This is what true selfsufficiency looked like - Full Tour

[00:00:07]This is our self-sufficiency iring homestead, which is kind of a oneman's battle against the system. And today we're going to have a look on another self-sufficient homestead that is from different era and represents something else. Let's go and have a look on that place.

[00:00:28]Sh welcome to Riotala.

[00:00:35]This is not just a home for a small family but a complete system that provides prosperity and security for the future generations as well. The history of this place dates back to the 17th century and the road access was built almost 300 years later in the 1930s and that makes this place quite special.

[00:00:55]In the beginning, only three things were brought here. Salt, iron, and God's word. This place represents extreme self-sufficiency.

[00:01:06]This place represents radical self-reliance. And this place represents a dream I will probably never achieve.

[00:01:14]There's over 20 buildings here, and they're all built mostly out of natural materials. Let's go have a look around and uh see how this place supports the self-sufficient lifestyle.

[00:01:27]Even though the history dates back to 1650 or something like that, uh most of the buildings are built in the 1800s, all of the buildings are log buildings and they are built out of these massive logs. There's also many other buildings such as the smoke sauna, a forge, windmill, a production plant nearby the water and so on.

[00:01:51]This yard is designed in a way that it makes nice square space between the buildings. There's the living quarters, the food storage, and the animal shelter nearby. This makes the life more efficient when the animals are nearby when you have to go feed them in the morning or in the evening. And the food storage of course need to be close to the house as well.

[00:02:15]All right, let's begin the tour from the main house. Here in the main yard, there's two houses, the old house and the new main building, uh, which was built 1852.

[00:02:26]So, let's go have a look inside here.

[00:02:36]Oh wow. This is so amazing. Such a big building for the time it was built in.

[00:02:44]It's actually divided in two sections.

[00:02:46]There's like a similar kind of a kitchen/ living room on both ends for woman and for men. Pay attention here how simple things were used to build all this. There's barely any iron. And look at the size of the wood here. Oh, it's so amazing.

[00:03:09]This is so-called men's living room. And in here in the corner, they have this small woodworking workshop. In winter time, only these big rooms used to be heated. And uh there's a lot of spare time to make small kind of handcrafts. I can imagine the men uh working here to repair and make some tools and items for the next season during those long cold dark winter nights. This building was heated not one but with two of these massive massive ovens. I think you can fit something like 2 m long pieces of wood in there. I could fit there laying on the fireplace. fireplace alone is almost the size of our kitchen/ living room. Huh. It's so big. Let's take a measurement.

[00:03:59]One, two, three. It's something like three 3 and 1/2 mters on one side. This makes me wonder how much firewood was needed to keep a space like this warm and heat the oven like this. Our oven uses something like 7 to 10 cubic muh in one winter. And this oven is like five times bigger at least. So I wonder how many cubic meters of firewood they used.

[00:04:28]The chimney vents are so high up in there that you can't reach them. So this kind of a mechanism was built to operate them from the down here.

[00:04:39]I don't want to pull them too hard. I don't know if they work. This one here is the cooktop. It's made out of this massive thick uh iron plate. In winter time, if you came inside from the outside and you were freezing, the best place to warm yourself was up there on top of the oven. There's actually stair some kind of a stairs made here and you can fit to lay here.

[00:05:05]This fireplace is just work of art. I love it. Look at how it's made out of natural stones. There's even this big flat stone here as a platform. And then there's this uh thing that sucks all the moisture when you're cooking. All the steam and so on will go there. And there's an third hole in the chimney for for just that. This is made so well.

[00:05:30]It's rare to see a oven like this. And absolutely nobody makes these nowadays anymore. And it's made out of very simple materials. natural stone, some uh mortar, and uh a little pieces of iron like this here. There's a iron hook right there, and some piece of iron there to hold the structure. And uh I love it. It's just so beautiful. I wish we had an oven like this, but it doesn't even fit inside our house. It's bigger than our living room.

