I recently took over my family summer cottage. My great-grandparents had it built in 1937, and lived there and raised my grandma and her siblings for roughly the warmer 6 months of every year. It is perhaps not so old, but for some context, Iceland had an extended "dark ages" which it didn't begin to exit until the World Wars. Many people still lived with their livestock in the traditional stone and turf ("bricks" cut out of root-rich bog mud) huts. Wood framed houses were fairly new.
I feel very fortunate for the time I spent with my great-grandma here during my childhood, and to have gotten her perspective. She lived through such changes! I also feel fortunate to now have a chance to save their house. It's a wonderful place, with wonderful character, in a wonderful setting. We have a large stream with waterfalls. A forest my great grandpa planted, and nothing but mountainous countryside in three directions. It's a place for appreciating nature and a simple life.
Unfortunately over the past couple+ decades it has fallen into a bit of disrepair. It was quite expensive, and tradespeople here are quite expensive (if you can even get them to find time to come out), so I'm taking it upon myself to do as much as I can. My aim is to repair and largely restore it, or at least keep any needed changes in the spirit of the architecture/style/period/ethos. However, it's quite hard to figure out what "style" it is. For Iceland it is quite unique. Not many people at the time had the means to build such a large, timber-clad summer cottage. (Most old summer cottages here are quite a bit smaller.) I've been doing a lot of research on how old houses were built, and I've discovered that many of the details on this house are different than the norm -- at least very different than American houses, which most of the documentation I can find is about.
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In the third picture you can see the newly built house. One interesting detail I haven't seen much of is that the gable overhang is beveled such that there is more overhang at the ridge than at the eves. I'm not sure if there is a technical term for that? It's a detail I like a lot, and I'm surprised more houses do not have.
Another somewhat unique detail is that the siding under the gables is board-on-board. There is also no bottom trim. At the top the trim is just a board sitting in front of the board-on-board. The garage's siding is also board-on-board. I guess this is more common in Scandinavia, but rare in the US.
The windows are a bit different than I've seen on most old houses. The mullions/muntins or whatever they're called are quite beefy and just have a simple bevel to them. The vertical ones are bigger, and the horizontal ones about half that size. The panes are held in with thin beveled wood trim with a nice reveal, which I think looks a lot nicer than putty-glazed windows.
The exterior window casing sits in front of (rather than butted to) the clapboard siding.
The chimney is also a bit strange. It is not brick. There is no clay liner. It appears to be made out of the same concrete partition blocks as the foundation walls. Just a big open cavity all the way up. It goes down into the basement where there is a (not the original one, but old nonetheless) coal boiler, which we use wood in. It heats an anti-freeze mix that thermosiphons through radiators throughout the house. That works fine. It also is supposed to transfer heat to the hot water tank, but that does not work so well.
The clapboard siding of the house continues to form a fence around the back porch.
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It looks like there are wood planks at the rake on the top of the roof tiles. Anybody know what that detail is called and seen other examples? I've seen a couple other examples, but no info. I'm guessing it's not a very durable architectural detail?
The porch wall seen in the upper picture has since had the middle section totally removed, opening it up, and the wood porch has been replaced with pavers.
The white tents in the background of the second picture are British troops, who were occupying Iceland at the time in the early 1940s.
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Here you can see electrical poles, so at this point they have electricity. Originally they did not.
Water comes from a gravity-fed spring well higher up on the mountainside. In 80 years it's never gone dry.
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Fortunately, most of it is still all original. The siding is original. The windows, though some quite weathered, are original (minus panes which have been replaced).
You can see the flagstone pathway. My great-grandpa collected those and pieced it together. It goes almost all the way around the house.
I've since applied a coat of pine tar linseed oil mixture to the clapboard. I'm also using linseed paints for the windows.
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The yellow siding under the gable here is unfortunately thoroughly rotted and eaten and needs to be replaced. I intend to change some details to allow for 1 inch blanket of rock wool insulation and a 12mm air gap with better ventilation/drainage details behind the siding. Because new boards are thinner than the original stuff, I should be able to do this and still end up flush with the window casing.
The horizontal member (muntin?) on the window on the right was unfortunately rotted, but I've just successfully fabricated a replacement.
In the late 90s while doing some foundation repair, the area outside the basement door was excavated and this awkward concrete retaining wall was added to make room for a wood deck outside the basement door.
