The Secret Quarters

I made a big fuss about painting these stairs but never told anyone where they actually lead. I’ll let you in on a secret now. They lead to a builder’s nightmare.

In the old Home we liked very much how life was divided into three floors: ground floor for hanging out, upstairs for sleeping and basement for bathing and doind the laundry, oh yes, and for man stuff. Okay, except when I was about to have Veera and the couple of weeks after, when my legs just didn’t carry me as safely as I would have liked them to, that’s when I wished the shower wasn’t so far away. The new Home only had one and a half floors. We absolutely needed more space upstairs and had our minds set on adding more space below the ground as well, but were told from the beginning that the latter idea would most likely be impossible to turn into reality. There was an issue with the soil and another one with the plinth that had been reinforced from the inside, making it very difficult to design a functional staircase. We insisted we would make do with a ladder if we must. I was ready to declare moving to the new Home the biggest mistake I had ever made if the basement wouldn’t work out: the sauna wouldn’t have been such a big deal for me, but without the basement there would have been no storage space anywhere, and there was no place for wardrobes or cabinets or drawers or anything, so we would be forced to rent out storage space. All that trouble when in the old Home we had space to waste!

So we ended up with, well, a sturdy ladder.

But also got a premium man cave, tiny, but functional. Behind the stars there’s the door to the cellar and the freezer.

Check out the ceiling. It may be low but it’s well supported.

And this, this is what made it all worthwhile to me.

Here’s the sauna.

But because, as I might have pointed out earlier, there is a lack of extra space, we decided not to have a wall between the sauna and the bathroom as is customary, but combined the two in one, returning to the age-old tradition of Finns bathing in the sauna. And, after nine months of doing so, I think it’s a brilliant practice.

There. That’s it.