The hardstanding is down and the tree stumps are off site. Craig-the-digger-man loaded them onto an enormous trailer behind an equally huge tractor belonging to some farmer friend of his, and they have gone off to goodness knows where along with a lot of topsoil (possibly the farmer's payment for taking on the stumps!)

The Big One going into the trailer


We'll need to watch for honey fungus around the garden and put down something to kill it off as it can kill of many types of tree and shrub. Anyone who has any good idea on how to use this without using chemicals is invited to write to the author.

That was a good event. Not so the electricity connection saga which is now going into it's fourth week. The electricity supplier came to fit the meter but the electricity contractor had put in different connectors than he thought he was connecting to, if you see what I mean, so he went off again. The electricity contractor had been misinformed about the kind of connectors to install and came straight out to replace them, but not fast enough to stop the electricity supplier from going off to his next job. So we have another week with spaghetti wires across the carpet and the the toaster sitting on the floor on account of it having a very short lead! It will be great to be able to have a shower in the light! This Friday coming is the great day when we hope to celebrate the Great Switch On.

The hardstanding means we can now get up the second, and temporary, shed, this one made of metal. It makes assembling an Ikea bed seem like putting the lid on a jar of jam. R has made a wonderful wooden base out of stuff lying around on the site and we will put the superstructure up this week.
R making the base.

If you have been paying attention, you will know that this shed is a crucial part of the Masterplan. We build it then put all the stuff in the garage into it. Then we can demolish the garage which is over the south east corner of the house, and is therefore taking up space which we require for other purposes.

This week we will lay out the house on the ground, with string.

Tomorrow we get the results of the soil analysis and here is another Good Thing. I had a preliminary chat with the partner of the bloke who did the augering the other week and it looks like our soil may not be as bad as we thought and we might not need such humungous foundations as we thought.

Lots of technical stuff this week. On Wednesday I am going to the Ecobuild exhibition in London where I hope to find a whole new system of housebuilding which will give us thermal mass, insulation, speed of construction and precise dimensions for a price we can afford .... we can but hope.

Our neighbour has just given us these photos - this is the caravan being delivered - observe the tree branches in the way.....


... hence R up a tree - he had a good time, really


The digger fighting a tree stump and looking like it was losing.


We are now living in our caravan! No electricity as yet, except what we borrowed from next door. But it is very warm and cosy with just one electric heater going and a gas fire when we need it. And it faces due east. What more do we need? Maybe we won't bother with the house and just stay in our three bedroomed caravan..... Save a lot of fuss and bother.

I think that we are now at the stage when we can start our foundations - that it to say, I can't think of anything else we need to do before we can start. We are planning for the Vedic foundation stone to be laid during March if there is a suitable time, and then the foundations can go ahead straight afterwards. We'll have electricity in by Tuesday, and that completes the services, there is a bloke (another bloke - actually not another bloke, the same one who did the trenches for the water main) coming tomorrow to remove a) The Tree Stumps and b) a whole load of soil, to put down about 100 square metres of hardstanding. Then we have somewhere or the lorries to park while unloading.

The sad news is that we think we can't afford Hemcrete - it needs a complete timber frame as well as the stuff spraying around it. So we are settling for concrete blocks. It sounds terribly non-eco, but:

1. I was part of a meeting with one of the main architects for the Centre for Alternative Technology a couple of years back and he said that if you want to do your bit to save the planet, energy efficiency is the key. In other words, better to have a bigger thickness of mineral wool (cheap) than a lesser thickness of sheep's wool - wonderful but expensive, and it's not like we'll see it anyway.

2. Hopefully we will be building a house which will get other people thinking, 'we could afford this' and so more will be built like it.

A word about timber frame houses - they are probably the best way of getting a lot of insulation into a smaller thickness of wall. They go up quickly. They have a lot of wood, which is a Good Thing. There are two reasons we settled for masonry:

1. We like a wall which when you thump it, it gives a solid 'thock', not a more hollow sound, and:

2. We want thermal mass in the house - that is, walls which are solid and heavy and so absorb the sun's heat during the daytime and then let it out slowly at night. This will make it easier to have a zero heating house, ie a house with no central heating.

That's not to say we won't have any heating: there are two woodburing stoves. Plus solar panels on the roof to pre-heat the hot water. And the idea of a super-insulated house is that even just living in it you create enough heat from cookers, appliances, human bodies, which does not then get dissipated through the walls.

That's the theory!!

Tomorrow I start pinning down builders for prices - we have sent out drawings and specs to four. Also we might get the results of the soil survey. And sending to the Jyotishis for an appropriate time to lay the foundation stone. And making sure the hardstanding goes in the right place. And researching which type of blocks to use. No chance of getting bored.

