We are Charles and Frieda, two big city kids, who fell in love with the Baltics on a summer holiday and decided that buying a huge property with a beautiful Linden tree alley, a swimming pond and multiple acres of land would be just the right side project alongside our regular careers. But what is life for if not to take a jump into the unknown every once in a while?!
You can follow us along on YouTube where we share how we are building our first tiny house all by ourselves, make mistakes while learning completely new skills and enjoy the nature and culture of Latvia.
Welcome to our journey!
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Our resources
We are constantly learning on our journey and we want to share the videos, creators and resources that made us understand our tools, taught us useful skills and helped us build our tiny house and maintain our land.
Tree Guilds or Companion planting
I found this article on companion planting a good introduction to the theoretical idea behind it but also some hands-on tips on how to determine what kind of soil you actually have and should account for when planting your companions.
The Garden Bible
This gardening book called "Das praktische Gartenbuch" by Horst Koehler is so beloved by my grandma and my mum and aunts that everyone has a copy and I was lucky to be handed down one for our project.
I get why it is so beloved and that it is still sold in antique book stores because the tone of the book is very hands-on, to the point but at the same time also very beginners friendly with its easy index and pictures. Highly recommend if you can read and understand German - especiallyy if you think you have two left hands when it comes to gardening and it all seems a bit daunting and overwhelming.
Basics you should know before using a circular saw
You might have seen us fail catastrophically at our first circular saw cuts in Episode 1. This is the video that taught us almost immediately what we did wrong (we clamped the offcut side). Very helpful video for newbies like us and maybe you too.
The benefits and results of using linseed oil & and mixing it with pine tar
We decided for our Outdoor Kitchen Build (episode 1) to go with a natural finish of the wood to protect it from the natural impacts it would face over the years. From Swedish wooden house facades we already knew linseed oil paints but we did not know that you could also achieve a similar charred colour like the one you get with Japanese Shou Sugi Ban treatment (the literal burning of the wood) by mixing linseed oil with pine tar. Being the scaredy-cats that we are (or maybe were in the beginning) we did not want to accidentally burn down our forest and opted for the linseed oil and pine tar mixture as explained in the video.
How we built our sawhorses
As afar admirers we love what James Alofs is doing in Canada and almost religiously watch his videos when they come out on Saturdays. For some reason we did not at all plan for saw horses nor calculate to order enough wood for building them. Luckily, one of us at least did remember James building them in one of his earliest episodes. So at least the construction took no time at all.