Biofore Magazine 2020

By Laura Iisalo Photography Laura Iisalo

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Playing house Stuck at home with more time on your hands? Maybe it is time to take up some do-it-yourself projects and become the master of your toolkit.

W ith people spending more time than ever at home, apartments and houses are now functioning as workplaces, gyms and classrooms, while socialising with friends and family is be- ing done safely outdoors. Adjusting to this 'new normal' has resulted in an unprece- dented boom in do-it-yourself (DIY) pro- jects, along with a surge in sales of garden- ing and home improvement products. In the US alone, sales at garden centres and building supply stores were up more than 22% in the first half of 2020 com- pared to the year before. Additionally, according to a survey from the Europe- an Home Improvement Monitor, 25% of consumers in 11 European countries re- port they are working more on home im- provement projects. “When the coronavirus outbreak began in March, our initial worry was that the whole world would shut down. And it did for a while, as shipping was on hold and factories in many industries were forced to close. But in the beginning of May, we noticed that the lockdown had created a new marketplace for the wood industry, and the demand went up as a result,” says Mika Nokelainen , a Supply Chain Man- ager at UPMTimber.

The summer holiday, reinvented Part of that demand was from people like Anna Ehanti and Henna Simola . The long-time friends were planning to spend their summer holidays travelling abroad with their families, but instead they em- barked on a journey together by purchas- ing a 1950s cottage just a stone’s throw away from the centre of Helsinki. It was love at first sight for Simola, who saw theminiature wooden house first. “I fell in love straight away,” says Simo- la. “It was the same colour as the place my grandmother had was when I was a kid and I immediately felt at home. I didn't even want to think it through, I just knew that I wanted it.” Luckily, Ehanti felt the same way, and soon the two friends were enlisting the help of their extended families to fix up the cottage. The two women spent the summer installing a kitchen, painting sur- faces and putting up new wooden boards in and outside their new summer house. Neither Ehanti or Simola are experi- enced at DIY, but they wanted to create a cosy placewhere they can spend timewith their friends and family. “I like the social aspect of this place. We have a lot of friends who can pop over on their bicycles. This place allows us to

Anna Ehanti and Henna Simola have lovingly restored a Finnish cottage that dates back more than 60 years.

“This has been fun because the cottage is so small, it’s like a little playhouse.”