After finding the petrol station featured in the previous post, I continued my road trip towards my first intended location. I was passing one of the larger towns in the region, when I saw a house, which caught my attention. Having explored for more than ten years, I’ve started to have a nose for this.
There were large fields between the road and the house, so my first challenge was trying to figure out, how to get there. Eventually the only way was to park on a dead end street in the corner of a small residential area and walk a former driveway, which was now an overgrown path. That’s how I knew I was onto something.
Either they were really bad at gardening or then this was the real deal.
And at this point it was becoming pretty evident that it was. The windows were missing completely. The building itself was an ordinary pre-war residential building with a rather lavish porch.
The probable reason to the sheer size of the porch was the fact, that that’s where the stairs were located. Fair enough. The inhabitants also had a large Persian rug in the hall. But wait a second, what is that?
There was a lot of game related stuff in the hall: betting tickets, playing cards from two different shipping companies and chips. The steering wheel probably is from a computer game steering unit. Also note the mosquito spray and the calendar from 2008. Quite a collection this early on an exploration.
The newspaper was from 2013. If that’s the newest item in the building, it has been abandoned for around 8 years.
The hall led to a second hall. An interesting solution, as was the bright red paint on the wall.
This is just a possibility, but I am somehow suspecting, that the lavish porch has been built later on, and this is the original entrance to the building. Otherwise the layout makes no sense. This is a useless room.
And so we enter the room, which is called ‘tupa’ in Finnish. It has no direct translation, but it is a sort of a large room, which combined the kitchen, dining room and living room. In smaller rural buildings there was often just the ‘tupa’ and a bedroom.
The kitchen is a bit old fashioned, but the appliances are rather new. They must be younger than 2000, which is surprising given the fact that the building seems to have been abandoned no later than the early 2010’s.
A vintage lamp has lost some glass bowls.
Which, surprisingly enough, lay intact on the floor.
Toilet cleaning detergent on the stove? Doesn’t look good.
The oven was huge. It was a combination of a cooking oven and a baking oven. I haven’t seen such a two in one thing before.
A look back towards the hall.
The toilet with the toilet brush and a male toilet sign on the floor. If this was the male toilet, where did the others go? I mean there was only one toilet in the house.
The room next to the kitchen had no wallpapers, which was pretty strange. The way of hanging the curtains was also pretty strange.
This curtain wasn’t hanged sideways. It was bright red creating the illusion of red light inside the room. That’s what I thought at first.
The red books are called ‘The World Of Our Time’. They are geography books from the 1970’s.
The use of a flash reveals it. The light isn’t the only red thing in the room. The logs on the walls have been painted red, which is evident also in the previous picture. Even the lamp next to the fireplace is red.
This is turning out to being a strange place.
Another fun fact was, that this shelf with china wasn’t in the kitchen, it was in the bedroom.
But this feels like a good place to split this exploration in half. So we’ll continue at a later date!