When most people move house, it means signing a contract, handing over a huge amount of cash, moving cardboard boxes and choosing new curtains. This summer I found out that in Sweden, ‘moving house’ can mean exactly that, ‘moving house’.

 

Swedes are a resourceful nation and for those with practical know-how it can be cheaper to buy an old house, take it apart and transport it to your plot, than to buy a new house, already standing.

 

Ready to start at six am prompt, we were a motley crew made up of the new owners’ extended family. We charged ourselves up with strong black coffee and I felt weak at the knees at how unprepared I was for a weekend of dismantling.

 

Only myself and Kalle, the most senior of our team of destructors, was not wearing designer builder’s clothes. I went for the generic English DIY ‘old clothes’ and Kalle was wearing a pair of clogs and some rather short purple shorts; to be fair, his legs did look rather good.

 

Everyone else had heavy duty attire with loops, zips and pockets, all emblazoned with logos like Caterpillar, Beijer and Bosch. Göran, I could forgive as he is a professional carpenter, but Matte and Anders who both work in offices, had the most fancy workman’s clothes I have ever seen and Matte even had a leather tool belt.

 

I wanted a leather tool belt too.

 

A bad workman blames his tools. I make no bones at accusations of being a bad workman, but I did feel at a slight disadvantage, as I had no tools to blame. Everyone else had brought along a selection of their biggest and best power saws, drills, wrenches and lump hammers. But what it all boiled down to was one thing: the crow bar. Anders was the unspoken king and there were daggers of jealousy as he pulled out his adjustable crow bar. No one had ever seen one of these before and initially he came in for some ribbing for buying posh tools…. But, Oh Boy! When it came to pulling out the nails, Anders was tops.

 

Anders, Matte and myself were sent up ladders to the roof, below us the rest of the gang gutted the house. There were two green skips that had been delivered the day before, one for burnable waste the other for non burnable, and our task was to remove the tiles and sling them from the roof into these skips. This was probably one of the most satisfactory experiences I have ever had – the sound of heavy ceramic smashing down into the metal container as bits of tile flew up. It was like watching a slow motion crash over and over again. I started off by throwing single tiles down until I received ‘one of those looks’ from Anders and Matte which implied not only that I was being a bit of a weakling, but that we had so many tiles to remove if we threw them down one by one, we would never finish. I started to test myself – three at a time, four at a time, five at a time. I tried six at a time and the momentum required to throw so many tiles almost took me with them to the ground. I decided that four at a time was a good number to maintain an even pace for the whole roof. Matte put me to shame by throwing down piles of at least seven at a time and Anders made some excuse about having a bad shoulder that meant he couldn’t do any throwing at all. I didn’t resent Anders for this, I just resented him for having thought of this excuse before I did.

 

It’s not so much a fear of height that I suffer from, as the fear of falling from the height in question, but I felt perfectly comfortable on the non-slippery ceramic tiles. As we removed the tiles to reveal more precarious surfaces, I was told that falling was the least of our worries. It was the wasps that we had to look out for.

 

We had already found several abandoned nests, but it was just a matter of time before we found a live nest. It was not a question of if, but when and who would discover it. The answer to that came a couple of minutes later as I lifted a tile. A swarm of angry wasps launched an angry assault on my bare skin. In seconds I had three stings; I threw myself over the apex of the roof and made for the ladder. Anders and Matte who had seen me being attacked were already down, enjoying my pain.

 

We reassessed the situation on ground level and after a drink of water and a quick look at my wounds (“Are you allergic to wasp stings?” “We’ll soon see…”), Matte decided to climb back up and take on the wasps. Anders and I wished him luck, opened a packet of biscuits and watched from a safe distance as he used a long plank to knock down the nest.

 

The wasps calmed down and on we toiled through the midday heat as tiles were removed to reveal asphalt to reveal wooden slats to reveal the bare beams of the house. We sweated, tanned and burnt, on the rarest of dry weekends in one of the wettest summers on record, as we avoided the multiple hazards of wasp nests, sticking out nails and falling off.

