Recovering, rethinking, redesigning, rescheduling

OK, we’ve had a complete change of plan, and the schedule has gone to pot. We were going to miss the window for building anyway (straw bale walls need 3 months to settle before the first frosts) due to Ali’s illness, and now that he’s recovered we’ve been having a rethink about the design.

Because whichever way you look at it, it’s too small. It’s not worth the trouble, time and work of digging into the banking and raising a huge retaining wall just for a few feet of wind-sheltered space.

The tree has to go.

It’s not an old tree, or a particularly big or special one, and its foliage blocks our path to the rest of the field. If Ali takes that out and the banking on which it stands, he’ll gain an extra 50 square feet for his building, which will make it more comparable with the size of the old outbuilding it’s officially replacing and make the work involved suddenly worthwhile.

So we’re looking at next April/May for the build now, and hoping for those few weeks of sunshine that we’ve been getting around that time in 2010 again.

It’s a good decision for me, because it gives me some much-needed time to get some finances together for the little optional extras like windows and doors(!) and it also means the landscaping will be finished in time, so that Ali’s not wading through nettles to get to his house.

His 20th birthday is next June, after which he must increase his working hours and start paying for his keep, so he hopes to have most of the building work done by then.

It’s going to be stone. Eventually.

We made a decision on the wall – well, Ali did. It’s going to be stone, not breeze block. He’s got enough stone, and he likes working with it, so that’s the plan.

He dug down to make space for its foundations, and to everyone’s surprise (though perhaps we should have expected it, there being quite a few quarries around here) he came across a big natural stone shelf. It stands about 2½ feet above floor level, is easily as deep and as far as we can tell it extends back into the hillside. Everyone agreed that the stone shelf should act as the retaining wall’s foundation: to remove it would be dangerous, pointless and very difficult. Keeping it there and building from the top of it saves a lot of building work up to the level it’s at.

So Ali has been digging a foundation trench to the east side of the retaining wall, for the house foundations and he needs to dig one to the west side, and the front. This is looking down onto the site, with the stone shelf in the lower left corner:

And here’s the site from another angle:

– though it’s harder to make out the stone shelf on that one.

I’m worried that it all looks like it’ll be too small for him, but he doesn’t think that’s going to be a problem and points out that he can dig out as far as he likes to the north side to make it more spacious if he wants to. I think the ‘tucked into the hillside’ part will be where he will sleep, which will be the best place in those famous howling winter gales we get up here.

Anyway, he’s ill at the moment, so no work has been done there for the past week or two. I’m still focusing on the landscaping, pulling out field junk again and sowing grass seed, patch by patch, a painful square yard at a time. I don’t want to take over his foundation-digging, because that kind of feels like his baby.

You’d think it would be easy

We haven’t even started on the house itself yet: we’re just focusing on the retaining wall, which should be a relatively simple thing to construct, but we’re having long and intricate debates about how exactly to do it. This is probably a good thing: better than just going at it thoughtlessly and getting it wrong. Holding back all of those tons of earth and preventing them from collapsing onto the house and its occupants is quite important.

So, we’ve got our civil engineer-approved plan. We know we need drainage and something called back fill, which involves a lot of gravel. We’ve even been advised on the type of gravel: 10mm limestone, and we’ve found a local supplier of that who can deliver. What we’re struggling with now is quantity. I asked the civil engineer to: “Come and look at it again, and tell us how much we’re going to need, because surely you do that kind of thing at work all the time?”

And I was told: “No, we have quantity surveyors for that. I just draw up the plans, then the quantity surveyor comes along and sets out the quantities of everything.”

A quantity surveyor? There are people whose job it is to just do that??

Hmmm. ‘Just do that’ doesn’t really convey the difficulty of the thing, though. We have no idea whatsoever how many kg of gravel we’re going to need: all we can do is order a dozen bags or so, use them and then order more and carry on like that until the job is finished.

The other issue is the breeze blocks, or cinder blocks, or concrete blocks or whatever you want to call them. They’re not as cheap as we hoped they’d be. Both B&Q and Wickes charge 97p a block – which, when you need 200 of them (we did manage to work that out) is very expensive. Other suppliers won’t tell us their prices unless we divulge our inside leg measurement and supply them with DNA samples, it seems.

£200 though! That would have paid for the floor, or the roof, or all of the windows and the door. We’re funding this project on a wing and a prayer as it is, without needing to pay out so much money for the retaining wall.

And we do have a lot of our own stone:

– although whether there’s enough for the free draining foundations and the retaining wall is debatable. Also, building from that kind of stone takes about 1000% more time than with breeze block, and we’re on a deadline if the straw bales are to have three months of settling time before the first frosts.

