Open doors in Rihula
Since July 2023, we’ve been keeping you up to date with the dry details of our association’s foundation. This week, things are finally getting concrete: after more than a year of planning, we’re bringing the old forestry farm “Rihula” in the east of Estonia back to life after 32 years of vacancy.
Our first construction project in Estonia started small last week: on Wednesday, August 14, Lola and Lukas set up a small tent in front of the sauna hut and, as preparation team, did their first shopping, hammered tent poles and mowed a first niche in the tall grass for camping. Georg and Krista from the farm’s current owner family pick them up from the train station and provide the first mowing tools. Thursday night at 2 a.m., after almost two days of driving through Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, reinforcements finally arrive in the form of the materials car, driven by Stella, Jo and Hagen. Since then, the team on the farm has been growing just as steadily as the mown area. Before we can start the building activities at the old forester’s house, the barn and the old stable in traditional log construction, we first have to cut back decades of flora. Behind the greenery, a beautiful, sleepy ensemble with a great atmosphere emerges, which is already a place to feel at home. Behind the romantic wooden facades, however, there is also a lot of work to be done in the coming years. On Friday, David, Luise and Petra are joining us and enrich the camp with music by playing guitar, violin and clarinet after work.
Before we can get started with the exciting woodwork, roof renovation and garden planning, we first have to set up the basic infrastructure: a mobile toilet is loaded onto our trailer, fitting to the centimeter, a generator is picked up, a shower area and a large community tent are built. For the kitchen, the old sauna house is first cleared of rubble and made usable.
On Saturday, reinforcements for the core team arrive from two different directions: Klaas and Janne from Germany, Anna joins from Finland. The association’s members are now complete for the first two weeks. Here we go! Well, first of all it’s Sunday, and we wanted to have a day off, you have to relax sometimes. Or so we thought. Surprisingly, Klaas and Hagen find themselves unexpectedly on the neighboring sawmill site on Sunday. The sawmill worker, a neighbour who Krista managed to persuade to take a large order at the weekend, arrives about two minutes after us and speaks very little English. We draw numbers in the air with our fingers, Krista helps with the translation and in the end, we have actually placed our first Estonian timber order. The farm is no less busy. Even though the community tent is now up and running, comfortably furnished with carpets, a fire place and newspapers, the motivation to clean up the kitchen and cut some more gras, beats the Sunday duty to relax.
The ordered wood can be collected the very next day and Klaas steers the trailer through adventurous forest paths. At the same time, Jo and Krista get to know all the hardware stores in the area, while a storage for firewood is created in the old stable on the farm. The sauna that has become the kitchen is given a new veranda, and David and Janne build a small peer at the shore of the Kunda River that flows directly behind the kitchen.
In the afternoon we get some expert input. An employee of RMK, the forestry authority that also operates hikers’ cabins in Estonia, comes to visit. Our guest runs an Estonian-language blog at https://kodusadam.com/ about the renovation of his own house. He helps us to assess the condition of the building and advises us on how to prioritize the construction sites. We quickly agree: first plug the holes in the roof! We’ll continue here on Wednesday, because tomorrow, August 20, is an Estonian holiday: Estonia regained its independence in 1991. See you soon!
