After an hour of work they are all satisfied and fed.

We continue with filling our woodsupply in the house, remove snow and making sure our batteries are topped with the necessairy energy, from our solarpanels or the generator. After that we go for grocery supplies and gasoline in town.
In between those jobs, Menno works a little as a callcenter operator, and has his woodworkshop and website to maintain. Kim does all the rest in and around the house. At about 3:30 PM we stop with what we are doing, we start to relax.

Quiet and Relaxing

The evenings start with diner, healthy food, cooked on our woodburning stove. It calms us down, it tells us to take it easy. The house feels warm, the woodstove makes sure that we do not have to bother about the cold outside.
Diner has been done, after cleaning the table we start thinking about the sauna. We light it, filled the water tank and make us ready to do a sauna round with a warm shower after that. The water, heated by our sauna stove is used for our offgrid shower. A small pump helps us with that, driven by our batteries, it provides the pressure we need to take a good long shower, about 20 minutes on one load of water….
The rest and quiet evenings makes you ready to go to bed early, to have a good night sleep.

This is what our winter looks like, and we are ready for it. We have enough firewood, solarpanels, and gasoline to get trough the winter without any problems, regardless the temperatures outside or the amount of snow on the ground.

What do you do this winter? Do You live close to nature? Let us know in the comments.
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