I think we’d rather use natural stone than concrete, because it would save the money and just be nicer to work with, but Ali isn’t 100% sure if he’s got the time or the expertise to do it properly. He’d learn as he went on though, wouldn’t he? However, it’s got to be his decision.

We were plaguing the civil engineer with questions last night, like: What happens to the backfill if he spends a few days building the wall with natural stone, then changes his mind and takes it all down? (The backfill will be mostly gravel with a small amount of concrete to bind it, so it will be semi-porous.) Will it collapse, or will it have set? The answer to that was: “No, it won’t have gone off [that's 'set', to you and me] so quickly, but it will collapse onto him as he takes the wall down, then he’ll have the problem of where to put it while he rebuilds with the concrete blocks.”

So we’ve got to make a decision one way or the other, really. And soon.

The digging is nearly finished now

And I have, wearily, run out of hole puns so I’ll just show you a picture of where we’re at:

Ali has done 95% of the work: he goes out there every day to do some. I am very pleased that I haven’t had to do it myself and have been able to concentrate on the food-producing work instead, which is very busy at the moment.

So, I think we’ve decided on breezeblock for the retaining wall, disappointing and non-green though that is: it’s the only thing that will be quick enough to build with, otherwise we’ll miss this year’s window of time for building with straw (three months before the first frosts) as we did last years. The boys wanted to use stone, but that would have taken all summer.

Good drainage is the key factor: the land behind the wall will fill up with water and put too much pressure on it if we don’t incorporate a good enough system, which will involve a lot of gravel and drainage pipes. We’re planning to take that water around the side of the house and collect it for crop watering. There are some advantages to being on a steep hill!

The house itself, being partly subterranean, needs its own drainage system so there’ll be pipes under the floor as well, feeding to the same collection point. Then, when we’ve found some suitable tanking material to place between the breezeblock and the straw, we’ll be ready to lay the stone foundations.

We’ve still got to source the straw, and the door and windows… and the render… and the floor and the roof! Much googling to be done.

“There I was, a-digging this hole..

(Courtesy of Bernard Cribbens [opens YouTube])

“Hole in the ground, so big and sort of round it was
And there was I, digging it deep
It was flat at at the bottom and the sides were steep
When along comes this bloke in a bowler which he lifted and scratched his head
Well he looked down the hole, poor demented soul and he said

Do you mind if I make a suggestion?

Don’t dig there, dig it elsewhere
Your digging it round and it ought to be square
The shape of it’s wrong, it’s much much too long
And you can’t put hole where a hole don’t belong”

“I ask, what a liberty eh?
Nearly bashed him right in the bowler

Well there was I, stood in me hole
Shovelling earth for all that I was worth I was
And there was him, standing up there
So grand and official with his nose in the air
So I gave him a look sort of sideways and I leaned on me shovel and sighed
Well I lit me a fag and having took a drag I replied

I just couldn’t bear, to dig it elsewhere
I’m digging it round cos I don’t want it square
And if you disagree it doesn’t bother me
That’s the place where the holes gonna be”

“Well there we were, discussing this hole
Hole in the groud so big and sort of round it was
It’s not there now, the ground’s all flat
And beneath it is the bloke in the bowler hat
And that’s that”

Heehee

The hole is still there really (we haven’t had the man with the bowler hat round yet – honest!) but a whole load of brambles:

now aren’t:

And, although I enjoyed building what will be our Beltane bonfire with them:

– they poked me in the eye, by way of retaliation! So I’m kind of painfully squinting at the screen today. Hmm. It will be a good bonfire!

A few more hole shots:

The hole truth

Feel free to just groan unreservedly at the current post titles. I am, and I’m writing them.

Anyway, the hole: it groweth, thus:

– and is becoming quite the family obsession I was hoping it would:

– which is good, because it needs to go down by at least another 2 feet, still, and obviously get a lot wider.

There was some debate the other day (with our civil engineer friend/advisor) as to whether the gradient of the sides might be a little too steep now, and need reinforcing before the build commences. I think they might too, but we’ll wait and see how it turns out.

Anyway, there’s always somebody out there digging away. Today we have friends coming to dig with us! (Their idea, not ours! Just in case anyone thinks we’ve been out with a cosh )

It’s just fun, and although I keep feeling like we’re running behind, we’re actually slightly ahead of schedule. The bales need July, August and September to settle before the first frosts, which means we don’t need to be laying them until the end of June. That gives us nearly three whole (hole!) months in which to get the level right, reinforce the back wall if needs be, and build the stone foundations.

But the speed things are going, I don’t think we’ll need it.

When you’re in a hole…

…don’t stop digging!

I’m just wondering how many more cheesy ‘digging’ titles we can come up with. Oh, I can think of a few!

Here are a few more digging shots anyway, just to prove we’re Ali is doing something:

I’ve just been out there with pen, pad, pacing feet and camera, while we worked out there to dig from and to, and whether the whole thing is going to be big enough. (It is, he says.) I’ve promised to feng shui the front door position, with a bit of help from my friends. (Ali laughed about that.)