[00:06:02]Can you imagine how it felt sitting here in the middle of a winter? It's minus 20 -30° outside. The fireplace is radiating its heat. Your newborn baby is sleeping there. There's just candle light. The wind is hauling. You have a strong nice house around you. This place is just something else.

[00:06:28]>> This room was called nicea which means a woman's room.

[00:06:36]Back in the day, it was very normal that there were multiple generations who lived together in big houses like this.

[00:06:44]It was never just a single family, but a community of relatives and workers also outside of the family. In the time without these all these modern technology and luxuries, things were hard. So, people needed other people to help each other out. So, living as a community was a normal thing.

[00:07:06]people relied on each other and that's something that's pretty sad nowadays that we lack of this community.

[00:07:14]We also dream with Claus sharing our life in multiple generations or having a community around us. Maybe one day that will come true.

[00:07:26]Where men had their responsibilities, so did women. Usually making of clothes was woman's responsibility and weaving looms were a common sight in the corner of the room. Women also shared the responsibility of running the kitchen and that is actually where I sometimes struggle alone and dream of having some women around me to help with the kitchen and cooking.

[00:07:53]This oven is huge.

[00:07:56]It can fit 24 breads that are each 2 kilos size.

[00:08:02]A lot of bread.

[00:08:04]But I guess there has been a lot of people living in here. Also, this bucket has been used clearly for making bread, rye bread. There's This is the dough, sour dough that's left dry.

[00:08:22]Wow.

[00:08:24]This is the pantry that has been used for short-term storage of food.

[00:08:31]>> And that up there is where the bread would be stored.

[00:08:40]There's a nice toilet right here.

[00:08:44]I think this was used mostly in the winter, in the night time, so you don't have to go out there in the blizzard in the dark and cold, but you could come here and take your dump.

[00:08:57]And I'm really interested in the roof structure. I think the upstairs is off limits for regular guests, but I think the museum uh leader gave us permission to go places that are behind the roof structure. Doesn't disappoint me. Look at this size of the log that's supporting some of the roof and the structure here carrying all the weight.

[00:09:29]This is a large roof and there's a lot of snow in winter time. So, it needs to be strong. The chimney is built like this so that it penetrates the roof in the middle of the roof. That's the best possible solution for the chimney related to the flow of water on the roof. This beam here actually carries the weight of the chimney.

[00:09:51]And uh it's not disappointing me. It's a good size of a beam. And the end grain of this wood looks perfect. I think all of this wood used here is from primal forest and the growth rings are so thick that this is just not available anymore.

[00:10:08]This homestead was known and famous for being uh very pleasant place to work in and there's a few reasons. One of the rules was that everybody ate around the same table. Even the man of the house sit amongst the worker in this long table as an equal not above them at the end of the table or in the separate room but in the same table with the workers that were running the actual farm. And I think that's one of the key things for the success of this place is how they treated people with respect. The other thing that the people really liked was was that the sauna was heated every day and every day after work you could wash yourself and that was quite rare because the smoke sauners they use a lot of firewood but here they respected the people and they wanted them to give an opportunity to have a nice relaxing bath at the end of the day.

[00:11:14]still works.

[00:11:24]I wonder what was stored in here.

[00:11:32]There's multiple of these root sellers where the root vegetables and I guess some berries and jams and juices and so on would have been stored.

[00:11:41]Unfortunately, this is locked and the keys they gave me don't seem to have a key for this lock.

[00:11:55]I wonder how they've been able to lift these big rocks in the old days.

[00:12:04]So, this one's called a potato cellar.

[00:12:14]Wow, it's already cold in here.

[00:12:17]The potato seller was built around the period of late 19th century and early 20th century. Look at the roof.

[00:12:30]Ah, you can see moss in between the rocks working as an insulation.

[00:12:39]Feels quite scary to stand under the rock roof, but it's been standing there for a long time, so it should still stand there.

