Snail's Pace

 

Here's one of the interlopers that take advantage of the condensation on the bathroom window. The baby snails (and sometimes slugs - ugh) sneak in through the vents and make themselves at home in the cool damp autumn evenings.

The big news for this last week is that we have - at last got our plans registered with the planning department. Now all we can do is wait, answer any questions sent our way and hope that the council will smile on our efforts to produce an acceptable design.

It's hard not to want to jump ahead of ourselves and start looking at all the secondary details that we've found out about whilst designing the house. We'd been planning an environmentally friendly home even before it was such headline news. We hope to have solar hot water, clean and energy efficient heating, a productive garden, natural pond and a healthy environment to live in. The jury is out on a wind turbine, but our location appears to be quite suitable. There are lots of things, big and little that will make this our home and we can't wait to make them real.

Just yet though we have to hold back and see if we will be allowed to put down the bricks and motar. Wish us luck. 

How to Keep Warm in Winter

Here's a little video I've made about the hot air blower we're going to use to keep ourselves warm this winter. It's the first video I've made, so it's rather simple, but I'm pretty pleased with it.



Now that we've sucessfully made biodiesel from the oil we've been collecting, we can use it to run a heater. It's a very sophisticated device, burning the fuel like a little jet engine and using a heat exchanger to warm up nice fresh air. The heater pushes out an enormous volume of hot air and will be connected to warm our bedroom and bathroom. Though it sounds pretty noisy in the video, once it's warmed through it settles down to be much quieter. Adding a silencer and hiding it away under the caravan should let us keep it on throughout the night without disturbing our sleep.

Monkey!

 

I was going to put up a picture of the 'repairs' I've done on the shower in the caravan. The plastic it's made out of is old, yellowing and rather brittle. When the caravan was used irregularly for the previous owners' holidays it was certainly up to the job. Now that we've been showering regularly for over a year of continuous occupation, the cracks are showing.

Literally.

The disturbing sign of leakage isn't wet feet or musty smells. Instead the chipboard that the floors are made out of starts to sag where the water has penetrated them and softened the glue. These little dips that bounce as you walk over them act as a map showing where the shower has sprung yet another leak.

So, knowing that plastic like this can only be stripped out and replaced, and that a specially caravan sized shower will no doubt cost way too much, I've botched it. Fibreglass repair tape and resin used to build and repair small boats does a fantastic job of holding the edges together and keeping the water in place. It's not pretty - not even slightly - rough and browning as the resin reacts with daylight. But it works, so I'm happy.

However, having taken a photo to share online, I realised just how ugly it looks. So instead here is a picture of Monkey, one of William's favourite toys who unexpectedly got thrown into the bath and has had to be given a seat to dry out again. 

Hyacinths

If you were watching Gardeners World on BBC tonight, you might have seen a piece on the National Collection of Hyacinths. We're just around the corner from them, so we're bitterly disappointed not to have been asked to feature as the National Collection of Nettles.

The Chickens Have Landed

The lovely Pam of Fenland Fowl came today and brought us four young bantams.

We have a Maran, a Hamburgh, a Wyandotte and a Leghorn x Legbar cross. So far we've not named them, but they've settled in well and managed to ignore the scrutiny of our cats and William (who was more interested in banging on the coup).

In a few weeks' time they should start to give us multi-coloured eggs - very dark brown from the Maran, blue-green from the Leghorn x legbar cross and brown and white from the Wyandotte and Hamburgh. Now we've just got to look up all of our best recipes. Hopefully some of them will include courgettes as the veggie patch is making a last stand before Autumn and we can't pick them fast enough.

Baby Steps

No one big piece of news to report on at the moment.

Chickens should arrive... next week.
First batch of biodiesel... next week.
New set of house plans... next week.

I've also got a very uncomfortable sprained muscle in my back, so the ongoing war against nettles is suffering a slight set back.

On the positive side, William brought back his first painting from nursery on Wednesday. He's just like his dad - more paint on the boy than on the paper. My usual approach to painting things is more or less the same, cover yourself in paint and throw yourself at the target.

Can you tell what it is yet?

Putting this together has been very, very satisfying. It seems I've not quite grown out of meccano. There are a few more bits and pieces to add yet, but once it's finished it'll be a biodiesel reactor.

Add used chip shop oil and a bucket of chemicals, leave for a few hours and (with some luck) out comes diesel. It should be good enough for running the truck and heating the caravan and will cost quite a bit less than normal diesel. Best of all though, it's carbon neutral - recycled fuel made with recycled plumbing.

The Often Forgotten Fifth Teletubby

The shed roof is (was) corrugated asbestos. Strangely the beams that I thought were holding it up stopped six inches short of the lintels that should have been supporting them. There's no evidence the two ever met, so it seems the roof was holding up the beams, which I'm pretty certain is the wrong way round.

It's taking a while to dismantle it - dressing up like a grubby teletubby soon gets very warm the moment the sun comes out. The other sheds will (hopefully) be taken down by someone else, who can do all the messy work. In the mean time I need to sort this one out, so - after a long cold drink - it's back to the protective gear. 

