We, The Infected

While Eli still called himself Elias, he lived with his parents and two older siblings in a small house. Similar houses survive to this day, and one of them can be visited at the historical museum Skansen in Stockholm.

The house is exceedingly small. The one room with any means of heating is 4x4 meters, of which the fireplace occupies about a quarter of the space. In that single room all inhabitants would have slept, at least in winter, and they would have kept some of their smaller animals such as hens there, too.

Here is a page in English about the house.
Here you can find a plan of the house. A is the fireplace, B is the baking oven.

Here is a picture of the house. Note that the house is very low - the entrance door is just over a metre high!

That's very cool, thanks for sharing. I wonder why the doors are so low? I think I would get claustrophobic if I had to duck in the doorway every time I went in or out.

Thanks, metoo, all these little details is another bit in the puzzle Eli(as), and I love that!

Cool. Thanks for sharing.
It reminds me about my grandmother's house.

a_contemplative_life wrote:That's very cool, thanks for sharing. I wonder why the doors are so low? I think I would get claustrophobic if I had to duck in the doorway every time I went in or out.

Well, I can't say for certain regarding houses in Sweden around that time, but there's a historical museum near where I live with a house on display that has doors and whatnot that low, and apparently, it was because people were much shorter back then.

As for the house pictured, that's really interesting! I'm a huge history buff, so I love these kinds of things!

Thanks, metoo. A sober reminder of how hard the winters must have been for them so long ago. Tough people, those Scandinavians!

Thanks for the pics, metoo.

a_contemplative_life wrote:That's very cool, thanks for sharing. I wonder why the doors are so low?

My guess is that, apart from saving on construction materials, since warmer air rises, homes with very high ceilings tend to be rather cooler that those with low ceilings, so one with low ceilings (requiring low doors) was easier to keep warm.

Rather sobering to consider what such a place would be like to live in. How many of us could do it? Of course we'd be giving up a tremendous amount in order to live there and do so as a family would have done back then. Electricity, plumbing, heating systems, most everything we touch during our days would have to be given up. I'd like to be able to say I could but could I? Could we survive the change of pace, tensions and the quiet?

Might be more interesting to ask whether Eli could handle returning. Eli's rolled forward in time to where the noise and advances of made over 200 yrs have completely changed how we live. Eli would have a unique perspective on the then and now.

a_contemplative_life wrote:That's very cool, thanks for sharing. I wonder why the doors are so low? I think I would get claustrophobic if I had to duck in the doorway every time I went in or out.

The doors are low because the walls are low, and those are low because building material was expensive/hard to get. An additional factor might be that heating a large house is more expensive than heating a small one.

Poor people couldn't afford a tall house.

This kinda reminds me of the sod homes ("soddies") built by pioneering Americans in the late 1800's. People built homes from what was available.