So here it is - the headquarters for the next few months



He made it out from under - a well-deserved Raja's Cup and a piece of cake


A great day on site - lovely weather although a bit cold. Not so great for R who spent most of it lying on his stomach under the caravan with an 8-ton jack (that is it lifts 8 tons, doesn't weigh 8 tons), lifting the caravan so that he could put stabilising blocks of concrete and railway sleepers underneath. A bit scary but all done now. I acted as gofer which was fine by me as I didn't want to lie under the caravan - slight touch of claustrophobia there. In fact what happened for the first hour or so was that the ground under the jack compacted and he had to keep adding bits of wood under it to stop it disappearing into the ground. I took down some of the last trees which were in the actual place where the house would be. Buttered scones for tea.

So now the van is ready for me to clean it - carpet cleaning machine tomorrow. It's actually in quite good shape. We reckoned we only could spare about £1000 for the van and we looked at what you could get for £1000..... not a lot is the answer to that one, unless very lucky. And we are going to be in it till November. So then we realised that if we bought a better van we would be able to sell it on fairly easily and maybe the difference between purchase and sale price might not be much more than £1000. Maybe. We wanted 3 bedrooms for The Girls and for any friends who might want to brave it. So this is an invitation to any friends who would like to visit our little patch of mud to come and stay. We have double glazing and a certain amount of insulation under the floor. Or wait till the summer!

We got water!! Yippee - another small step in a long journey.

Storm has blown over, trees still standing, caravan still upright - I'm glad we weren't living on site today, though.

We have just got fully dimensioned working drawings which are going off to various builders to get quotes - we move along...

Picture: The way through the woods for the water main.


The caravan arrived on site last Friday and it is huge - makes the site look quite small! I was at work on Friday morning and I called R at 11am to see how things were going, and he was half way up a tree lopping some branches off so the caravan on its lorry could get onto the site. He had an exciting day - the caravan is on site but needs quite a lot doing to get it up and running. I had naively thought that we would wheel it on, connect a couple of pipes and that would be that. Not so unfortunately - a lot of lugging about to get it East, a lot of thinking about how best to jack it up so it's level and stable, and then a carpet cleaner to freshen it up - it's not really dirty, just needs sprucing up a bit. I can't remember if I said this but it has got double glazing, electric panel heaters and a gas fire which may go some way to keeping us from freezing.

We now have a phone line - hooray - the first utility installed. A stand pipe for water and a board for electric meters. Plus the place is definitely beginning to look more like a building site and less like a garden.

Things have started up again now after the traditional three-week Builders' Break over Christmas. Last week was very exciting, but more from the undergraound point of view. The local mole population were probably feeling very put out. A Bloke-with-a-digger arrived on Monday morning and started on the water main. He was great, and as a friend of ours said, "You can't beat a good Bloke With A Digger. He put in trenches for water electricity and telephone, sorted out how the sewage from the caravan was going to work and pulled up the stumps of the trees which were cut down before Christmas.

We now have a five-ton diseased tree stump on the land..... Better than a five-ton diseased tree stump _in_ the land I suppose. The picture above shows our lovely new shed overshadowed by the stumps.



The water was the most exciting trench because of being about 150 metres long and having to come through the local shrubland which is now looking a bit sorry for itself.

Anyway Craig was great - very neat and tidy, and we now wait for the various statutory undertakers to come up with their sides of the bargains and connect the ends of the various pipes and wires to give us power and water and phone.

And what is the point of that, I hear you say, when you haven't got the House yet. You can't even put the phone on a tree stump because they've all been pulled up. That folks is the next story - The Caravan.

Saturday 16th December.

The civil engineer guys came at 7.30am to put the hole-for-the-water under the road, without even digging the road up. Very clever. So that's one thing done before Christmas. There will be a hiatus of about three weeks now, but at least it gives us chance to think about how it's going to be built, i.e. the walls.

