News From the Hill

Archive for July, 2009

Our house project is coming along nicely. It is exciting to be in the process of creating our new home after years of dreaming about it.

We are self-building and starting planning to do this some years ago when we got the land that we are living on. I was surprised when I saw how many self-build magazines there were in the larger newsagents and bought a few to see what ideas I could pick up.

The one thing that struck me straight away was that my definition of self-build and the medias definition were very different.

As far as the wider print media is concerned the term self-build seems to apply to anyone who commissions a house to be built for them by someone else – a building contractor, project manager and an architect are usually in the picture. Very little of the work is self-done, athough sometimes the person involved takes on the position of project manager themselves.

Our self-build project is a little different. We do not have a mortgage, we have designed the house ourselves and are building it ourselves. Happily we have occasional help from friends and other people who are interested in learning something about the possibility of providing a home for themselves.

I guess you would imagine that we must be wealthy to be building a house in
Ireland without a mortgage and I also guess that being wealthy would certainly make things a lot easier for us.

We are not wealthy in any financial terms, in fact we just get by week to week
like alot of people these days, however we are rich in ways that really count. We have our health (yeah, I know, real sign of getting older when I say that!), we have each other and our families.

We have friends that are eager to help us and to share in our home-creating experience. We each have skills and there are a lot of people around us with skills that we can barter for, skill exchange without cash.

We are also very resourcefull people and learn from others with similar skills. You can develop an eye for things that can be useful and for seeing how something can be re-used in a new way. We keep our eyes and ears open for things that are being thrown away (and others also do this for us).

There are lots of free stuff websites out there now for checking out what people have to give away and for requesting items.

Because we are not financially well-endowed, so to speak, we are making use of as much salvaged material as possible.

We have all our windows already on site. We salvaged them when friends and family members were upgrading their own homes and putting in new windows. The windows are maybe twenty years old, most with hardwood frames and single glazing. The frames are in good condition so we are lucky and in time to come we can reglaze the frames with double glazing when we can afford it and in the meantime we will use old-fashioned heavy curtains in the winter to help insulate against the cold when the sun goes down.

We have two sliding patio doors salvaged from the window replacement man’s skip. We were at our friends house picking up the old windows to remove them and got chatting to the man doing the replacement job. The guy was excited about us re-using the windows that he had removed, he actually hates the waste involved in his profession and so he invited us to come to his place and make use of anything we wanted. We were delighted to avail of the opportunity and grateful to him for being open minded and not overly concerned about the insurance implications of allowing us to salvage from his yard.

We also have all the doors that we need and we bartered for the hemp with which we intend to build the walls. We collected two van-loads of hemp hurds yesterday and I have to say that it felt very strange to be driving home with the van filled to the roof with hemp! If someone had told me when I was in my twenties that one day I would be driving a van filled with hemp and that I was going to use it to build my house with I would have suggested that they perhaps had had too much hemp themselves!

All we need now is to hear about someone who has roofing material or lots of building timbers - it could happen you know!

We were just talking yesterday about how great our small fridge is. I expect that most Irish people take their fridges and freezers for granted and would not even consider living without one although as a nation we are not very far removed from living without them.

Rural electrification only happened in the sixties for most but not all of rural Ireland. I remember, as a child, visiting relatives (often elderly) living on small farms in the country who did not have indoor plumbing, never mind fridges.

I didn’t think that there was anything unusual about this because I grew up visiting these families and always enjoyed my visits. For me the excitement of being involved with farm animals was my main priority.

Nowadays we even have small fridges plugged into our cars for picnics and camping trips – haven’t we come a long way?

We have a small hand-me-down fridge which has no ice compartment and is relatively quiet in operation.  It is only ever plugged in and switched on during the summer time.

The main reason that we don’t switch on the fridge in the winter time is that we don’t have as much power coming in from our Photovoltaic panels during the shorter winter days as we do in the “longer day seasons”.

When we finish the wind turbine we will have more power coming in, however we have enough to do us at the moment and our main priority is house-building right now. It’s more important to us to spend our time working on the house at the moment, we want to get as much building work done as possible before the winter hits.

For us it’s not so much that we don’t have enough power in the winter, it’s more a case of how we chose to use that power, what electrical needs we want to meet.

