Bracing Ourselves for Winter

How Do We Brace Our Homestead for a Danish Winter?

Last winter was our first winter in our small, Danish homestead. It was also the coldest winter in 20 years with several days reaching temperatures of minus 10 degrees.

Our homestead covered in snow in last years winter.

I remember, Herluf would take in bucket after bucket of firewood, and the masonry oven would burn all day. Still it was cold, so cold, that the inside of our front door would be covered with frost in the morning, and the dew that was sat on the inside of the glass of the rotten and leaky windows would freeze into bulbs of ice.

So this year, our second winter, we wanted to be prepared.

The work of preparing for winter began in the early summer, with the refilling of our woodshed. Last year, we used up firewood we thought would last two years, and we even had to buy in more in February to get us through the last bitter cold months of winter and early spring.

So in June when we talked to a local lady who had just had two trees cut down, Herluf was quick to offer to cut them up and remove them from her property in exchange for the wood. That’s how he ended up cutting firewood in an old ladys back garden in the heat of this years June.

The cleaving of the firewood took a long time, especially the largest clubs of tree were stubborn. Thankfully, so was Herluf, and he was able to cleave up everything and fill one room of our woodshed with firewood that would be dry to use for next years winter, or in the worst case, this January.

The next room we filled with firewood that we bought and had delivered. This firewood would already be dry, dry enough to burn in this winter, and we spent the last of the summer days stacking it inside the wood shed before the rainy days of autumn would inevitably come.

Stacking enough firewood was our top priority for preparing this years winter as burning firewood is our only heat source in our home.

But our work did not stop there. Besides restoring the masonry oven we changed out the two doors in the house, and we would have changed out all the windows too, if only we could afford it.

Instead, I have spent the last few weeks sewing thick curtains for the windows that did not yet have any window treatment, including the one window right in front of the masonry oven that lets out a lot of the heat. I also gave all the windows another thick layer of paint, if not for any insulating effect then just for the visual.

Other than that we have been closing gaps in the home, both outside under the roof, and inside around the beams that sits in the wall. The outside walls of our home is constructed with a so-called cavity wall, meaning that the walls is actually two walls and a cavity or hollow space in the middle. Again, we wanted to insulate this hollow space more than anything this year, but it too was something we simply can not afford at this stage.

That is why, we have also been preparing ourselves for yet another winter where we will be cold in the mornings before we have the fire going.

Where we will have to let the oven door stand open after we have baked buns in order to distribute the leftover heat into the home. Where we will have to, once again, dress up our daughter and our newborn baby, that will be born in the midst of this winter, in several layers of warm and homemade knits in order to keep them warm.

We have done what we can to prepare our homestead for this year, but still I am unsure if we ourselves are mentally prepared for what another winter here might bring.

How can we prepare ourselves fully for those dark days that seems to go on for ever? For the cold and the hard labour involved in keeping us warm?

My only hope is that this winter will be a mild winter, with lots of sunny days where the ground and trees will be covered in glittering snow and everything will smell afresh. Where we will feel even the slightest improvement with all the preparations we have done since last winter.

Nevertheless, the year is closing in on us now, and we have no more time for any more preparations. We have done our best. All we can do now, is hope.

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