The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Community => Introduce yourself => Topic started by: NickRJ on January 25, 2022, 08:46:53 am
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Just to say "hello" from south west Poland. :wave:
I won't type a long intro, I've tried to type a proper intro four times now and for some reason or another it simply hasn't loaded/posted. Just to say my wife and I are at the start of a new adventure here, a complete change form our previous lives in London so I suspect we'll be posting quite a few questions as we find our feet in our new lifestyle!
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Hello and welcome from North East Scotland! I'll look forward to hearing more about your life in Poland.
Why Poland?
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Hello Rosemary,
Thank you for the welcome. Why Poland. Well my wife is Polish and her family is from a lovely part of the country. When I was made redundant we decided that it was a good opportunity to escape the rate race of life in London. We have not long moved into a 200+ year old farmhouse on a couple of acres which we simply couldn't have dreamed of affording in the UK, We hope to buy some more land and add some livestock.
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Obviously "Rat race" doh...I did try to correct it earlier but I seem to have some IT issues. I think the snow here is affecting my internet access, I'll have to get used to that I guess!
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Hello from Southwest France. Lovely looking house which I'd guess has been recently refurbished. Similar build type to here with stone walls at the base with timber frame upstairs. The main difference is the roof angle- because we very rarely get any snow our angle is shallow and loft rooms are a definite no because of the heat in Summer.
By co-incidence my wife is of Polish origin, but to avoid a long story, she has French Nationality. Surprising how many nationalities we have down here. Our neighbours are Romanian (from Guadaloupe), German, Belgian and Dutch. My friends' wife is Polish but from Scotland.
I'd give it a year or so until you are familiar with the climate. You may find it necessary to bring some or all of your livestock inside in Winter (in Summer here), so you might need barn space? Perhaps you have an English speaking support group like we have down here?
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Welcome to TAS, Nick, firstly have to say what a fantastic house , second thought looks great for collecting rainwater for garden/animals, I try to get gutters and tubs/tanks on all our sheds, usually not too far from a tub of water, apart from when frozen of course.
How does the weather compare to UK, sounds colder than N.Scotland?
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Hello Chrismahon and Peninehillbilly, thank you both for the welcome,
The house, sort of, most of it is stone on the lower level and wood above, but not quite. Part of the gound floor is actually wood log construction which was rendered over sometime in the past. We have actually had specialists in to assess that part of the building because we want to take it back to its correct historical context. The type of house is known as a "Dom przysłupowy" in this region and they are a construction which exists mostly in Germany, here and the Czech republic. The photo is of the log built room from the inside so that you can see the wood, sorry it's a Christmas picture in January but it shows the construction, these rooms were used for weaving looms historically. Unfortunately the house was "refurbished" by the previous owner but we are finding a horror story of poor/unsympathetic and in places dangerous work so we have our work cut out! Peninehillbilly, I would agree with you about the water but we are lucky on the water front. We have several wells on the property, spring fed and even with temperatures in the -10 category the water continued to flow and we understand it has never dried up in living memory, :fc: The other advantage being no water rates, that is a blessing in view of the rampant inflation everywhere at the moment. Certainly winters can be cold but generally the weather is to a degree predictably seasonal, unlike living on an island like the UK. We are also fortunate as we have two huge stone built barns with upper levels. One of the barns upper levels will probably be turned into holiday accommodation, if money stretches as far as that. Putting right some of the previous owners building works has already proved to be an unexpected eye watering experience! Unfortunately I have already had one dream shattered here. I had always fancied keeping pigs but with african swine flu rampant here it isn't possible to get permission to do that, at least for the moment. Ho hum. Chickens and rabbits will be the first animals on the list but my wife has an eye on a few alpacas as she is keen to do some spinning, she doesn't want a lot, they will be purely "hobby" but I have to admit they have a lot of appeal.
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We are on spring water here, so no water rates, but any problems we have to sort out ourselves, can get a bit low in a long dry summer, only got too low to use once in 30 years, but we took the opportunity to clean the brick tank out and build sides up a bit. We have another spring which we had already built a holding tank, so plenty of water.
I love alpacas as well, been tempted but i think prices are still a bit high for me, will stick with my goats for now.
House sounds a nightmare to sort, but sounds like it will be worth it, other people's bodged jobs are the worst, I have a friend who had to rewire all their house when they moved in, wasn't safe.
