The Renovation of our Squat, Oslo- Norway - Living Free

I just came across an SD card and saw it was one with the stages of renovation that we done to the cabin that we live in for free in Oslo, Norway. The place was empty for many years and now its our new home. We don't pay rent to live here because we are occupying it. I'm so happy to have found these photos again, and that I wont loose them on Steemit!
The place was in quite bad shape, there's no water here and it has electrics but its disconnected, we did setup to get reconnected but instead decided to stay of grid with nothing. We don't even have an address because the cabin is so old its not on any system anymore. The Smart Meters are being installed this week into the surrounding houses and cabins but we refuse them so we shall get solar power instead. If you want to watch a documentary of people doing actual physical self research about these then please check this vid on pootube, its called "The truth about smart meters" and if you have one in your home then I'd beg you to watch it.

Anyway want to see a renovation of a squat?

All done with no electric tools , just a DeWalt drill?! And no car to move things?! This was a real mission this project but we got the impression that nobody will be showing up if ever to kick us out and if we stay a year that means we paid like a very very very cheap rent, so we invested a bit of time and cash to have a 30m2 home as a base with access 5 mins away to the Sea!

---

This is the side of the cabin and you see the back door leading to the kitchen. It still a shock to see these photos because of how different it is now. Just the other day I saw the other side of the stream, a set of really damaged steps in the wilderness, and the realized that it was the original path up to the cabin. We made a new one because we never found the original until now! Here's the 50 steps leading up, it was just all jungle! We had all our things at a permanent camp we had made in a forest which was quite far way from this cabin, but this was the jackpot, and before winter also. The cabin was big enough to do something with, and we decided firstly that we could insulate the place. This did at first mean to take all the inside wood off the walls, insulate the empty spaces there and then put the old wood back on, but that would still leave the ceiling to do as well. I knew that also it would be shitty work, and we would never get the wood on the walls off and back on in one piece, so I suggested that we would make a new shell inside of the original walls thus saving a lot of effort and time and a bad finish at the end of it, oh and no insulation in the ceiling. ---

Wheres there are trees, the wood will be cheap!

I laughed at the price of all the wood needed to do a suspended ceiling, the perimeter walls and 2 planned internal walls which would create 2 bedrooms and a lounge from the cabin. Here's the space we had to work with(Below), the kitchen is the room in the back where the window was smashed from the old burglary. We did discuss whether to just take our tents and put them up inside the cabin for the winter, and have our wood burner that we had saved in a bush from last winter installed. Fuck it we had work and money, so we deserved some luxury of a bedroom each and nice thick insulated walls.

We needed 333m of 4x2 wood which we got delivered with the rolls of 10 cm insulation. we had to use glass as its the cheapest, obviously wood or hemp is much healthier for humans and the world but it was expensive. We did the ceiling firstly and started with a hammer and nails, but after an hour I went to get a drill which would anyway be needed unless I wanted to spend years instead of one month!

The Start- the ceiling!

We used 2x2 wood double layed to make 4x2 because its less weight to be held up on the existing ceiling, if you try to put 4x2 up in 5 m lengths with just 2 people- it would be a huge struggle. You see we had no lights just head torches when we started to build, it was fun and we slept there until we started insulating , then we evacuated to the basement which was quite bad!

Once the ceiling was up, Cronus (the guy I occupy with since a while) knows how to do some electrics and we ran cables for lights before it was ready for insulation. We didn't have plasterboard at this point because we had many more things to do before we got to that part.

Swapping windows was the next main thing

Something that was ridiculous to achieve without having a car to use. The first one I found 2nd had online was a window to replace this huge one that's would be in my room (when the room would be built!) It was 2 hours on a bus away, and was cheap so OK- it was a nice day, lets go for a little trip. I arrived there and got the window, carried it down to the bus-station to find that there's 3 buses running each day from that place. I had told her I was coming with the bus but when I got there she said that she was anyway that day driving to Oslo! I did a 7 or 8 hour round trip for this window and even had to pay more than what my month ticket was worth as it was so far away from Oslo. We (me and the dogs) tried to hitchhike but people asked if the window was mine after asking if the 2 dogs and rucksack was also mine, and the window was just always the No-Goer.