[00:13:04]That building right there is a smoke.

[00:13:17]This is a smoke sauna. All the walls are black and it's smelling like a smoke in here.

[00:13:23]And also here in Riotala, the smoke sauna is the only way of uh hygiene.

[00:13:30]There's no showers or running water. And this was the way to have a bath and to relax. It's not common, but here in Riyotala, the sauna was heated after every work day. And all the workers had a possibility to come here, wash themselves, and uh have a nice relaxing bath after the all the work was done.

[00:13:50]And this being a smoke zone means that there's no chimney. The smoke from the fire would actually go through the room and escape from a vent on the wall or on the roof. And uh that's why all the walls are black. Moa is the traditional Finnish sauna. the original one.

[00:14:09]>> I can imagine how the man of the house felt while cooling down from the sauna, sitting here and uh looking at the house and the homestead itself.

[00:14:42]This pump is modern and added later on.

[00:14:45]They built a nice way to still lift water easily.

[00:14:54]Let's have a look inside the animal shelter.

[00:14:59]In 1815, this barn had 25 cows, ball, two horses, 11 sheep, and six pigs.

[00:15:07]That's a plenty of cattle for one family. But that represents uh selfsufficiency and reliance. Whoever built this barn probably thought that he's going to make a barn so great that it's big enough and strong enough that the future generations don't need to build another one. Having a barn like this, of course, means that you're able to be pretty self-sufficient on the food. It can fit enough animals inside that it can sustain your family for the whole year, and they're able to reproduce in great enough numbers so that you will have a constant and reliable source of meat. Meat and protein are, of course, one of the most difficult areas of self-sufficiency. And the true self-sufficiency in a food begins from cattle. This is for example something that we haven't been able to achieve yet because we don't have a barn like this and we don't have the necessary hay fields. Let's have a look on the uh upstairs.

[00:16:09]Some of the roofs on these buildings are in pretty poor condition like this uh barn for the animals for example. It's a real shame that this place is trouble having funding from the museum institute in Finland because this place is unique and it's so well preserved. But if the roofs are in this condition and they're not going to last for too long. So people put some pressure on the museum institute to give some funding for this place.

[00:16:40]Let's have a look on this uh storage building. It has these separate sections for separate things. And uh this one here is actually I think uh meat and fish storage. And in this room they would preserve the meat and fish in salt bry. So salt was one of the few things that was brought here from the outside.

[00:17:00]One of these big buckets could fit up to three cows after they've been slaughtered and uh cut into pieces. they would be submerged in the salt bry and salted to preserve and lots of other meat and fish would be preserved in the same way. Another way to preserve meat is of course uh smoking and I think they used that one as well. One thing that makes this place quite unique is that most of the stuff you see here are original from this place like these milk separators.

[00:17:32]These were used to separate the cream from the milk to make cheese and butter.

[00:17:41]Let's have a look on the summer uh living quarters. These are non-heated spaces, so they would be only used in summertime. They have no fireplaces.

[00:17:52]Here's some laundry equipment.

[00:17:56]This is a mistress's room where she would make some clothes and store some linen.

[00:18:05]That's a next level self-sufficiency when you make your own clothes and linen. That's probably something that we're never going to achieve because it's just too much different uh skills and knowledge that we're missing that is required to make your own clothes from the beginning.

[00:18:29]This room is not just a bedroom for the seasonal workers, but also a clothing storage. Here you can see some of the traditional clothes made back in the day. I think most of the clothes were made here on the site. The winter clothes were made out of wool and then the summer clothes were either hemp or linen. One funny thing that tells me that the builders of this place were not lazy is the size of the wood they used and the fact that the whole upstairs all the way to the roof to the highest point is made out of logs. The lazy builders would just stop on the downstairs and continue with boards upwards because lifting big logs like this up here in the three, four, five, six m high, it's heavy job and it's a lot of extra work, but it makes a strong, durable building.

