Construction Diary #1: The Moomin House and the Great Flood
The Moomin House first appeared in The Moomins and the Great Flood. As our village floods, I've been painting the walls and thinking about refuge in a scary new year.
This is not how I intended to start the year. Or end the last one, for that matter. We sat up past midnight last night, T playing a video game from the 1980s on a Steamdeck, while I worked on the Moomin House.
I thought I'd start by writing a small construction diary of building the bathhouse. It's a separate construction to the Moomin House, but as I painted the wood struts of the roof, I thought I could write something about Midwinter Moomins, when Moomintroll wakes up out of hibernation early and spends the time with the mysterious Too-Ticky (based on Tove Jansson's real-life partner, Tuulikki).
It might be about the loneliness of winter, especially as rain lashed our windows and washed out any hope of a new year celebration—except for our neighbour who ruthlessly set off his fireworks on schedule at midnight.
This morning, I tried to come up with a way to write about the bathhouse construction as I set off for a run. The rain finally stopped, having pummelled the house all night, and this seemed like a good way to start the new year. Then a few metres down the road, things got rather strange.
We live a few short metres from a floodplain. A major river runs to the south of our little town, on a flat alluvial plain, guarded against the river's excesses by a series of meadows. They're largely fields these days and used by local farms for horses. The start and end of my runs are marked by passing by a set of stables where people can ride and keep their horses. It's a local, working-class sort of a stable where the kids take ponies out on traps around the villages, not of the high-end type.
I planned to run the roads this time, because I needed to do speedwork and the rural runs would be packed with people working off last night. Or so I thought. I passed the entrance to the stables and surrounding houses, finding it even more packed than expected. Horseboxes everywhere, people coming and going. Young people, especially, in hats and coats and wellies. I assumed they were putting on a special New Year's Day event and went on my way.
You're not here to read about me running, so I'll cut to when I reached my next junction with the river. It had broken its banks and flooded fields and roads alike. The next two villages down the line were cut off, everything shut. The world was a flat grey-brown pan, the water eddying in the gusting wind. The river itself was in danger of overtopping here, too.
I ran back and discovered that the only New Year's Day event was the horse owners rushing to get their horses out of the water, which had flooded the whole stable and was lapping at the steep road down to the compound. I'd thought the river would be high, but we'd only had yellow warnings of rain, no indication to expect flooding.
This last happened back in 2021, when T attempted to run down there and found himself cut off by the river's bloated body cutting off everything about 200 metres from the house. We're far enough back not to be affected, but the town was in chaos. Fire engines surged to a small local shop on fire, as well as to rescue farmers living down on the meadows themselves.
Today the river broke its 2021 record, which had been the highest it had achieved at our monitoring station. More rain rolled in during the afternoon and the bridge where I turned around is in danger of breaking its 2002 record and the houses just a few metres from the water being washed out.
I came home, tempted to offer assistance but knowing I didn't have the right clothes or equipment and that they already had a packed contingent of stable yard workers and others ready to lend a hand. I didn't want to be the useless incompetent making things more difficult for the professionals.
Instead, I decided to work on the Moomin House, specifically the Moomin House walls. It felt appropriate because the Moomin House serves as a refuge throughout Tove Jansson's stories, and has seen its fair share of floods. Its first appearance is in The Moomins and the Great Flood, which Sort of Books republished last year. It's the end goal of Moominmamma and Moomintroll, who are refugees from a flood struggling to find their way to a new home, built by Moominpappa.
This is a section of work I've been putting off and putting off because the walls are the most visible outer structure, they're what people will see first and most. I had this long, tricky stretch in the autumn where I had to fix the outer panels to a frame that also had to be glued together. The results ticked off my inner perfectionist, and I knew I'd have to do some work when it came to this stage to get the walls looking right.
The issue is my level of skill. Even two years into working on the Moomin House, I'm still a beginner and I haven't had vital years of experience to know how to solve a lot of material problems, the kind of things that come up when you're working on a big project. The biggest test was applying the outer panels to the frame, although the frame posed its own conundrums.
For a start, I made a series of mistakes making the frames because I struggle with instructions and the complicated series of numbered parts, so that I had to wiggle a craft knife into delicately glued joints and wrestle them free, so I could turn them around and re-stick them.
The design for the walls is to have a frame with thin wooden panels stuck on the outside. They're painted blue, although not quite "Moomin House Blue", as I think of it. These panels were all in sections that had to be fitted together and then bent over the frame itself. I worked out a strategy for this, after buying two big sets of craft clips. I did one wall at a time (there are four in total, two wide and two thin), and applied the sections a little at a time.
Even doing this (the pictures show an example of one wide wall), I couldn't get the clips into the right position to perfectly align the panel sections. I knew I'd have to fix this further along, and somehow invent solutions to problems not really mentioned in the instructions.
This is why I'm so fascinated by the process of making something, especially because some unknown person is relaying instructions to me, but cannot know the specifics of me, my level of skill, approach (am I cautious or slapdash?), or the tools I have available. They include a lot of tips, but these can't cover every eventuality—especially not those related to my own lack of experience.
The magical handbooks I studied during my PhD relay something of the same process. An unknown author has written the instructions, including, very often, tips and tricks and alternative methods, required equipment and tools and materials and alternatives. Yet the instructions are read and followed by somebody else with no contact with the author (as far as we know), attempting to reproduce something based on texts.
(There is some material evidence for this in some of the handbooks, at least, which show signs of the Roman Egyptian equivalent of coffee mug stains on them).
Now I'm faced with how that plays out in another context. You could apply it to anything—recipes for dinner, a workout programme—but becoming conscious of it and the strange part this asynchronous communication plays in making the Moomin House is another matter.
At the time of writing, here on the 1st of January, 2025, I have painted three of the four wall sections. I am attempting to depict, to some extent, the vicissitudes of the life of the Moomin House, especially its capacity to survive flood events. The blue must be just the right kind of uneven, perhaps especially around the base, where water has lapped and swamped the lowest levels.
I struggled with the instructions because it seemed to me that they didn't require all the walls to be painted, but it seemed appropriate to do just that. So I had to experiment. I'm not done with that experimentation yet, because I have to wait for the walls to dry, and undoing some of my worst mistakes in the previous process.
In the real world, I read reports of people unable to leave their homes or being rescued from them, and the ponies being rescued from their stables—also their homes—covered in filth. I feel as though the stories of the Moomin House are especially close to home right now, in a more physical sense than I expected.