Anyway, this is my next job I think:

A strip of land that needs putting under grass.

“Are we in Australia yet?”

“No.. keep digging!”

Tee hee.

Well, we’re this far in now:

and already I’m wondering whether it’s in the right place. “Is it wise to build so close to the path?” “What if the baby falls off the edge? We’ll need to fence it..” and “When you take into account the [straw bale] thickness of the walls, is it even going to be big enough?” being just some of the questions that plagued my mind as I worked yesterday. (Yes, I did some too!) It’s also fascinating to see what’s down there, to wonder how close to the surface the rock shelf is, and how far we’re going to be able to get.

There’s already a bit of an issue about where to put the subsoil. The topsoil is no problem: that’s going on the mound of cut brambles at the bottom of the field, to make a kind of midden of them. But you can’t do that with subsoil; it needs keeping with the other infill-type debris, though that mound is full and now complicated by the addition of some proper wall stones that don’t belong there at all. Aaargh! I keep telling the kids we’ve got to be organised!! But it’s falling on deaf ears, for the most part.

OK, I reassured my worried mind as I worked. So, we make a ledge and then decide it’s in the wrong place for Al’s house. So we’ve got a useful ledge! We need one of those (to store subsoil if nothing else.) Also, if we then carry on and build the house and it turns out not to be big enough, we can extend it. In fact, the plan is to extend it as soon as we can. We want to start small to get the hang of the building method first and work out how to source the materials without bankrupting ourselves, etc. To prove to ourselves that we can do this. Even if the first build ends up just being a tool shed or a glorified water harvesting system, it will be worth it because of the experience we’ll gain.

So I’m not worried. Really I’m not.

The first cut is the deepest..

OK, it wasn’t all that deep, and as Al said: “It doesn’t even really count as a cut, in ground like this,” but it happened anyway, yesterday on the vernal equinox. And actually, from that point where he put the spade in for the pic, we need to dig down a further six feet, or until we hit the rock shelf – whichever happens first.

We all traipsed out there:

and stood about for photos.

That’s a plate of celebratory cakes, being ceremonially balanced on Lyddie’s head, for some reason. We stuck a candle in one of them and presented it to Al for him to blow out, but he wasn’t overtly enamoured with the idea, and anyway I think the wind beat him to it.

(I like this shot of both the boys though:)

Anyway, that’s it now: we’ve started. No more questions about where it’s going, or when we’re starting. For the next couple of weeks: just digging. With a spirit level on hand. And then building stone foundations and then a wooden floor, I think, if that’s the next thing. I suppose I should get out the book and find out, really. Still, one step at a time. We need to start from the right level first.

We’re going as deeply as we can into that corner so that we can benefit most from the wind protection and low profile that the shape of the hillside offers. And we’re starting small: I want us to have a practice run on this first structure, which needs to fit in between the two trees so can’t be huge. And it has to go up soon because, apart from the need to let the bales settle before the first frosts, I need the roof to collect water for my crops! (Which reminds me: I still have that 4th deep bed to dig for the carrots etc.)

Hmm. Is it happening? Will it happen? Only time – in the next few weeks – will tell.

The deep breath before the plunge

.. is how Tolkien described the quiet waiting before the Battle of Minas Tirith, if I remember correctly. It’s a great analogy for that tense yet calm anticipation of major activity and ok, so we’re not waiting for a battle against the orcs of Mordor here, but it is something that really matters to us: something about which I’ve been talking about on here for more than a year now: building our first structure in the field, which will be Ali’s little house.

We’ve got to make that first cut in the ground soon, in the next week or two, to start preparing the foundations. We’re going to make a ceremony out of it, with photos and a feast. (Any excuse for a feast!) But can you believe that we still haven’t fully decided where to put it?! Ali says he doesn’t mind where it is, but I want it to be dug into the hillside, to get some shelter from the wind and weather and to ensure its low profile. The trouble is that there’s a tree in the way, which I don’t want to move, so am thinking of ways to build around.

But Skipton Castle has a tree in its courtyard, so I don’t see why Ali’s ‘castle’ shouldn’t!

…Except that the Conduit Court of Skipton Castle is about 40ft(?) in diameter, and that of Al’s might be about 4ft, if we’re lucky. Hmmm.

I think, once we’ve made the first cut, the build will take on a life of its own and decisions like that will become clear. We’ll find out where the tree roots are, at least, which we don’t currently know.

Building our first earth-sheltered straw bale house was always going to be a challenge. Building it around a tree..? A bit silly, maybe. But I like that tree and it goes right against the grain [groan!] to cut them down.

We’ve just got to make a start, and doooo it.

Soon.