Most of the courtyard apartments don’t have their own baking oven, so the residents used this one. Today we think it unsanitary or even dangerous to handle bread in the same space as dirty laundry and highly corrosive lye which was used as a detergent.

On the edge of the large laundry cauldron you can see lye chunks that have corroded the iron plate under them. Hundreds of Finnish children burned their insides or even died in the early 20th century after drinking water dissolved lye from the old lemonade bottles where it was stored at home.

Washing laundry was hard and time consuming women’s work and done only a couple of times a year. Linen and clothes were boiled in a cauldron, rubbed with a washing board and rinsed in a wooden tub. All the water had to be fetched from the common wells so it was usually easier to rinse the laundry in a lake, river or sea. The wooden barrel with a crank is an early washing machine invented in the 1930’s.