 

As the roof looked more like a skeleton, and the work involved some proper danger. Matte was allocated as the one to hang over the edge and risk life and limb. Anders justified this by saying that Matte had been a scout in the Swedish army which meant that hanging from things, while performing an act of brute strength was well within his ability. I asked Anders if his military training would help.

“Well,” he said “I was in the radar division of the Navy, so if a Russian submarine approaches us, there is a very slim chance that I will spot it before it spots us”

 

I looked around the forest, to the ground, up in the branches, scanning the area for hostile action. How many Russian submarines did you find?”

 

“Me personally, or the Swedish Navy as a whole?”

 

“Both”

 

“Me? None. The Swedish navy? In 50 years of Cold War, we managed to find one Russian Sub. The task was made easier by the fact that it had run aground on a sandbank.”

 

Even though I was never in the army, I was a teenager in Birmingham, so if push came to shove, I knew that I was probably the best prepared for a combat situation.

 

We stopped for lunch (meatballs, beetroot salad) and I took a look at the house transformed. The basic shape still resembled a house, but gone were the doors, roof, and windows, leaving just the supporting structure.

 

And so we progressed, like Melville’s whalers, stripping a leviathan down to its basic elements and extracting the parts that held value under its old, weather beaten skin, namely the eaves, the beams, the supporting walls, the insulation and much of the tongue and groove.

 

When we finally reached the floorboards there was great trepidation amongst the previously macho men.

 

“What are you afraid of?”

“There’s a chance we might find a…….”  The fear was palpable “….. a badger!”

“A badger!” I said with disbelief “How cute!”

 

I was quickly put right after a flurry of disapproval. The unanimous opinion was that the badger is Sweden’s most brutal and dangerous creature; that we should put twigs in our boots as the badger will only release its grip once it hears the snapping of bone. We began removing the floorboards cautiously, when all of a sudden Anders saw a flash of fur. Everyone leapt back and attempted to leap into the air.

 

“Badger! Badger!”

The ‘badger’ didn’t move…

“Could be a trick,” said Anders, “they’re crafty like that.”

 

I stepped forward, selflessly putting my own safety behind my own curiosity. Giving the ball of fur a quick prod with my boot, I looked back to reassure everyone and regaining their composure, they stepped down from whatever high vantage points they had climbed up. As I lifted it up, it was clear that this was nothing more than a long dead cat, which must have crawled under the house one winter to snuggle up and end its days in peace. It was was petrified solid and harmless to the point of not even being smelly having probably died happily in its sleep.

 

I gave it a fitting send off, saying a few well-chosen words as I slung it into the ‘burnables’ skip.

 

By half way through the second day, the house had been reduced to 2 skips (burnable and non burnable waste), three piles of different size timber (tongue and groove, beams and floorboards), a large bundle of insulation, the triangular eaves and the walls, both neatly stacked.

 

All that was left on the plot was the bare earth where once the house had stood. A few woodchips and splinters remained as a sign of our destructive labour and an ant nest, which for so long had remained undisturbed bustled with life trying to repair their mound, as we finally relaxed. The old woman who owned the land came out to have a look. On the one hand there was relief that she had been paid to have this old house removed, yet on the other hand there was remorse that the edifice which had stood for so long was now gone forever. She told us that she had 12 grandchildren that had all played here, but now they were all grown up and had moved away, their laughter never to fill this place again.

 

It made me realise that the house was more than just the timber and nails that were now lying so neatly waiting to be hoisted away, but somehow something more organic. Even in its abandoned state we had unearthed reminders of life in all its stages, in the form of bird nests, wasps, and the cat that had died so peacefully so many summers and winters ago. This was a house that had seen happiness and sadness, life and death, summer and winter, day and night.

 

But this house would live again and the cycle of life would continue, regeneration following degradation. With the bare bones hauled onto the back of a lorry, the house would soon be rebuilt 100 miles away and a new generation, the collective children and grandchildren of those who had sweated to dismantle it, would soon be running through the rooms bringing it to life once more.