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Yes the house situation knocked us back a bit. We bought it on the understanding that it had been "thoroughly" renovated to the highest standards and we were hoping to launch a B&B business fairly quickly. Unfortunately surveyors don't seem to exist here in the way they do in the UK for house purchases. It has turned out the plumbing, which was buried in the walls has turned out to be a nightmare of plastic pipes fitted with the cheapest connectors some of which have started to fail. We had a major burst on New Years eve and it was a failed connector, not the cold weather that that was the cause. We have also discovered that a large open fireplace and a wood burner installed in other parts of the building are fire hazards and need to be completely taken out and replaced because whoever installed them had no idea what they were doing and it seems that is the tip of the iceberg. That said we love being here, we've started to re-adjust our thinking on the way we go forward and we are relishing the challenges. My wife started "farming school" back in September as neither of us have a farming background and without the relevant bits of paper we won't be able to buy more land. It's interesting how "smallholding" here is not as well developed as it is in the UK. Small scale farming seems to be dying out to a degree as the mindset seems to be that bigger is better and there doesn't seem to be the level of interest in getting back to the land that drives a lot of people in the UK.
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Hearing a little of your story is fascinating Nick. It's also great to hear that your wife will be learning to spin and keeping fibre animals. With your log-walled room having been a loom room, how appropriate for it now to be a spinning room :spin: 8)
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All that lovely old wood. Haven't seen anything like that since we stayed at the Prince Rupert hotel in Shrewsbury. I spent many 100's of hours restoring elements of our place in England. Painted all the rooms the traditional colours only to be told by the estate agents that no-one wants them like that- paint them magnolia!
I often was called out to bursts with plastic pipes, usually the hot. The reason was always the same. The end of the pipe has to be fitted with an insert to take the strain of the clamp. If not the plastic pipe gets crushed over time and the fitting comes loose. Seems DIY types and even some plumbers don't realise that.
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Yes Chris, there is A LOT of wood here and I have to admit being in what we hope is our now "forever" house we can completely be ourselves and never have that niggling feeling that an estate agent will pop up to tell us how we should decorate the house to make it "presentable". Spot on with the pipe, it was the hot water so doubly painful.....we had paid to heat all the water we ended up losing! I had to go down into the cellar to turn the water off and thought I would be electrocuted as water was pouring through the ceiling and down by the power point the pump was plugged into. Interesting point about plastic pipes. It's a learning curve for me as I only ever had experience of copper before for domestic water.
Hello Fleecewife. Yes Agnieszka, my wife is very keen to try spinning. I know she was looking at plans for carding machines and such like and we do have some of the old19th century tools lying around in the house. In fact quite a few old reminders of how the house ran in the past, crates full of old iron horse shoes probably dating back a century or more, farming equipment and some very ancient bee keeping equipment. It is a real voyage of discovery. I suspect Agnieszka will be here picking your brains on spinning when we start to settle fully into life here and try out all the things we plan.
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If it was a missing insert I would advise you to check all the joints. If you are lucky it was just that one that was forgotten. If you do make any connections with plastic pipe it is important to measure the fitting for the correct insertion depth and then mark the pipe. The reason is the additional force required to get the pipe into the seal at the end is sometimes misleading and you think the pipe has reached a stop. Of course you would spot that mistake as soon as you turned the water on. I very rarely used plastic. Only when I couldn't get copper into place or when making repairs to an existing plastic system. It just doesn't look 'professional'.
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Thank you Chris. I have to admit it feels a bit like living with a timebomb because the piping was buried in walls and we simply don't know where any connectors may have been used. We have some damp in a downstairs room which we are convinced is another leaking joint. We started taking the tiles off the shower in the room above and taking up the tiled floor of the shower only to discover the pipes are embedded in a concrete plinth the shower stands on. We also discovered electric cabling had been run along the middle of the walls and across the pipes, thank goodness we used a club hammer and bolster to expose the pipes because the angle grinder would have gone straight through the cable! I was shocked to see how many different types of plastic connectors there are on the market now and they all seem to need their own special fixing tools, which ain't cheap :o At least with copper it's a blow torch or spanners.
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It does sound like a bit of a nightmare Nick. The favourite leak point with a shower is the connections to the mixer- had a lot of those because they are difficult to seal and I used to use gas PTFE tape which is a lot thicker than the water stuff. Of course it could be the waste pipe work as well.
Before Brexit there were an awful lot of Polish plumbers working in England. Perhaps they have worked to the same standards there. Plumbing here in France is very different. The water supplies are 10bar which is too much for the UK solder joints or compression fittings. They weld the copper supply pipes together, even on the lower pressure circuits. Solder joints are considered a bodge. The pipe walls are thicker and there are far more sizes. Annoyingly they solvent weld all the waste pipes, so there is now way to dismantle and clean them or make additions. Seems plumbing is a problem everywhere?
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Just a thought on copper, we are now mainly on plastic (HEP20), our spring water is slightly acidic and corrodes copper pipe and cylinders. Spent one christmas with some of the kitchen units pulled out because pipes behind had started leaking. stainless steel hot water cylinder.
