Places in the garden

Kyle and I are both firmly of the opinion that you need a certain amount of 'silly' when embarking on a project like ours. So, as stories emerge of our exploits on the property we give names to the places they happen.

For example, my sister Rachael came with us when we first bought the place and we went to explore the creek. She's a bit more concerned than we are about getting muddy and wet, so when we jumped across the creek she said she'd find a better spot further upstream. We told her that was as good as it would get, but she stuck to it, so 500m further upstream she was stuck on the other side from us. Thus, this section of the creek is dubbed 'Rachael's Folly'.

Which, of course, necessitates putting up an artfully rustic sign...

... and taking selfies underneath it...

... to forever commemorate this event, and remind Rachael in future that she should cross there after all...

... we're not really sure how Rachael feels about this. But, now that I've posted it here I guess we'll find out!

It's nice to have help

Sometimes when I tell people what we're doing with our house they look a bit concerned and ask if we have much experience with that kind of thing, as though it's utterly impossible for regular people to do anything outside the norm. When I say not really they generally judge my sanity a little, and I assume they think we'll come crashing and burning at some stage and see the error of our ways.

I look at it differently - I come by such insanity quite honestly. My parents, in one of their loopier moments, built a 4WD motor home from scratch, test drove it around Australia for 6 months, then decided to drive to Scotland in back for my cousin's wedding. After watching that unfold, building ones own house that's perfectly stationary doesn't seem so far fetched. I'm sure my Dad would be quite pleased by this.

Of course, there are other bonuses. When you tell such parents you're building a house using an unusual technique, they simply can't resist coming to have a poke around for a few months. So we now have a self-sufficient motor home in residence on the property, which brings with it all manner of conveniences such as an induction stove and a vacuum pump loo, not to mention two enthusiastic helpers!

It's turning into a rather eclectic settlement, as our tent (the red and white one on the left) hails back to our days in historical reenactment and is a replica of viking tents during the 8th/9th century.

Work begins!

This weekend was the beginning of two weeks off work for both Kyle and I. Two weeks of what we hope will lead to basic infrastructure on the property.

Most of Saturday was spent shopping (heavy duty pants, welding visors, lots of stuff from the tip), during which we resist the feeling that we are haemorrhaging money and try to remind ourselves that this is what we spent so long saving up for anyway.

Sunday was a trip to the site. We knew we weren't going to get very much done on this trip (the first when we actually own the place - we took a brief trip out a day before settlement and did some blackberry clearing, but we figure that doesn't really count). The purpose was really to talk over what happens next and get a better feel for the place. Early on we realised you can't really skimp on the time you spend talking it over before you start - a constant process of revisiting and reclarifying and making sure you both have the same vision in your heads and the same idea of what steps happen when.

So, we explored a bit first...

There are several areas we have started calling wombat villages:

But also lots of smaller holes here and there that are probably echidna's, or various other burrowing crawlies:

There's also one particular tree on the far side of the creek that had three birds nests:

Last time we were at the property the creek had obviously flooded a little while before, up perhaps a metre or two. I've checked the weather data and it looks like it floods that much quite regularly but the catchment area isn't big enough for it ever to go higher.

The water is quite clear, though, and trickles pleasently:

We went further up the hill on the other side of the creek than we have before - technically the property boundary is the creek itself, but when the property was subdivided from the very large cattle station surrounding it the creek was too hard to fence so they put it on the top of the ridge. This means we have an extra 20m or so all along the creek of very steep south facing slope with lots of scrubby trees. So we went all the way up to the ridge to take a look along the fence line.

We found evidence of past bushfires, though obviously from quite a while ago:

There's a quite lovely spot with a bit mossy rock in the shade:

And the inevitable two or three spots with a large thicket of blackberries - this one is clinging around some large rocks, and it looks like some of the wombats have made tunnels through it to get to burrows underneath. Kyle tentatively leaned over the edge to take a look from the top:

At the top of the ridge we looked out over the neighbours property, a little greener than ours as it had obviously been grazed whereas ours has had the grass dry out over winter then regrow so it looks a bit brown from a distance.

Then we stood in the middle of the ridge and looked back up at our place. You can see a bunch of trees at the top, but only 3 of them are actually on our property.

After exploring we had an extensive discussion about what we want to achieve over the next two weeks. We've talked a fair bit about this before, but it's different when you're standing there and can see the scale of it and where things will go.

We bought some stakes with flags on from the tip shop ages ago, thinking they'd be useful one day, so we staked out where our outdoor kitchen will go (this is where we'll build the barrel oven). It will have a roof over the top, but otherwise be quite basic, at least to start with. You can just see the brightly coloured flags in the picture below. We've put it beside one of the trees right at the top of the hill, as we think that's a nice spot for entertaining - you can see pretty much everything from there.

A somewhat less definitely permanent composting toilet block will go a little way over on the other side of the tree.