[00:19:21]And here in Riotala, there's no compromises. Everything is built from big wood and they made as strong and durable as possible.

[00:19:39]Next, let's have a look inside the tool shed.

[00:19:47]Look at the stairs.

[00:19:50]Wow.

[00:19:52]The next room is storage room for tools.

[00:19:56]And there's a lot of them. Of the reasons why I think this place represents the peak self-sufficient era is because this is from the era of no machines. Everything was manual and the manual tools are the most reliable and the cheapest. They're easiest to make from the nature. You can't really make any machinery yourself. You need modern infrastructure and the factories for that. And in self-sufficient lifestyle, you need so many different tools. You need construction tools. You need uh haymaking tools. You need gardening tools, you need forestry tools, you need uh cooking tools, you need slaughtering tools, you need uh laundry tools, all kinds of stuff. And it's it really is surprisingly a lot what you need. And uh here you can see some of the tools related to this lifestyles. There's some pitchforks, some rakes, some shovels for different kind of purposes, a lot of saws, some forestry tools, uh some skites, etc., Terra.

[00:20:58]>> There's even skis for children.

[00:21:07]And the final room of this building is the stable for the workh horses.

[00:21:14]When you're self-sufficiency operation is at this level, doing it with your shoulder strength is not enough anymore.

[00:21:20]And you really do need some workh horses. This place used to have multiple workh horses. It is simply just too much work to pull logs this size from the forest with manpower. You do need some horsepowers behind the work. And this kind of stable enables your homestead to have workh horses for those purposes.

[00:21:42]Workhorse is of course next level self-sufficiency compared to four-wheelers or tractors or any kind of machinery. They don't require oil changes or spare parts. They require some hay to eat and uh some uh shoe maintenance and uh probably a lot of stuff that I'm not aware of. My dream is to have a workhorse one day. But to my sadness, I didn't inherit any knowledge or skills or any experience related to that field. And it feels like an overwhelming thing to learn to learn how to upkeep and take care of a horse and not to mention how to train it and how to work with it. I think it's just too much for one man to obtain all those skills and knowledge. I'm so amazed to see this place because in my eyes this all looks doable, but you need a lot of knowledge and skills in our homes that I am the workhorse and we don't unfortunately have horses or the necessary building to upkeep them. But it is my dream one day to have a workhorse to do all the heavy work to transport the firewood and to pull some big logs from the forest, plow the fields for planting the grain and so on and so on and so on.

[00:23:10]You can see that these buildings have been standing for quite a long time.

[00:23:14]Like for some reason here in the middle of the war there are way newer logs and these are certainly a lot older. To me it's so amazing that this whole place was built the future generations in mind. The builders never thought just themselves. They always thought that they want to build a building that lasts hundreds of years. There's multiple of these barns and they all follow the same principle. nice strong natural foundation, big strong logs for the walls, and a wooden shingle uh roofing.

[00:23:50]And they are just something else. I've never seen a homestead where a barn for hay was made this strong.

[00:24:00]I have just realized one thing that I will never achieve this kind of setup.

[00:24:07]And there's few reasons for that. One being this took 11 generations to build, 350 years, and there's only two generations of us at the moment. And of course, there's always been multiple men working and not just one. So, these huge construction projects were carried out with a group of men, not just one. And the fact is also that this place was built for a community, not for just one small family.

[00:24:45]This is a public museum actually and you can come here if you want. Just check online the opening hours. This is not open every day.

[00:24:54]It is also possible to rent this place for private occasions like weddings or events or whatever. And they have like a private group tours available. So if that's something you're looking for, yeah, you could consider doing that.

[00:25:15]To be able to grow, process, dry, and store grains is not an easy task in self-sufficiency without machinery. You will most probably need horses to blow the fields. You need a separate building for uh processing the grains. You will need a windmill to process the grains into the flour. And you will need a storage building to store the grains uh without the mice and other pests getting into them. And this place has it all.