Lucky OH is a heating engineer :)
He has just commented on THAT Christmas as well, I'd asked him about copper pipe corroding ;D
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Hello from Polish smallholder from Leicester ;)
Poland has beautiful climate - warmer summers and cooler winters comparing to the UK.
House and small fsrm prices are SO MUCH CHEAPER. For £100k you can buy a beautiful house with several hectares of land.
I would move either to the far north of Poland - region with lots of lakes, or far south - mountains.
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How does the weather compare to UK, sounds colder than N.Scotland?
Depends what region (obviously on the mountains it will be colder than on lower grounds), but even down south towards the mountains you can grow peaches up to 450m, i.e. around 1500ft, in UK you wouldn't be able to grow apples that high!
Winters are colder (on average) but summer's are much warmer. Average temperature in summer on Leicester is around 18C, in Poland around 23C. I.e. 27C at day time, and 18C at night.
Poland has the best climate in Europe for growing grain. That's why it's the largest producer of poultry and pork - because grain is cheaper to grow and locally available - no need to import.
We also produce around 80% of apples and 90% of geese in Europe.
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Hello macgro7,
I have to admit we probably paid too much by Polish standards for the house here but it was, by comparison with property prices in the UK much more affordable. I do like the life here and while in part I am glad to be away from the politics in the UK I am not a big fan of the politics here either but thankfully my Polish isn't good enough to enable me to understand it. I guess in a way I am living in blissful ignorance, long may it last ;D
Whereabouts in Poland were you from. We are not far from Mirsk and Jelenia Gora, that is where my wife's sister lives and so the reason for our choosing this location.
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I'd would prefer to stay away from any sort of polotics, but sometimes we need to be aware of certain things :-[
I am (as well as my whole family) from Lublin, and surrounding region.
I have lived in England since I was 17, but sometimes I think of moving back to Poland and getting a smallholding there instead of here.
You can literally buy something of similar size for 1/10 of price.
House with 10 acres in Leicestershire cost £1,100,000 nowadays :o
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That is true but it may not stay that way too long. While we were looking we couldn't believe how prices for property were rising here and there seemed to be no logic to it. Some properties weren't selling and yet the prices seemed to go UP rather than down, I just could not understand that. The property we bought was thanks to the sale of our semi-in the suburbs of London. The size of the property we now live in we could fit our old house into five or six times over! If you do decide to come back though a small holding as such may not be so easy. The property laws here are quite convoluted now. That is why my wife has been going to agricultural school since September and will be on the course until next Christmas. It is free which is a relief, but because she isn't a "farmer" she isn't allowed to buy more than a hectare. I believe there are "ways" around the matter but they are fraught with problems I understand. We have about a hectare here. We have been offered an adjacent plot of another 2 hectares but until my wife has the official "farmer" status she can't acquire it. A neighbour who has 19 hectares, adjacent to us has said we can keep animals on his land if we wish so that looks to be a way of keeping some animals.
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That is true but it may not stay that way too long. While we were looking we couldn't believe how prices for property were rising here and there seemed to be no logic to it. Some properties weren't selling and yet the prices seemed to go UP rather than down, I just could not understand that. The property we bought was thanks to the sale of our semi-in the suburbs of London. The size of the property we now live in we could fit our old house into five or six times over! If you do decide to come back though a small holding as such may not be so easy. The property laws here are quite convoluted now. That is why my wife has been going to agricultural school since September and will be on the course until next Christmas. It is free which is a relief, but because she isn't a "farmer" she isn't allowed to buy more than a hectare. I believe there are "ways" around the matter but they are fraught with problems I understand. We have about a hectare here. We have been offered an adjacent plot of another 2 hectares but until my wife has the official "farmer" status she can't acquire it. A neighbour who has 19 hectares, adjacent to us has said we can keep animals on his land if we wish so that looks to be a way of keeping some animals.
AH! Yes!
Several years ago they introduced a law that is supposed to make it easier for the farmers to buy land (instead of rich investors). You are only allowed to buy land which is larger than 1 hectare if you are a farmer, I.e. if you work in agriculture or have agricultural education, or if you leased it forn3 years (or more?)
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They have a system in France which is designed to stop the loss of agricultural land to 'townies' who want it for a garden or horses. Once the sale price is agreed it is offered at that price to the farmers co-operative. They can buy it, take the land and sell the house themselves. So it is very difficult to find a house with land and then be able to complete the purchase, keeping the land.
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To be honest Chris my experience of Polish workers in the UK was always good. We have found a few reliable people here but they seem to be few and far between. I am beginning to think all the best ones are in the UK. It isn't just us but a lot of people are saying how people just don't turn up when you call anyone to do a job now. We have got to know a British couple in the next village from us. They have been here a few years and they have a list of trades people they are able to recommend through experience and that is very valuable information!