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.