Like lots of people both Dawn and I had dreamed of one day escaping the rat race and trying to live a more self-sufficient lifestyle, we had also become very interested in low impacted building and in particular straw bale building techniques,(ok now most people are properly thinking we are part of the knit your own sandal brigade and will soon be running off to hug the nearest tree lol)
We had fallen in love with France and our idea was to try and find a piece of land with CU (planning permission) and that we could afford, which would be large enough to build a house and barn and setup a smallholding, after about 12\18 months of spending all our spare time surfing the net and spending our holidays looking at various plots we found a piece of land that ticked most of the boxes, the purchase of the land took about six months and we became the proud owners of our piece of France,
Then next big step for us would be to get the planning permission for our straw bale house, we know that the French do like to keep things traditional when it comes to buildings, but have also seen that they are open to eco ideas if they are properly thought out and planned, with this in mind we employed a local French architect who had already had a set of straw bale house plans accepted by a planning committee,
Our house would be a little different from the last straw bale house that this architect had planned, ours would be of the Nebraska style which relies on the straw bails alone supporting the roof and not a timber frame, this way we can use less timber, we also decided to live off grid so all our electricity we will have to be generated ourselves but more of this later
Dawn had spent many an hour at the weekends and nights drawing up a set of plans for our house and barn using a very cheap software program, we took a print of our plans and met with the architect to show him the site and what we had in mind, he seemed very interested in what we are trying to do after taking lots of photographs, he said he would be in touch with us again soon.
After about six weeks we received the architect’s drawing through the post and were really pleased to see that he had made only one small change to Dawn’s original drawings, he had changed the way the stairs came down from the loft space.
We returned the architect’s plans for him to submit to the planning committee, and waited for what seemed like an eternity for their decision, but just before Christmas 2009 we received the best Christmas present ever our plans had been accepted we had full planning permission for our straw bale house, wooden barn and a large poly tunnel
We visited France the first weekend in February this year to plant 1000 fast growing willow sets and 100 poplar sets this will be coppiced on a four year cycle which will go some way to making us self- sufficient in fire wood, we will also be able to use the willow to make hurdles and baskets. The weekend we picked to plant must have been one of the wettest and coldest or did it just feel like it lol it was really satisfying to see the last tree planted but oh did we ache, (it felt good to be back in England and back at work for a rest lol) glad we got the willows planted when we did because the next weekend I slipped when getting out the car and broke my elbow ?
The next few years are going to be very busy for us, as we hope to do most of the building work on our house and barn ourselves. By the end of this year we are hoping to have the foundation for the house and barn laid and the barn up
We are hoping to source most of our materials as locally as possible and try using as much recycled materials as we can.
We will try to keep you posted on our progress from time to time and hope to include some pictures