We currently have two main contenders for wall spec:
1. A traditional double skin of dense masonry blockwork with a humungous cavity of 300mm, filled with Rockwool or similar.
2. A mixture of lime and chopped up bits of hemp, which sets like concrete and acts as insulation (see www.limetechnology.co.uk for the technical details).

We went to see the hemp company yesterday and were inpressed both by the presentation and by the man himself. I don't want to go into it in too much details, because we think it may turn out to be too expensive. He's working on a quote for us and we have to sort out the exact price of alternative no. 1, and then we'll know. If we can use it, that would be terrific in all sorts of ways both technical and ethical. Then you'll get the full story of hemp in boring detail.

Fingers crossed.

Christmas taking over - this may be the last post for a week or so. So for those in the know, I'll just say a bit about The Girls to keep you up to date. They are both very excited about an eco-house. Kate is in the way of turning into an eco-professiona;, not to say an eco-activist. She's just started an MSc in Environment and Sustainable Development at UCL in London and is also fairly chuffed 'cos she's landed a graduate-traineeship-for-top-management job with a Housing Association. The course is part-time and the HA pays for the course too. So that's all right.

Emily is in her 4th year at Imperial doing Hard Sums, and will get a MSci at the end of it. She lives with boyfriend, Tom, also a bit of an eco-activist. She also volunteers as a teaching assistant in Maths in a run-down comp once a week - possibly even Harder Sums.

It is great being closer to them and being able to do up to London for the night. Emily is the Arts Editor of Imperial's weekly paper and as such gets free tickets to all kinds of arts events. As her mum, I get included in the share-out of extra tickets - she took me to Porgy and Bess last month.

I'm sorry to be further away from my mum and dad in Yorkshire though- it was great being able to pop in for an hour whenever I felt like it.

I am retraining to teach Skills for Life, or Basic Skills as the government sometimes calls it. The said govt is putting a lot of money into free education for the 7 million adults in this country who can't read, write and/or add up properly, ie who need basic skills. Lots of opportunities and you don't even need to be a schoolteacher to do it - just do one of the courses on offer, which I am doing part-time. There's also the English language for immigrants and foreign visitors. It's very interesting: I am doing a C&G course one day a week until February as well as teaching both adults and 17-20 year-olds in the college.

In the New Year we move onto the site in a caravan and the place starts to look like the trenches. Mud and holes in the ground. It's a giant caravan though and with any luck we'll have all mod cons including broadband which will make this blog a lot easier. Happy Christmas.

This was the entrance to the site in October when we first started work on it. The garage will be demolished before the house is built.












Here is a view through the site to the very nice
brick wall at the north end

15th December

WE DID IT! We got Planning Permission yesterday. What a relief.

This is the story of our Planning Permission. We got the land with Outline PP and applied straight away. Our house will be similar to the Mercer's in Skem. So we went to see the planners straight away in October and they were very friendly and helpful. Russell made a lovely set of drawings and we went back to them. This time, by chance, we saw a principle Planner. We talked about MSV on account of our house facing a funny direction - he accepted it but was not what you might call bowled over by it!

We then said that we had tried to fit in with the Suffolk vernacular by using local materials: like pantiles and a rendered finish. He said that our house was nothing like the Suffolk vernacular and what did we think we were doing designing a short fat house in an area where the houses are narrow with steep roofs.

So we started on an impromptu spiel about short fat houses being better for energy-efficiency on account of the high area:perimeter ratio, and how we were going to build a super-eco house with very thick insulated walls and no central heating. It was starting to sound a bit thin to my ears - but at the end he took off his specs, looked at us and said how impressed he was that we had thought out the design and how energy-efficient housing was exactly what the Council wanted; and then he talked us through what we needed to do to make sure the PP went through smoothly. He practically held our hands to guide us. So the middle of October the application went in, and after eight weeks of what was really an uneventful progress through the Usual Channels, but what seemed to me like about two years, Russell went to the Council Offices and picked it up yesterday.

