The arrival

Welcome to Västikulla, a farm situated in Southern Lapland. This farm had been abandoned for many years, until two years ago when a small group of re-settlers found their way to this beautiful place.

In the beginning we where four people and one dog, we arrived in April 2014. There was a lot of snow that made it difficult to reach the house. We had brought a canoe that we used as a sledge to transport our belongings to the house.

The buildings that were still standing where in a bad state. There was an old saw house, a leaking garage, a simple wood shelter, an outhouse and the main house. All the buildings where more or less leaning and many of them with leaking roofs. The main house was in a shabby state but at least the roof was not leaking and the chimney seemed intact except for the top part that almost had fallen apart. In the basement one wall had fallen inwards and the still standing walls where leaning and had a lot of cracks, we realized that this house where not going to stand for long if left alone.

The first thing we did was to try to start the fire in the stove in the kitchen, after some smoky failures we finally mange to get a fire going. Since we only could get the fire going in the kitchen we decided to sleep there on the floor. We had brought some reindeer skins that we spread out to sleep on.

We had made it we had reach the farm. We asked our self if this would be our new home? and where we really ready for this challenge?

The first week we where occupied with cleaning the house and explore the land with skis and snowshoes. We saw a lot of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) and tracks of a lot of other animals. There was a lake quit close to the farm may be around 500 meter there we tried to fish. We went out on the ice and drilled a couple of holes and quit soon after we had put the first hook in the water we got a fish, a perch (Perca fluviatilis) soon we had over 20 perches.

Only a week had passed when one of us, a man from Lithuania decided to leave the farm, he had not expected that it would still be so much snow and cold nights. Now we where three people left at the farm