I’ve been reading this beautiful book for inspiration and instruction:
The Author, David Pearson, (about whom, more here) talks a lot about building in the vernacular, and this has made me rethink our choice of building materials.
This area has long been quarried for its Millstone Grit, which is a sought-after building material due to its hardness [...]
We were going to..
1. Do the house up to get it ready to be viewed by potential buyers.
2. Talk to the neighbours about our field plans.
3. Meet with planners and put in the outline planning application.
4. If we get the application, (hopefully) sell the house.
5. Move into temporary accommodation, apply for detailed permission, start the [...]
Sorry, couldn’t resist that, though I really should have done, I know.
OK, today’s meandering topic of conversation, on finding again that our PCs and our wiring are not in the optimum place in this house – i.e. everywhere, all the time, just at the end of our arms when we suddenly want to work on [...]
Question: how can we find out what the average windspeeds have been for the past 20 years? We want to try to plot the pattern, to help us decide whether it’s a crazy idea to build up here in the field. We went out there today though and it was calm and very peaceful. Today, [...]
We’ve talked about this and airily come up with the idea (or subconsciously hijacked it from elsewhere) of installing some kind of heat exchange unit in between what will be a cold room (for food storage) and a warm room (spa? sauna? bathroom? clothes drying?) but one of the many items on the list of [...]
Pros:
They’re usually pretty good at designing buildings.
They’ve usually had more experience of doing this than we have.
They’re supposed to know all the technical stuff.
They’re often used to dealing with planners and builders etc.
Cons:
We’d be asking them to work out how to spend our money!
We’d have to pay them loads of money on top for doing so!
We wouldn’t get the fun (Yeah, ask me again in [...]
If we get the planning permission, it will go here:
This picture is looking from the east, towards the west. But the position of the site is such that the house will mainly look out over the view in the valley to the north-west. We’re hoping to be able to take advantage of that view with [...]
We had another big chat here last night about whether our field is really the best place for our off-grid project. We don’t want to move house again ever, ideally. So wherever we do this, we’d like it to be the right place for us. We discussed the pros and the cons of living on [...]
These are our old sheds. We did think we might replace them with new straw bale sheds and live in them temporarily while the main house is being built, instead of buying mobile homes or renting.
Hmm. There’s obviously quite a lot of land-clearing work to be done first, as well as old shed demolishing and [...]