We live in a mobile home which doesn’t have an insulated floor so we utilise this cold floor space in the lower cupboards as a storage space for some food items. For example we don’t often use cows milk, we prefer for a number of reasons to use soya milk – organic when possible and non-gmo of course. We buy the milk by the box of ten cartons and we store these in the cold floor cupboard.

I guess we use this cupboard like an old fashioned pantry. We store the soya milk, fruit juice and number of other items that are best stored at colder temperatures.

Because we live in a uninsulated building we do use the stove to keep ourselves warm in the winter. We have found that by using the fridge as a cold box we can keep all of our perishable food at a much lower temperature than room temperature so that is where we store cheeses, left-over dinners, butter etc.

In fact pretty much everything that we keep in the fridge when it is switched on is also kept there over the winter when it is switched off. This system does require utilising a small door stopper to prevent the fridge becoming a little
whiffy.  Other than that we have had no problem with our system of going
unplugged.

One advantage of having no freezer is that we need to eat ice-cream as soon as it comes in the door! We have no problem with doing that either…

Tonight’s dinner was an unqualified success and an unexpected one at that!

We were working on our house project during the day and I had been planning what to cook as I worked – I was thinking lentil burgers, because I knew we had a few eggs and some cheese, accompanied by a Mexican style rice.

When we came in for our coffee break and I put the espresso pot on the gas cooker I realised that we were running out of gas and wouldn’t have enough for cooking dinner.

Luckily we had a good bright day and received a good deal of electrical energy from the sun today – yahoo for photovoltaics!

As we were now going to use the new induction hot plate I decided to do couscous instead of rice and shorten the cooking time.

I put puy lentils on the hotplate to cook with a small handful of porridge oats and some tumeric for flavour. When this was cooked I mixed in a couple of eggs, some pine nuts, grated cheese and a few spoons of gram flour.

We were making this up as we went along! We just added enough gram flour until it looked nice and gloopy, we then decided against burgers and thought about cooking flatbread style.

Enter our old reliable cast iron pan and our new fangled induction hotplate.

What a wonderful combination of old and new. Induction cookers work on magnetism, you have to use a cooking pan which is magnetically active so old fashioned cast iron pots are just the job.

When you lift the pot the cooker stops working, the hot plate only heats the metal that is in touch with it so a small pot only activates a small part of the hotplate – wasting no excess energy.

I love the idea of cooking with magnetism because we use magnets to make the alternator in our wind turbine.

I always loved playing with magnets as a child and I love that I still play them!

The lentil dinner was real tasty too!

I suscribe to the “small living journal” which is an American online magazine devoted to the idea of living in small economical spaces – the complete opposite of the Celtic Tiger sort of dwellings which have turned our Irish countryside into disturbia!

I particularly liked this article on Guerrilla Housing. It appeals to my ideas on housing in the countryside. I know of quite a few people who have had to compromise with the planners to build their home.

There have been cases of prefabricated log cabins being built in wooded areas of County Leitrim where the planners have insisted on the house being plastered in a white cement plaster to “suit the environs”.

In one of these cases the house was the only one for a two miles with nothing but trees surrounding it and yet the owners still had to plaster the already finished wooden house just to satisfy some twenty or thirty year old thinking in the planning department.

Not only do these houses stand out from the surrounding countryside because they are now bright white, they also are now prone to condensation and damp problems because the healthy breathable fabric of the well designed house is now sealed in a cement based plaster – really just like popping it into a nice big paster bag! How lovely!

It doesn’t have to be like this. There are alternatives, we can fight for healthy homes and build them ourselves. Eventually we will reach a tipping point where healthy homes are the norm.

Until then, roll on guerilla housing…

Small and Beautiful

I have been working really hard to practise some detachment.

They say that practise makes perfect – I have yet to find out!

I am trying to separate people from their actions.

When I see a child misbehave I find it easy to to know that I don’t see a bad child,  I see a child whose behaviour is not very good.

When I experience an adult whose behaviour is not very good I don’t find it so easy to differentiate their behaviour from them. I don’t find it so easy to know that there is a person who is behaving in a selfish way, I tend to think there is a selfish person.

It’s a struggle for me at the moment.

I am trying to look at the bright side which is that I do know there is a struggle. At least this acknowledges that I am aware of the difference.

At an intellectual level I do know that the person is not their behaviour,  I just struggle with knowing it at a heart level right now.