Snickarglädje and washing dishes

This is Mom in 1937. The photo was taken to show off
the new bike but it also shows the snickarglädje well :)

"Now I think I’m going to tell you what Kjettestorp looked like when I was a kid. There was the main house that was always white stucco. It used to have red trimmings around the windows. When I was a little kid, there was a veranda in front made of wood with all kinds of carvings in. They used to call them snickarglädje which means “carpenter’s happiness.” That was the front of the house. 

Around the side, there's a door into the kitchen, but before you get to the kitchen, there is an extra little room. The actual name would be a förstukvist but for some reason, we always called it Tvisten. When you first step inside that door, to the right, there was a little window and there were hooks there where the men hung their coats when they came in from the barn. We always had special long overcoats when we worked in the barn that came to the knee. That took care of some of the odor. It didn’t come in the house quite so much if we left those coats out there. To the left was built a skafferi it was called, pantry, I think. It was a storage space where they could store some of the food. They didn’t have any refrigerator, so they had to have somewhere to put away the bread and the cheese and such. It was always in containers all wrapped up.

Another picture of the snickarglädje with Elin and Thor
standing on the veranda. Seated are Bojan and Bengt Arne
Svenson,and Margaretha, Sara and Lennart Boberg. Bengt
Svenson stands on the ground. Maybe someone can
remind me who the Svensons are?

Then you came in the door to the kitchen. It was a big kitchen. To the right of the door was the wood box. That was one of the first jobs we got as kids was to haul wood. In summertime, we had a little wagon with wheels. We didn’t have to carry it in our arms all the way. In wintertime, we used a little sled. 

Next to the wood box was something called the kommod. Maybe we’d call it a washstand in English. That was a stand where they had a washbasin to wash their hands in. It was tin on the inside with a hole in the middle so that when you had washed your hands and wanted to empty the water, it ran down the hole into a bucket underneath. Then they had to take out the bucket when it got full. This kommod had a lid on so that was always put down when it wasn’t being used. There was also a hanger with towels. 

Next to the kommod, there was a diskbänk. This meant dish bench but now we would call it a kitchen sink. That also had tin inside. We had one tub for washing the dishes and another for rinsing them. Underneath of that sink, there was storage space for these tubs and scrub brushes and whatever we used for washing dishes. Dad was up-to-date and modern and every improvement that he heard about, he wanted to try. He built a stand onto that diskbänk where there were slots in where you could put plates, and there were special places for the serving dishes, cups and saucers. When we rinsed the dishes in hot water, then we could put them in their places to self-dry. What an improvement. We didn’t have to wash as many towels, less work. One person could do the dishes; otherwise one had to wash and another dry.

Washing dishes, of course, was one thing we did early, and I remember

Hildegard Boberg

how I hated washing dishes. We had to stand on a little footstool to reach up to the tub and to wash dishes after ten or twelve people, every day, three times a day. Of course, one person didn’t do it all the time but I still hated it when it was my turn. I remember one time after dinner I was supposed to wash dishes but I sneaked out. I went up on the hill outside where we used to play. We called it Berget or The Mountain. I was getting to wonder why nobody had called at me to come in. I had expected that a long time ago. What had happened? I was almost getting worried about it, when Hildegard came out and called me to come in. So of course, I went slowly, dragging my feet in there. She pointed to diskbänken, and there wasn’t a dish left there, and the tubs were put away. I looked up at her, and she said, “I did it for you this time.” I was both so glad that I didn’t have to do dishes and so guilty that my crippled aunt had done my work."