Flishuset 1950

After the war, there was a lot of activity on the farm, and the animals needed food. NMBU needed storage for feed. Flishuset, The Wood Chips House, which got its name some time into its existence, probably didn’t have a name initially. At least, it has not been possible to find out what it was called back then.. 
 
Flishuset is one of three houses that remain in the area where the farm had its buildings and activities from around 1950 to 2015. When the Veterinary School was to be established in Ås, 30 buildings, including residences, the barn, stables, cowsheds, chicken houses, the Southern and Northern henhouses, and others, were demolished. What remains are a residential house, called Likkista, with an outbuilding and Flishuset. 
 

History 

Flishuset was built in 1950, according to the Property Department’s overview. It consisted of two completely separate rooms with doors from the outside. In the western part, there was a potato silo under the floor, and there was a hatch in the floor. This is still there but not in use. 

To find the history of Flishuset, I have gathered information from the Sandås family. Both the father, mother, and daughter have together worked at the university from 1961 until today. 

Oddvar Sandås was born in 1944 and has lived his entire life in Ås. He started working at NLH during the summers when he was 12-13 years old. First with weeding and harvesting vegetables, but from the summer of 1961, he got a summer job at the “hønhuset” (Ås slang). The following year, in 1962, he was offered a permanent job when the staff suddenly decreased from 12-13 to 2 people. He worked there until he retired in 2012. He almost reached 50 years at the same workplace, missing only a few months. A knee operation forced him to stop working at NLH. Oddvar Sandås therefore has good knowledge of what the Flis storage was used for from the 1960s.  

– In the old days, the chickens were fed boiled potatoes for dinner. A very popular snack that was eaten up in record time. In addition, they had access to concentrate feed, but this was of quite poor quality.

The potatoes were steamed while they were on the tractor trailer. This was done outside the old heating plant, which is now called the Heating Center. It always smelled good of freshly cooked potatoes there. Sandås adds that other animals besides chickens also got potatoes for dinner. 
 
The steaming hot potatoes were then transported to what we now call Flishuset and poured into the silo. They were stomped down, just like grapes, by the workers. The potatoes were so hot that the rubber boots melted while they were working. So, there was a high consumption of rubber boots. Afterwards, plastic was laid over the potatoes to keep them for a long time.  
 
The potatoes were retrieved from a hatch in the basement wall on the west side. This hatch was visible until the ground was raised in connection with the construction of the Veterinary Building. 
 
The other room was probably used as a tool storage. 

In the early 1960s, the potato silo was moved to the Southern henhouse, before it shortly thereafter stopped being used for feeding potatoes. This practice ended when Johanne Høie, the head of the henhouse operations, retired in the 1980s, and the quality of the concentrate feed improved.  

Flishuset Got Its Name 

As usual, reuse was an important factor at NLH. The house had to be used for other purposes. Flishuset was now filled with wood chips.  

– Back then, wood chips came in bulk and were swept from the trailer and through the windows, and someone had to stand inside the dust and shovel it further. The west side was used for shavings and the east side for sawdust. It was very important not to mix these two,” says Sandås. Later, fortunately, wood chips and shavings came in bales. Wood chips and shavings were transported by wheelbarrow from Flishuset to the hens. Under the roof in Flishuset, poles and rolls of chicken wire were hung, which were used in the summer when the hens were allowed outside.

Today, the building is used as a tool shed for the students, who have student gardens on the outside. The two rooms inside is now combined.