My parents' house in Finnish Lapland / "A day in the life"

This is our house

I've posted a pic about it before, and now you get to see a fuller picture of our yard! I don't live at home anymore, but my parents live 20 kilometers from the nearest shop in Ivalo, Finland. We live by the third biggest lake in Finland. I'm not sure if this qualifies as a "day in the life" -post, but I find my parents' house quite unique! Sorry, some of the pics are a bit dark, I took these photos during the night.

A dark pic, but note the midnight sun.

My dad rents out places where people can leave their boats during summer. This is the view from our yard.

What I though you'd be interested in, is the way my dad has decorated our house! He has collected weird branches, gnarls from trees and unique stones from the lake. This is our warehouse (better pic below!)

These are some old chainsaws and motorboats' engines that have gone out of use. My grandpa owned the first chainsaw in our yard!

My dad is a keen fisherman, who brings a lot of fish from the lake all summer and winter. Here you can see some old fishnets. Note the old wood branches that have been used as door handles!

Here's the outer wall of our house! Dad has decorated it with weird looking trees. That's kinda his thing. My mom loves growing flowers in our small garden outside.

More of my dad's "art", boyfriend for scale! My dad has brought all that wood out of the forest, removed the bark, and put it on the wall. A month back we got Chinese tourists wondering up on our yard (which is odd as the nearest market is 20 km away), and they ended up coming inside, taking photos the whole time. My dad gave them reindeer horns as a gift.

Here are some of the stones I mentioned about! He has carried all those from the lake, islands and forest by himself! He turned 65 this year.

This one time he was at the lake with a boat, when he was supposed to build a fire and brew some coffee. However, he saw a glimpse of an intriguing rock, under the water, and he decided to dig it up. It was huge, but somehow he managed to carry it to his boat. He got an eerie feeling, didn't stay in the island, but came back home. When he got there, the police were there waiting for him, carrying news that his identical twin brother had died. Later the stone became his brother's grave stone.

Our house from the inside

Here you can see how he has decorated our house with the gnarls as well (not sure if that's the right word..) Our house is quite full of them, but he hasn't spread them everywhere.

Almost compulsory selfie, as I wanted a pic of the moose horns that are hanging on the wall as well! When I think about animal remains hanging on the wall I instantly think about redneck part of America, but here hunting and fishing are a part of how people get their living.

There are three traditional wooden cups hanging from the tree branches, we call them "kuksa". My mom paints a lot, there are hers and her mom's paintings on the background!

My dad also likes to do other stuff, he's made this himself! He also made a smaller version, but this is roughly 1,5 m wide. And yeah, he built the house himself too.

Some of the paintings we have on our walls continue the Lapland theme quite a lot! These are made by a local artist, who is also a family friend. And I think he's related to us as well. Oh.

And now we get to the best part ..

Which is the view. I love to look outside our living room window, and sewing the sun set ashore. These photos were taken last fall.

Our house during winter

Winter is a magical time, as we get looooots of snow and the temperatures can go to -40 degrees Celsius.

And finally

Here's my dad. I thought about this post as a post about our house, but as our house has been influenced by my dad so much, here's a pic of him staring on water. He's a cool guy.

Dog tax

I hate cats. But I hope you enjoyed this post! Some of the photos were a bit blurry, but I hope you forgive the potato. I love seeing glimpses of people's daily lives, so I hope you enjoy a peek of how we can live here in the north.