This is the signal for all sorts of buttons to be pressed.

Also the celebratory meal in the local Chinese restaurant.

And my mum can sleep again at nights.

Tomorrow the milestone of a hole being bored under the road to put the water pipe through. Saturday morning at 8.30, on site.

Russell has now finished the first shed - a very nice bijou wood affair. If all else fails, I guess we can live in the shed.

The putting-in-a-guaranteed-true-North-South-line bloke is coming on Wednesday - another big milestone.

Vastu or Bust


09 December 2006
Welcome to the blog!

December 9th

Dear Folks,

Well here we are in sunny Suffolk and ready to start building. Here, dear reader, is where you will be able to watch our eco-vastu going up.

With any luck we'll be getting photos uploaded soon when I work out how to do it.

At the moment we are erecting a bijou east-facing shed to fit our currently-being-stored furniture into. This is a fairly posh shed and there will also be a cheap metal one going up for temporary storage, to be sold once the house is built.

The caravan arrives next week. And all the above-mentioned stored stuff is coming from Yorkshire.

Also some of the trees are coming down. One is diseased and another two would do serious damage to the foundations. They are forest trees, still at the teenager stage so due to get much bigger, and we are on shrinkable clay. We will plant copses of garden-sized trees in due course.

And the civil engineers will be boring under the road for our water connection.

That's about it till after Christmas - oh yes, one more thing: we are considering hemp-and-lime as a super-eco form of construction and we're off to Oxford on Friday to see a bloke about it.





13th December 2006

Just to fill you in a bit on what has been happening so far. R and I have been looking for a piece of land to build a Maharishi Sthapatya Veda house (a vastu house) for about a year. We wanted to live in North Yorkshire but the prices were (way) beyond our means, so we started looking round the country - from Cornwall to the Orkney Isles (I like the north of Scotland but it's a bit cold for Himself, and The Girls threatened that I would never see them if they had to get a plane from Aberdeen, so that one didn't work - but it is wonderfully cheap up there. Maybe when I'm a Grumpy Old Woman when I don't want to see anyone, anyway....)

So we came down to East Anglia. The only other place which is as cheap is Wales but a vastu house has to get the rising sun without hills in the way and that eliminated about 90% of Wales. The whole central part of the country is very pricy. Everyone wants to build their own house, and who can blame them.

I spent from March to July working full time on finding the land. Lots of internet research finding plots and then lots more internet research rejecting them because of having sunrise delay or water in the wrong place, or electricity pylons too close. East Anglia, for the most part, is free of sunrise delay, which was a great relief after searching other parts.

80% of finds were rejected before going to see them. Of the rest, maybe three-quarters were rejected on visiting. It is hard to see smaller level changes on the map and a small but nearby rise in the ground can create SD. A lot of driving, me and the old Yaris. I used to think that home was the Yaris sometimes. A lot of staying in Youth Hostels. Three or four goes at buying plots - one outbid at auction, one we lost to another buyer, two with dodgy planning permission. We wanted a plot with Outline but not Detailed PP - so that we knew we could build a house of some sort but we could design what we wanted.

In the end, the plot near Diss. Interminable stuff with solicitors. Finally bought in September. Unpacked the flat in Harrogate, moved out in October. We have possessions scattered around the country: in my parents' garage near Skipton, and in storage near Wetherby, at R’s mum's in Northamptonshire and in the tiny cottage we are perched in until we get the PP. Have stopped looking for things. When we move into the house I will find all sorts of stuff I had given up on. Will probably chuck out at that point.

The cottage is 15th century, severely cute, thatched, in Eye, with possibly enough room for a small child to swing an underfed cat. (The caravan we have bought to put on the site once we have PP will actually be a bit bigger.) The cottage is very tastefully done up in the modern style with 3 tellies and no wardrobe! One TV (waterproof) in the wall of the bathroom.

Keeping all digits crossed for tomorrow when, we have been told, we will Get Planning Permission.