Today has been a much more cheerful day. R spent it in his favourite way - underneath the van with a hammer in his hand and a few tacks in his mouth, installing insulation. With the added attraction of having to wear a face mask because of the glass fibre (very eco!). Extra layers were put under our bedroom to keep us cosy.

We have our own robin! I will try to get a photo tomorrow. We are spending the whole weekend fitting out our van, and I had the very nice job of finding all the stuff we need in the garage. All sorts of old friends came to light. Plus trying to rescue some of my houseplants, which have suffered a bit from the cold. Fingers crossed.

Anyway, a bloke (I have realised that there are a lot of blokes in this blog) came yesterday to auger the ground - dig out soil down to a few metres with a thing like a cross between a corkscrew and a very long apple corer. He took two cores - the first one was very exciting - 2 metres of sand with clay underneath it, but the second was much poorer, lots of clay and a high water table. So he recommended putting in deep concrete or steel posts called piles into each corner. More elegant solution. Much less earth to cart off site (and pay to have disposed). Probably cheaper and quicker. But the piles will be 10m deep and this may have implications for Sthapatya Veda. So we await advice on that. Otherwise we dig 1.5 - 2.5m deep trenches.

A second bloke connected up our twin gas bottles (in a tasteful red) to the caravan yesterday afternoon and checked our gas cooker, fire and water heater.

Another bloke, bloke number three, came today to quote for giving us a hardstanding for our cars and the builders' vans - the basis of our future car park - and we tried to persuade him to take away the tree stumps. These tree stumps are starting to haunt my dreams - they lie in a very slodgy heavy way right in front of our new shed. One is diseased and it would of course be the biggest one, weighing in at over 5 tons. We are having trouble persuading anyone to get rid of them for us - talk about the elephant in the room.

A picture of the tree stumps seen across the car park and definitely in the way of the shed, not to mention the hardstanding. The tree surgeon can't even cut them up because the stones and soil mess up his chain saw, we can't bury them because of the diseased one and a bonfire to burn them would probably bring out the Fire Brigade.

Now all we need to move into our caravan is the Electricity Board. Pray for no storms or floods or lightning strikes or rat infestations in power stations or sudden cases of metal fatigue in pylons, or anything that would count as an emergency as far as the EB is concerned, and delay the connection. How hard can it be? As far as I can see they just come along and put two wires together.

We move along. Tomorrow the fitting out of the kitchen. Mustn't get too excited about the caravan and get distracted from the main plot, but at last we are living in our own property which has to be a cause for celebration.

Right now we are waiting - for the Electricity Board to hook us up, for the builders we have asked to quote us to come back to us, for someone to shift a 5 ton tree stump so we can put a hardstanding down, to be able to move into the caravan, and to make a decision about how to build it.

There are, in case you hadn't realised it, downsides to self-build - the main one being not having a proper house to live in during the process. Our cottage is tiny and I long for a big proper kitchen and a huge comfortable bed. The caravan will be better because it has a lot more light, and is better organised for small-space living, but it is still a caravan - it will get us wanting to move even faster towards vastu, if that were possible.

Also the slightly scary fact that in this case we have a choice between two systems of construction, both of which are new and without much precedent.

We really do like the idea of tying up tons and tons of carbon in our house by building it out of hemp and lime. This works in two ways: the fast-growing hemp with its carbon is locked into the lime, and the lime, as it goes off, extracts carbon from the atmosphere. Most housebuilding puts CO2 into the atmosphere and we would be removing it. Plus it's a very simple system. Zurich Insurance have just given their consent to a building warranty for Hemcrete as an infill to a timber frame. That means that the timber frame needs to be strong enough to bear all the structural loads, but that's okay. This is quite a big deal actually, because I don't think we would have gone ahead without that.

Anyway, I should look on the bright side - there is a bloke coming tomorrow to take a trial sample of the soil, which means that we will soon know exactly how deep the foundations need to be, which means that we can soon get the old muhurt application off and get our Foundation stone in place. So that's all right.

Plus we have a postbox coming tomorrow. This may not seem a major event but it has the following consequences:
the postbox means that the postman won't have to walk around the garage to post the letters
this means that we can take up the paving slabs which make up his path
then we can put the slabs down to make a base for the temporary metal shed
then we can put the shed up
then we can move the stuff out of the brick garage into the shed
THEN we can knock the garage down!!

As the garage covers the south east corner of the house, this is a Good Thing. We are planning to invite The Girls (and The Boyfriends) to a demolition weekend as soon as we can. And indeed anyone else who fancies wielding a sledgehammer....

We have discovered Freecycling and joined two local networks. People who want to get rid of something post to the local Freecycle messageboard and people who want it contact them and go and get it. We collected a whole load of blown-down fence panels at the weekend to make a skirt for the caravan - not because it is feeling modest but because it's a lot warmer without the wind blowing through. Anything for extra warmth.

Below are a few pics of the van.