Time seemed to fly that summer. And big changes were happening in my life. Like I said in an earlier post, I decided to leave Northern Finland and relocate South. I had applied for jobs all summer, but nothing seemed to happen.
Not until July, when my former colleague sent me a message telling me she wanted to move to the capital region and asked me to become her flatmate. Without hesitating for a second I said yes. A week later she called me that we had an apartment.
I cancelled my rental contract, put my car up for sale and quit my job without knowing what the future had to offer. A few weeks later I was offered a job. I started packing, selling stuff and throwing useless things away.
When my friends at my local cafe heard that I was leaving, they immediately suggested another urbex trip. I didn’t need much convincing and suggested that we’d start at the workers’ institute that we visited the previous time.
We did manage to get to the village, but we weren’t alone. There were sounds of people shouting and driving mopeds around the place, and when we walked closer, a good ten teenagers drove away from the jungle, which had grown behind the building. The last one of them had too much speed, braked heavily when he saw us and fell straight on a big rock, knee first.
He was in a lot of pain and screamed under his moped. We lifted it up and tried to check, if he was seriously injured. The pain soon went away and he got back on his moped and drove away.
We went closer to the house, but another group of people, three young men walked ahead of us. They looked menacing with army pants, black hoodies and shaved heads and talked about doing drugs. We didn’t want to face them so we quickly walked away. That was to be my last visit to the workers’ institute in its current shape. It was bought by an energy company and demolition started in the summer of 2020.
But luckily there was still one unvisited building left on my list.
And so we found ourselves on the main street of a village, which had been built around a sawmill. It was the usual story once again. The sawmill was closed, the buildings abandoned.
This time we didn’t visit production facilities. Instead we found a huge, old wooden house. It had been a home before abandonement, and according to the legend, it was built by the sawmill company, hence the name Sawyer’s Villa.
It was a luxurious old red wooden house with big windows on the porch.
The windows had been broken, ripped off and thrown around the yard. I doubt there was a single intact glass left in the whole building.
And there were quite a number of different sizes and shapes of windows. Surprisingly many, to be honest.
The wooden floor was original and in a very good shape. It had probably had a change of paint several times during the history of the building.
A first glimpse inside one of the rooms, probably the living room. If you compare this to the cottages I explored in the previous posts, this has been the home of very wealthy people.
In addition to two floors above ground, there was also a basement. By now you have probably noticed, that it’s close to never I visit them.
And I won’t go there this time, either. I’ll dedicate two more posts to this building. One for the ground floor and one for the upper floor.
To be continued.