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Building houses can be compared to painting icons. The art of the painter and carpenter in ancient times fed the origins of Russian culture. There are simply no identical icons on the same plot, although each must be canonical, the same with houses.
    Types of housing in the Russian North are diverse enough. Most homes have a typical roof over the living and household space, winter and summer buildings. Following only one of these conditions forced to build large, spacious mansions, which were not made in other places of Russia.
The winter hut, wintering, was a place where people moved to live with the first snap of cold weather. It was built differently, but if it does not have a great stove, benches, or bunk beds, this is no longer a wintering but something else.
  Everything in the house, except the stove, was made of wood. From the time, the walls and ceilings began to turn yellow and, over the years, became amber-brown if the stove was made in a "white" style. In the house with the stove built-in  "black" style, the higher top of the house grew dark and shiny from regular rubdown. Benches and floors were white or yellowish-white; they were scrubbed for each holiday.
By cleanness of the wooden floor judged girlish diligence and purity. But it is not so easy to observe cleanliness in the winter if the family is big, and every morning you have to warm up and carry to a pen a dozen buckets of swill to animals. Therefore, the floor in the house (as flax in the field) has always been a woman's pride and misfortune. Before washing, the floor was poured over the hot caustic lye and then scraped with a broom made of grass together with the crushing of the sauna stones. In houses heated in a "white" way, the walls and ceiling were washed for Easter once a year. The stove was whitewashed with diluted water ash.
In the old days, the windows in the Russian hut did not have curtains. To look into the house from the street was allowed to anyone, and it wasn't considered in any way wrong. Between the frames was dark charcoal to absorb moisture, and for the beauty, it put beside it the orange brush of rowan or scattered handful of cranberries. The shrine and the walls were decorated with dry bundles of medicinal herbs on holidays with snow-white kerchiefs and towels.
 If, in the family, someone of the men was engaged in hunting, then the tails and outstretched wings of grouse or grouse were nailed to the main pier. Under the main support beam usually hung a large bull's bubble with the peas inside, instead of the door hangers often fastened elk antlers. Just below the ceiling on the wall, repeating the length and width of the benches above ran the shelf. At the door from the stove to the wall were the bunk beds.
 The "raven" was a powerful top beam that held the bunk benches. During a wedding or another revel over the "raven" hovered child's faces. Kids were watching what was happening downstairs. Nobody made them go to sleep. And how many exciting things you can learn and see, looking from above, feeling that you are out of reach and at the same under the protection of the home. During the week in the evening, lying on the bunk, old people told children fairy tales, falling asleep in the most sacred places. A child would wake grandmother or grandfather, but they forgot at what point stopped and started all over again...
    During the winter, the hut often smelled either like the pine needles or like brought from the frost the spruce needles, which used to be rubbed on the traps for rabbit hunting. But exceptionally sharp and delicious was the smell of fresh bird-cherry rods for fishing gear, as well as a bunch of elms twigs for fastening of the sleighs and bundles of firewood.
When the oven was closed with cakes or loaves of bread inside, the smell of baked dough won overall. Especially pleasing was a smell on the street among the frost and snow. Fearful of intoxication by CO gas, the whole family, except the house lady, tried to get outside or to another building. The adults always have things to do. The children also know what to do, where to go, and what to play. It was never crowded in the house. Yet, the vastness of the summer house, its spaciousness, was missed throughout the winter.
Spring transition to living in the "front house" was always joyful. But before the winter frames were taken out from the windows, people changed the felt boots to leather boots and stopped to close the stove's vent tightly. Grandfather and grandmother are still sleeping in the winter house while drinking tea and having dinner in the summer hut together with everybody. Aired bed blankets were cleaned, dried in the sun, and hung in a barn.
    A first mosquito appears, and in the big barn, where roof swallows sing under the high plank, the first tent has been set up. Pretty soon, a whiff of brooms and the first hay will appear. How long ago has the home crackled and boomed from the Baptismal cold? Now it makes a noise from the warm summer wind.