Then we really got to work. We wanted the first thing we build on the property to be a little veggie patch. Nothing big enough to distract us from the build for the moment, but just something to say "we've started" and to begin as we mean to go on.

We staked it out pretty basic, with a few bits of wood we had lying around from ages ago that weren't going to be used for anything else much. We cleared the grass, and turned over the soil:

The neighbouring cows were fairly suspicious of us at first - they had lots of calves among the herd, and all gathered together staring at us. But eventually they got used to us, dismissing us as just odd humans I suspect.

So, first days work and we have a veggie patch!

A long way to go, but we definitely feel like we've started now!

"But earth houses always look so... hippy..."

Before deciding that we wanted to build an earthbag house we did considerable research on this style of building, research that continues. Even now, every so often I find new things.

Whilst Kyle and his ex-painter/decorator eyes has always been more actively concerned with the appearance of our intended house than I have, we've both always loved the look typical of so many earthen houses.

We love the curves that are so restful to the eye, we love the abundance of greenery, and the colours that you couldn't quite get away with in a 'normal' house. I guess if we wanted 'normal' we wouldn't be doing this anyway, so it's unsurprising the different appearance is part of the attraction.

A little while ago I found the below collection from somewhere near Bogata in Columbia, all designed by the same architect.

I'd never seen earthbag houses with such clean, crisp lines or such bright colours. Very schnazzy.

And the light, bright interiors:

I'd always previously sort of assumed that the kind of people who build earthen homes would tend to be the kind of people who decorate them in loud and colourful ways, as we intend to do, simply because we like it. When I saw these pictures it seemed fair all of a sudden, having never considered it before, that some people would want the earthen house but a more conventional interior appearance.

Sometimes when our project comes up in conversation people ask what it will look like, and I show them random offerings from my Pinterest collection. Upon showing these to a friend she seemed amazed - apparently it had never occurred to her that it was possible to decorate an earthen house with crisp lines and white walls and a marbled benchtop in the kitchen. For some reason it had seemed to her that it simply wasn't allowed, through some weird nuance of the laws of physics, to decorate them in any other way than the slightly 'hippy' images I had favoured before.

Building our skills

In a rather long and convoluted story, Kyle has recently commenced some woodworking courses having had an interest for quite a while. As part of one of these courses he was required to make a coffee table with two drawers (I'm not entirely sure why it had to have that specific quality, but I'm sure there was some reason). So one day he began a discussion along the lines of "what type of coffee table do you want". We discussed many factors, from the positioning of said drawers to what we we would put in the space underneath, to what type of wood it would be made from, and then to the all important colour. Kyle, you see, used to be a painter/decorator and has rather an eye for these things.

After a long search for an appropriate green, and some considerable experimentation with steel wool and vinegar, he had a lot of fun one afternoon watching it all come together.

I often end up discussing our housing project with people at work, usually just in passing. They're all very curious, but sometimes it can be difficult to convince everyone we meet that we can actually go through with this and end up with a space we can live in comfortably. This has always been something I've tended to take for granted - why on earth couldn't we do it? But the more I talk to people about it the more I realise that that attitude is entirely a result of my upbringing (thanks, Mum and Dad, you can say "I told you so" about now and feel well chuffed).

Kyle doesn't always share this blind faith in our abilities, but I'm confident (wouldn't I be?) that he'll come around. It seems so obvious to me that all this is possible and within our grasp. After all, between us we have so many skills, like woodworking, that will help us in that journey.

Even our cat, Plop, thought it was pretty cool when done.

Eco-Builds as Sovereign Risk Insurance

I was recently sent an article comparing the economic policies of various Australian governments past and present, which set off an interesting string of email discussion with various members of my family. During this discussion my father decided he was appalled at the thought his daughter felt the need to take out sovereign risk insurance.

Sovereign Risk is described by economists as what happens when governments default on their debts. A concept that's come up a lot over the last few years, though not often by that name. Sovereign Risk is considered particularly relevant by industries such as mining which have a very long-term return on investments. When starting an open-cut mine, for instance, one expects it will be in operation for several decades. 'Soverign risk' is the possibility that the government of the day sometime further down the track along those several decades will make decisions which change the profitability of the mine from what was first expected. For example, Australia suddenly introducing a mining tax certainly raised Rio Tinto's assessment of its sovereign risk in this country, and the next government removing the tax just makes the economic climate more uncertain rather than less risky (Not that I particularly disagree with the mining tax - it just provides a good example).

Kyle and I have many reasons for pursuing the project around which this blog is based. One of them, is that we are concerned about the direction public opinion and political will is taking society around us. Whilst we are quite well off, and would ourselves probably end up in the category of the 'haves' rather than the 'have nots', current policies lead to the type of society we don't particularly want to live in anyway. On the off-chance that the general public hasn't quite woken up to this yet and votes the Liberals back into power we're looking at a collective future in which individuals cannot depend upon social support services. We don't want to risk being tied to expensive mortgages and rising energy costs, necessitating the stressful career choices that would go with supporting that.