Harvest time

This time of year is an absolute favourite. We both grew up working on farms and bringing in the harvest was a great job.

The combines are out, running on past sunset until the dew comes down and makes the grain too damp to store. Trailing behind them like lost puppies are the tractors and trailers waiting for the auger to swing up from the side of the combine - ready to unload again.

I couldn't help smiling today as I was walking back from the village and stopped so William could watch the big old combine starting a new field. Even in the face of modern farming techniques and mechanisation everyone helps on the harvest, keeping every tractor, trailer, combine, grain blower and shovel moving. True to form the tractor following the combine was being driven by a skinny teenager, sitting proud in the cab and obviously full of the importance of his job. I bet the radio was on loud.

Now the air is damp with dew and the bats are out chasing insects. The smell of dusty straw is sweet and mist is coming up from the fields. Time for bed.

Chicken House

Even if we can't build our own house just yet, we can build something for chickens to be proud of (we hope).

We're going to be getting four birds from Fenland Fowl, hopefully to give us some lovely fresh eggs. There's just time to go and buy feeders, drinkers and layers pellets, and then we'll see if the cunning chicken coop design works.

The nettles in the background are making a last stand before the strimmer gets dusted down. Try to ignore them - we do.

Ups and downs

Today is typical of the ups and downs we've experienced so far at Lock Farm. We spoke to our planning adviser to let him know of the delays and in response he has been refreshingly positive. In the face of setbacks and uncertainty it's easy to get a little weary of the whole process. So it's wonderful that someone is on our side, that they are enthusiastic about our plans and believe we've got an excellent proposal together. Just as I'm sighing in the face of yet another hindrance, he has been reassuringly upbeat that at least we're making some small progress. Of course, he might be lying (we are paying him, after all), but those sort of lies are welcome with open arms if they can keep us going. The alternative is that by the time we return to planning permission we could be so weary of the project ourselves that we aren't able to communicate the effort and enthusiasm that has gone into designing a house suitable for the area, the plot and our needs. After all, we've had this design, or variations on it on paper for eighteen months now so our new home feels 'old' to us before it's even been built.

As an antidote to the friendly and helpful words of our planning adviser, I spent a frustrating hour trying to meet a joiner who could take an initial look at the barn. Frankly, four hundred year old listed timbers intimidate me a little. Whoever helps us rescue the barn is going to have to be good - not just a good carpenter, but able to work in sympathy those parts of the structure that can be saved. They'll also have to be able to work with the council's conservation department who will want assurance that the job is being done correctly. Whilst we're waiting on paperwork, setting out to find a joiner who meets these needs is a welcome distraction.

Unless they don't turn up when you've booked time off work specifically to meet them.

Still waiting

This isn't quite a blog yet... there's not that much to blog about. Lock Farm is still just a disreputable pile of very second hand buildings and extremely well established nettles. There's a separate post to be written about the garden, but that's really the only thing that's changed.

So far the delay that has held things back since the start of the year is the flood risk analysis - proving to the environment agency that we can survive without waterwings. Most of the time has been spent trying to work out how to prove the site won't flood without doing a full flood analysis. We're not far from the lock that gives Lock Farm it's name, so we have a river at two different levels, flood protection banks and acres of fairly flat floodplane (this is the edge of the fens!). A full flood analysis would cost around ten thousand pounds, which in self-builder's terms is one good kitchen, a double garage or a couple of bathrooms. So, as we'd rather spend money on real things than on paperwork, we've been working on an alternative.

Happily, the alternative turned out to be a set of engineers who appear to be more interested in solving the problem they're given than in doing the job they can charge the most for. We've compromised with the Environment Agency and agreed to build some basic flood protection into the site (actually a low bank along one fence), and in turn they've accepted that a detailed, technically accurate flood analysis is not practical on a small self-build project such as ours. We've saved thousands of pounds, though as usual the trade off is in time.

So finally, our flood protection proposal is with the Environment Agency and we're waiting on a (hopefully) positive outcome that would allow us to return to the planning department with a clean bill of health. Sadly it looks like the wait will be for a while yet, as they're estimating that it will be at least a month before they'll get to our submission thanks to illness and holidays taken by their staff.

It's all progress of a sort, but it would be such a relief to be moving beyond the planning stage to actually building something.

The view over Hong Kong 

Crunch Time

This demonstrates the benefit of driving a big old pickup truck. I was stationary in traffic and this poor Nissan was - um - not. At least, not until it drove into the back of me.

The Nissan was written off. The pickup suffered a bent tow bar. I just need to tie a rope around something solid and straighten it back again some time.

Dark Skies

The fens may be flat, but you can see storms coming from a long way away. By the time this one hit I was ready for it, standing in the doorway with the camera shielded from the pouring rain.



This is a very long exposure photo - over ten minutes, which is long enough to see the stars spinning through the sky.