[00:25:45]It's one of the ways to secure that you have enough food for the whole year. And the animals, they need grains as well.

[00:25:52]Next, let's have a look on those things.

[00:25:54]How this homestead was able to produce its own grains.

[00:26:03]Bread has been a crucial part of the diet in the old days. So getting your grains mil has been necessary.

[00:26:17]Here in realam they have built a windmill for milling the grains.

[00:26:53]This building right next to the windmill.

[00:26:56]is a storage for the grains.

[00:27:05]I'm sure this building had to be built mice proof because all the other animals are also hungry and they really like grains.

[00:27:14]But it looks really well built.

[00:27:19]Wow, there's more space in here.

[00:27:23]Here we We have Finland's largest uh drying barn. Let's go have a closer look. This is pretty magnificent building as well.

[00:28:03]It's three stories and it's built in 1895.

[00:28:13]When we visited this place the last time, I feel like I got lost in this huge drying barn.

[00:28:20]>> It's like a labyrinth.

[00:28:23]So in this room in the drying barn, all the grains were dried after the harvest.

[00:28:29]And this is the massive heat storing oven that was slightly heated to keep the temperatures uh low enough so that the seeds would still germinate but not spoil from the heat. The grains would be stocked up here and dried there for 1 to 3 days and then they would be processed in the grains in different rooms. I guess this uh log part of this building is older. And then there's this addition part with a more modern machinery in it.

[00:28:59]Let's go have a look around this building and see if I even understand how this building was used. I'm not an expert in this field. This machine is spinned and it blows away all the waste product from the grains.

[00:29:19]This place was so successful in growing grains and food that other people would come here to work and get paid in food.

[00:29:28]And also this homestead borrowed so much food to other homesteads around and neighbors that the value of the depths increased over the value of this whole homestead. And this was a huge homestead back in the days, one of the biggest in Finland for sure. The land area of this homestead was 940 hectares. Most of it of course forest and this place was just so successful. And I think the key to that success was the generosity and the respect for the workers. It was a religious family who run this place and they had some healthy values and I think that's one of the reasons why they were so successful.

[00:30:13]Our my filming crew is starting to be tired and we still have lots to cover.

[00:30:21]I'd personally love to see this place returned to life. To see all the things working, everything repaired, and everything functional, and a small self-sufficient community living here.

[00:30:33]That would be so amazing to see. I hope that happens someday. This one here is just an old barn. I guess they stored some equipment and some hay for example in there. They have not one but five horse plows there.

[00:30:52]Pretty nice here by the lake. They have this nice building for I guess it's for storing and servicing the boats, but also to be able to handle the fishing nets. Fishing was of course very important part of self-sufficient food back in the days.

[00:31:24]And this building here made it possible to be fixing the nets even in the rain and to keep your fishing equipment neatly in order. It is known that in summertime men would go fish every night and uh they would have fish soup for every Saturday to be served for the whole farm. Here we have few handmade wooden boats. That one is patched pretty hard. There's also this older type of boat that's carved out of one piece of big wood.

[00:31:57]And next comes my favorite.

[00:32:01]There's another big building here closer to the water. It's kind of a a multi-purpose production plant setup. And I tell you, this is something amazing. Let's go have a look on that.

[00:32:18]Here we have a steam powered production plant. There's a single steam engine that's powering multiple uh appliances.

[00:32:26]I think this is the thing that every self-sufficient homestead should have because here we can use firewood to have energy and to produce firewood with firewood and to produce uh lumber with firewood and to produce wood shingles for the roof with firewood. That's something to think about because that that way you will never run out of energy.

[00:32:56]This room was used to make soap and to wash laundry. There's two firewood uh powered uh hot water heaters and multiple wash buttons here. That's the whole process from the bottom to top including everything. This kind of setups don't exist anywhere anymore. And I'm very impressed. Laundry is one of the problems when you're living off grid and without the modern luxuries. And this setup is throughoutly thought to make that process as efficient as possible. I think this would work perfectly.