But a beautiful place to be waiting a long time for a bus..

Back up to the cabin and time to fit the window!

It took altogether 9 hours to go get it and 1 hour to fit it!

We found a 2 new rolls of insulation in the city in the trash and used this up first, and I remember know that the new wood at this point hadn't been ordered, we got all this 4x2 also from the city in trash on the street and the ladder was damaged and we got very cheap from a shop. When the weather was good we would do work on the outside, you see the white paint on the old grey paint is primer on bare wood, the old paint held up well and all was sanded down before hand.

Inside..

You see more clearly how we did the ceiling and we have started insulation.

We didn't have any more windows yet at this point so it was time to order wood and look online for windows. The basement needed some attention, it had many cracks where there should be cement all around the chimney had sunk and so I treated it will some cement and thin slices of brick, otherwise it was very likely to move when we started to add material into the cabin..

I thought to add this wooden beam supporting the main beam that runs the length of the cabin considering the piece of wood was just laying there and I dug down some and concreted the post into the ground and screwed it with hench screws next to the chimney stack. The chimney itself wasn't even needed any more as we have made the wood oven chimney going out of the wall and I went to see it and it was HUGE! It had to go, it was at a guess 250kg+ of heavy stone and concrete. If I wanted to ad a lot of weight then it made sense to remove some weight if I could. I had just a Stanley claw hammer and a tiny crowbar- not even a club hammer or something heavier. In a way though it would have caused more damage to the rest of the chimney to use some heavier tool and ideally I'd would have cut it away as not to disturb the chimney stack at all. My first boss was a very good carpenter and general builder and he had said to me "never touch or disturb the chimney stack!" and so I was quite paranoid anyway to start smashing it with a bigger hammer.()

Its a Beast!

I had already removed a reinforced steel bar concrete flat piece that sat up on 4 stone legs on the corners, and it was so heavy if I lifted it im certain we would have most likely fallen through the roof together! I had to move it flat on the roof with my feet and slide it of the edge of the roof (*Left in the red circle*)

Now watch what 4 hours and a Stanley hammer achieved, the neighbors must have hated me for the 1000's of bangs of a tiny piece of metal chipping away a huge chunk of concrete and hard stones!

---

Never 'dis the Stanley mate!

I left some because I didn't want to mess with the roof felt around the chimney, which I need to check again now I'm reminded! The most was gone and I did plan to cement it closed but ended up just laying roof felt over it. I use it for fresh air in the cabin from inside.

---

We had got already the plasterboard for the ceiling but this was a new one for me - usually you would make a new ceiling level and from 9.5mm thick, but here we had just gone with the existing ceiling (its a lot of work to level out a new ceiling and is just for "looks" anyway!) and we soon saw that the ceilings were all different angles and that the cabin gets smaller as it goes towards the chimney were it had previously years before sunken. The plasterboard dosn't bend! I was thinking that I had broken the first rule of building work - "Don't cut corners" as in taking short cuts because you will have to take it all down and do it again at some point anyway. Luckily though, this must be very common here in Norway that ceilings are wonky and builders are lazy, because they do a 6 mm thick plasterboard that bends!!

We could now start the ceiling as we still hadn't found the right sized windows to fit or smaller than the wholes we had there. Without power tools I wasn't even willing to start installing windows that needed the structure changing so we only could get ones the same size or smaller which was fine anyway, the smaller the windows, the better insulated a place is.

With the ceiling completely plaster-boarded, the first internal wall could now start only because it was having no windows!

The beginning of the new internal walls and the front door has been removed and set up for a thin long window we found online, and in the photo above is the making of the new wall for the first window I got.

In part two we go to get a door and more windows, but not a bus this time, well there was a bus or two and a train involved, but the most distance was with a boat!!!

I did months ago, a tour of my home but was limited to pictures, hence the re-makings because I have more photos. Appology's to the people who I know had read the first version , the beginning was the same!

Part Two of this building project will continue on!