It all looks so different in the snow

Beside the seaside…

That’s how it feels here sometimes, even though we’re actually 70 miles from the coast to both the east and the west. But the path through our field is a bit like a cliff path in places, and the traffic on the bypass in the valley tends to roar in a bit of a sealike [...]

Studying and thinking

The bad weather has definitely kept me out of the field, these past few days, but we have been using the time to study and think more about the first build in Spring.
I think it’s probably going to end up being quite similar in size and style to Simon Dale’s hobbit-type house. You can [...]

Load by load, first footings

Some days, it’s actually very difficult to go out there and work, when it’s cold, windy, wet, and staying in the kitchen by a roaring fire is so much more tempting. Today was one of those days.
“Just one barrow,” I say to myself, on such occasions.
One barrow of wood from the demolished shed:
[...]

Rain stops play

On the plus side, it fills up the water butt (which I drained the last drop from yesterday) but on the minus side, this driving rain makes working in the field difficult, so we’ve downed tools for now. We’ve had educational, domestic and social activities to attend to as well, so the timing has worked [...]

Advancing carefully, sweeping up as we go

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, [...]

Here’s where the new house will go

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 [...]

Hmm. That wind. Those sheds.

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 [...]

I’ll huff, and I’ll puff..

Hmm. It’s blowing a gale up here again. The perspex garage roof will need repairing for the third time in the past 3 months. (Our next-door neighbour laughs at this garage roof. But not as much as we laugh at his pane-less greenhouse!)
And I’m thinking: the first little piggy built his house out of straw, [...]

Shelter. Or power?

We’re back to howling gales up here again today. This makes us think two things: the desperate need for shelter – we’ll need to be tucked right into the hillside so that it blows over the roof but not straight through the building, like it does this one. And at it, hitting it like a [...]