[00:33:30]Next to the laundry room, we have the engine room where the steam engine is.

[00:33:35]Unfortunately, it's missing some pieces.

[00:33:37]It's not a complete setup, but here's the idea. This one here is a steam boiler. It is firewood powered. It doesn't produce electricity, but mechanical power. Here's a belt that was attached to the steam engine, and it would spin the axle on the roof of the actual production site. There would have been some kind of a wheel here spinning this belt. So, this is just an engine room for the energy. And here are actually the missing pieces of the chimney that would have gone here to connect the uh exhaust of the steam. Of course, steam is relatively modern technology already and it's a it's a machine and it requires service, but there are a few things that make it way more self-sufficient option than any other engine available today. First, it's powered by firewood, and if you have firewood, you have energy with this machine.

[00:34:34]The second thing is that these are very low revolution per minute machines which makes them last a lot longer. As long as you put a little bit of lubricant to the moving parts, you'll be fine and this machine will work for a long time. Back in the day, this steam engine was one of the key things for success here. With this, they were able to produce their own lumber, for example, which is by hand a very tedious and hard work to do.

[00:35:07]Now here you can see the power distribution system. This one huge axle up here divides the power to different appliances.

[00:35:16]There's five different uh apparatuses attached to the steam engine. The first one we're going to have a look is this machine that makes these shingles for the roof.

[00:35:25]You'd have the engine running and this piece here would go back and forth. And here's actually a blade that will cut your shingles out and then it will spit the shingles right there.

[00:35:37]Second apparatus is this grain mill here. Of course, with this you don't have to rely on wind to get your grains milled into a flower. It's not too windy often here. So, I think this was a quite nice um upgrade. You could mill anytime.

[00:35:54]This must have been a game changer here to be able to produce your own lumber.

[00:35:59]This is already quite similar what we see today with the big blade spinning here and the bed moving uh back and front. And this is actually quite long one. I think uh you are able to produce pretty long lumber with this. There's a separate uh cutting station right here.

[00:36:18]It's missing the blade at the moment, but I guess one or two men could be cutting here the wood. And here we have the splitting station for two people.

[00:36:28]So, you'd put the pieces of logs here and this would go back and forth, up and down, and the blade would come here and split the wood. I think with this machinery, the firewood processing would be quite efficient, but it requires multiple people, some to cut the wood and two people to split it. And from here, I think the split firewood would be thrown to a horse guard and brought to the firewood storage.

[00:37:02]This building used to be the old main building located down by the lake, but it has been moved here and it's been working as a guest house mainly. also where unmarried women used to live.

[00:37:18]And this place is really known by its hospitality. So there had to be room for the guests because there has been a lot of guests coming here.

[00:37:29]Wow, look at the size of the logs.

[00:37:33]They are huge.

[00:37:51]When someone on the farm died, they were brought here and placed on a long bench and remained there until the funeral could be held. So, let's take a look inside here.

[00:38:15]All right, now it's time to have a look on the forge. You know that the homestead's level of self-sufficiency was something else when they have their own blacksmith with their own forge. So, this is the forge. Let's look inside and see where the tools and uh hinges and latches and such things were made in this homestead.

[00:38:38]Oh wow, this is nice.

[00:38:42]Very basic, but it seems functional. The actual forge is huge. And then there's this big bellows to pump air into the flames to make it harder. And of course, some anvils with some uh attachments. I can see how some of the simple tools were made here. use his thongs to grab the hot iron from the forge and start banging here.

[00:39:09]This is nice.

[00:39:11]I'd like to have a forge like this to be able to make my own uh lo carving tools, for example.

[00:39:18]All right, I think we're getting done with the tour. There's so much to see here. It's impossible everything in one video. Uh if you're interested in, you should come here in person and see for yourself. This is so amazing place.

[00:39:36]I hope you enjoyed this video. But for now, it's time to say goodbye.