Floor Plans

The last bit to bring this up to date is to mention the architect. We were back at the cob course build site in June to help finish off the workshop project, and Stamatina (our host) introduced us to a local architect. His name is Konstantinos Grapsas and he most recently did a research degree at Cambridge on environmental architecture - he specialises in passive solar heating and cooling (designing the building to retain or resist heat depending on the time of year) and photovoltaic solutions. Anyway, we found his ideas very exciting, and very in tune with what we wanted to achieve. Apparently he is an advisor to the EU on such matters, so we're in exalted company.

We can't get planning permission without structural calculations - we're on the most active seismic fault in the world -so we knew we were going to need professional help, but we had no idea Lefkada would provide just such a useful contact.

So I've been obsessively drawing floor plans to give Konstantine a starting point. Apparently most beginning cob builders make their projects too large, and therefore too expensive and time and labour consuming. So I've tried to put everything we need inside a footprint of 100 sq m.



There are only 4 rooms we really need: kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and living room, and if storage is properly organised, those rooms don't have to be very big, so I've also included a pantry, boot store, linen store and laundry/garden room.

There's a bit of a low ceilinged attic, for guests willing to stoop and to climb steep stairs, which will have the best view in the house over the trees to the sea and islands to the east.

The house faces south to maximise solar gain, but the bedroom and kitchen look east. I'm hoping to have a raised deck outside the bedroom for breakfasts with glimpses of the sea through the olive trees.

A sanitary digression

We thought we'd try a compost toilet in the shower block. It'll be outside, so if it's smelly, at least we're not living with it. If it works well, we'll move it to the house. It just seems so wasteful to use fresh drinking water for flushing. This way we get usable compost too, (which we'll use for fruit trees only - so don't feel you should refuse the salad!)

If anyone's interested - this is the one we like the look of most:
http://www.composttoilet.eu

the plot continues ...

So we have this patch of land - about an acre (4,000 sq m) with limited access. This had kept the price down. However, there's a wonderful bit of planning law in Greece which says that an area of land has access if a donkey with a load of sticks up to 1.8 metres wide could get to it prior to 1923. We have a piece of paper from the town hall which confirms this.

Right now, tho', there's only a dirt track from the village above, and due to some dodgy villa building up there the track has a sharp right angle bend with a nasty drop to one side - Dave can get the van round, but long wheel-base delivery trucks can't get past. There's a court case going on to put a proper road thru' which could of course take years. But for now it keeps us focused on using materials that we can manage ourselves, which is a good discipline.

Our first action was to buy a camper van - actually a converted Mercedes truck - that someone we met in the boatyard over winter was selling. The engine is knackered and the inside needs stripping and rebuilding, but it only cost 750 euros. Keith (the previous owner) drove it cross-country thru' the olive groves to get it on our land, where it will stay for the foreseeable future.

Pic: Dave wondering just what he's let himself in for.


We splashed out on a generator, which has instructions in Japanese and Greek only, and arranged for water to be put on the land. The plan now is to build decking around the truck; construct a 'shower block' (shed with shower, washing machine and compost loo); put solar panels on the shed roof linked to the truck batteries; strip and refit the camper's interior - then move in.

Dave building a box for the generator - showing mountain views to the West.

If all goes according to plan, this will be the dead of winter - so we may not have the stomach for it - but the sooner we can stop paying rent the sooner there will be money to put aside for the main building project.

From the Beginning

Sunday 29 August 2010

The story so far:

Early this year we started looking at patches of land. There was some money available as part of a settlement from Jim so we set out to research what was out there.

I suggested building with straw bales and Dave was fascinated by the idea. Idly, I put a 'natural building' search into Google and found a cob building course was running in April on Lefkas ! Clearly the universe was telling us stuff, so we signed up and had a brilliant time, learning loads and deciding cob was the building material of choice.

Cob is made from clay (naturally occuring in the ground); sand (from a river if you can find one, or a builder's yard - sea sand is too rounded); and straw which adds tensile strength. Mix these ingredients together and you get a house with 2 ft thick walls with a high thermal mass (resists heat/cold penetration and reflects internal heat/cold back in. Lots of old cottages in Devon and Cornwall are made of it.

The pic shows some of the people on the course building a small (3 x 4m) garden workshop

Meanwhile, we bought the first plot of land we saw. We saw loads of other plots, but the first one was unmatched for location (under 2 miles from Nidri - easy bicycling distance), size (one acre), slope (about 10 degrees down to the south-east) and aspect (mountains to north and west, open to south, sea through trees to the east). The purchase went through on 30 June 2010.