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.