Coupled with the inability for government to admit climate change is likely to be a problem, leading to food/water/energy/safe housing shortages in 30-40 years, we figure we may actually need to support ourselves on that front for at least some length of time. Sounds rather extreme, and a little bit on the side of sci-fi apocalypses, but more and more becoming a real possibility for the distant future.

If you stop bothering to attempt to convince conservatives that climate change will happen and we need to plan for it, or that social policies will benefit us all in the long run, then you start thinking about how to survive it if they don't. We figure on the off-chance that it pans out that way we should probably think about living outside the systems we won't necessarily be able to depend upon. The alternative is moving to another country (Jenny, by virtue of ex-pat well-travelled parents, has triple citizenship, so we would be able to do this fairly easily), but it begs the question of where to?

 So, in a sense, we are looking at the long term plan for ourselves within this society and developing our own insurance for that eventuality. Thus, amongst so many other things, this project represents some insurance in the form of self-sufficiency against the risk that not enough is done to slow the changing of the climate, and that help is unavailable if this or other ills befall us.

In search of spaces

In the process of figuring out what we want in our odd version of 'dream home', we have considered the different sorts of spaces we'd like to live in. Kyle wants a house that's cavernous and maze-like, with hide-holes tucked away, dark and sheltered. I want the kitchen and living room to blend together, and a large bath with candle-niches and a window. We'd both love a library somewhere on our growing list of 'someday' wants.

We also considered the outdoor spaces. We want a large veggie garden, and a few greenhouses, but these are more functional spaces, important for different reasons. I'd like a little garden space just outside the bedroom, a courtyard of some sort, sheltered and tucked away (one of the few spaces I merrily envisage flowers for any reason other than bee-attracting). There is some talk of a pizza oven and associated undercover shelter someday.

One of the spaces we both have a very clear, very similar, vision of was inspired by a recent tour of Turkey during which we were introduced to 'kosks', little outdoor gazebo's with low cushions around a central table. We spent a series of very pleasant afternoons finding out that it is impossible not to relax when one is lounging in a kosk.

Whilst many can be large and fancy, it seems the prerequisite for the type of kosk we'd like is that it seats 4-6 people, has a table in the middle, is raised off the ground by a foot or so, has no walls, and only sees sunlight mottled through gently rustling leaves.

This image of relaxation, we realise, seems at odds with our much discussed wish to build our own house with our hands, probably over the course of many exhausting months, then tend an equally exhausting mix of pigs, veggies, chickens, fish, and whatever else we come up with along the way. We feel that's rather the point, though. Kyle and I have no wish to spend our entire adult lives forced into a climbing the professional ladder just so's the banks can profit from having us tied to a mortgage we couldn't afford any other way. We measure our success by different standards than those made common by modern capitalism. We don't want to spend our days working hard to support a house we'd barely see and have little personal connection to. But we're quite willing to work very hard to secure ourselves the sort of future that includes a kosk - indeed, what other future would be worth working hard for?

So... What are you wanting to do?

Build a house. No really - it can't be that hard!

We originally hatched upon the idea by looking at pictures of Tiny Homes, and then as we were exploring projects done by others we happened upon earthbag building, and the world of the eco-self-build opened up. At that stage it seemed that affordable, self-built, eco-friendly, larger-than-tiny homes were possible!

Kyle has some experience in the construction industry, and Jenny dabbled in several architecture/engineering-related areas of study in her misspent youth. Both of us currently work in education about an hour from the central NSW coast in Australia.

Jenny's parents recently documented how they built their own camper van, then drove it from Malaysia to Scotland and back over the course of 3 years. Whilst we weren't particularly involved with their journey, this project (and several others close to us) have left us both with a sense of what is possible with a little expertise in googling, moderate common sense, and a lot of grit. We think they'd be rather pleased by this. Thus, we don't feel that our enthusiasm for this project is naive or unrealistic, and we are quite comfortable that it is possible for us to do albeit a not inconsiderable challenge.

At the time of starting this blog, the current plan sits along the lines of acquiring around 20 acres within a 1hour commute from our respective workplaces and building an earth-bearmed passive-solar earthbag house, probably with split levels of some sort, with a related aquaponics greenhouse, massive veggie garden, and space for pigs. There are many reasons why those various aspects have been decided upon at this point. Rather than explain them here we assume that over the next several years they will be discussed to death, explored further, changed several times, and possibly experimented with, all of which we intend to document here. Partly this is for our own benefit in keeping track of it all, and partly because the single most helpful thing we've found so far is when other self-builders have thoroughly recorded their own journey, and we figure we owe something back having benefited from their experience.

All of this, we recognise, will put us at the mercy of the Australian tendency to over-regulate. We anticipate jumping through many bureaucratic hoops along the way.