The playhouse and visthusbod

Here is the playhouse with both Kjettestorp
and Rimforsa cousins. Left to right in back
are Sara, AnnaLisa, Henrik, Brita and
Karin. The little girls in front are
Margaretha and Mom. 

"Then if we go a little ways up the yard, we come to our playhouse. Farfar had made a playhouse for us.  It had two benches in there to sit on and a cupboard for dishes. Of course we got what was broken in the house and we were never supposed have any sharp objects there. But one time, Brita and Sara talked me into sneaking into the kitchen and getting two sharp knives. They each needed one for what they were going to do. Silly me, I would do anything they told me. I was so anxious to be one of the big girls. Brita and Sara were usually the big girls and Margaretha and I were the little girls. Well, I wanted to play with the big girls so in the kitchen I went and got two knives and as I carried them out. I fell, of course. I cut myself on the knee and got sand in it and it got infected. Brita and Sara tried to clean it up; we weren’t going to tell Mother. It got so bad that we finally had to tell mother. I still have scars on that knee. Every doctor I’ve been to in my life has asked what I did to my knee. Well, anyway, we had lots of fun in that little playhouse, especially when AnnaLisa and Karin, our cousins from Rimforsa, came. 

(end of second side of first cassette)

Then if we go a little further up the yard, there was something they called the visthusbod. That was a storage house where we kept food and other things for family use. In those days, we mostly lived on what we grew and raised there at Kjettestorp, so you needed a pretty big place to store food so you had it all through the winter until the next harvest. There was one room where it was only food. They had one great big wooden barrel, in an oval shape, where they’d put two ice blocks and in summertime, all leftovers and things had to go there

I'm not sure if this is the visthusbod that Mom talks about but it is the outbuilding at
Kjettestorp which is currently closest to the main house :)

in that ice barrel. On one wall, there was a great big wood chest where they kept bread. On one side was coffee bread or sweet bread and on the other side was rye bread or syrapsbröd, we called it. That was bread for sandwiches or mealtime.

On the next wall, there was a shelf that was hung from the ceiling away from the walls, so there was no way mice could get up there. On that shelf underneath were dowels and hooks. There hung our smoked hams and sausages. We had a little smoke house, so every time they butchered, we smoked our own meat. Then there was a window. In the corner there, there was a milk separator. I only saw it used once or twice, and I don’t know anything about how it worked, but I know that there was a crank, and when you cranked, there came out cream in one pipe and milk in the other. Then on the next wall, there was a big wooden bin that was divided up in sections. One section had rye flour and one had white flour and then there was another section that was divided in two. It had oatmeal and barley meal.

In the middle of the room, there was a big table where they prepared things for the smokehouse and such. Outside the main room, there was a sort of hallway that ran from the door to a window. In that hallway, we kept our bicycles. No bicycles could be left outside over night. In the evening if someone had left their bike outside, they’d better go out and put it away. Dad was really serious about keeping order. Then there was another room where they stored all kinds of things like rakes and shovels and those farm implements.

This is Thor working on the farm. I'm hoping someone can de-code Mom's handwriting
though. It looks like "Far har 'målat' upp" to me, but I'm not sure what that would mean!

Then there was a stairway to the second floor. Upstairs they kept grain that was ready to be taken to the mill for our own use. There was wheat and rye and barley and oats. When Dad was going to take some to the mill, he had a scale up there and he had big burlap sacks that held 50 kilograms and one of us kids had to come hold up the sack while he shoveled in the grain.

If we go back down to the main floor and then down one more set of stairs, you come to the basement in the storage house. When you came down the stairs there, there was a cupboard and there mother kept all her things she had canned, jams and jellys and such. On the floor were special buckets for eggs. The egg money was mother’s pin money. When she had extra eggs, she took them down to the store by the schoolhouse and sold them there, but in the spring and summer, the hens laid so many eggs that she’d have some left over. When this happened, she’d put them in these buckets, and they poured over something called water-glass. I don’t know what it is called here, but Bill knows what it is. He has seen it too. It was something they stirred up in water, and then they poured it over the eggs and then it looked like buttermilk and felt sort of cold. When you were sent out to get eggs in the buckets there, it was so yucky to stick your hands down in that cold buttermilk and get eggs out.

Then there was a door that went into the root cellar and there was a big bin for potatoes. Then there were barrels where we kept parsnips and carrots and red beets. They were kept in sand. Then there was a table for rutabagas and a table for cabbages. We didn’t grow a lot of cabbages because they didn’t last through the winter but we had enough cabbage to make koldolmar at Christmas."