the cat that got the rat got bit

Poor Lulu, she was just doing her job, killing mice and rats.



I noticed there was something wrong with her lower jaw and I checked her teeth to make sure she didn't have a problem there, but she was eating fine and seemed happy so I left her alone, then her jaw got worse, and even though she was till eating I checked the rest of her jaw out. She had a massive swelling under her chin.

I took her to the vets and an hour later he had shaved her and lanced an abcess and drained about 10ml of stinky fluid from it. The only thing I can imagine that caused this is the rat, she's pretty hardy and has fights with cats all the time, but have never had a problem like this, it's only the second time in her life that I've had to take her to the vets outside of her yearly injections.....



bless

Alpaca poo tea

I have been trying to dress and feed all the trees which we have planted since we've been here. Some trees have not survived, mostly because I didn't water them enough, some I suspect from poor stock. They don't cost much here, so it's not a terrible shame. But always trying to manage things better and do things efficiently and cheaply I was offered some alpaca poo in exchange for some livestock.



Having recently given over the whole of meadow three to the pigs (moving the fences constantly was too labour intensive),



Rick fenced off each end and now they have the run of the whole meadow. I needed to sort out the trees that I planted there, I actually couldn't find two of the almonds as my sunflowers had taken over, I dug bowls around each one and dressed them with straw and covered that in alpaca poo......

Great

NOT

Pigs love alpaca poo



I had to pick up all the alpaca poo and come up with another plan. How to feed the trees. Bit of research later....alpaca poo tea, you'd probably need one hell of a digestive biscuit to stomach it though.

No budget build-access

This is a picture of where it all began, the farm, in the forest, in the mountains, in portugal.



I think its important to try and be as sensitive as possible to the environment in which we are a part, and that includes the way in which any of us build, from our approach in siting buildings, through our choice of materials, and to the method in which we construct.

In an effort to achieve this sensitivity I think its important to be thinking about what we are doing, constantly. To think about what we are doing and our relationship to all things.

As such, I would like the finished building and all the necessary ancillary work to blend seemlessly into the surrounding landscape. With that in mind I will endeavor to maintain as much of the existing landscape as possible. However, and its a big however, it was necessary to fell a number of the pines to put the driveway in. I know it must have appeared as a scar on the landscape, yet subsequent planting and natural reseeding of the area have taken place and have begun to soften it.



Further, in order to improve access to the site, and to protect it from damage due to blowdowns (which are not uncommon here) and fire hazard, as a preventative measure I have taken out a number of pine trees within the vicinity of the planned build.



And although right now, as I write this it may not look as sensitive as I would like, that is my end game, where I am headed toward.


In the beginning of this story, there was a series of farm buildings comprising several parts, perched on the side of the mountain, with terraces sloping off. Slopey terraces may be great for harvesting olives, when you want them to roll down the gathering nets, they are less great when it comes to access and building.



Our farm has an access road running though it, just above the house site, and an ancient caminho publico (that's public path/right of way, to you and me) running from that road, past the house, along the boundary of our land, and up through the forest on the dark side, to join up with another camino that runs from further down the road, through another section of our land, and from there eventually back to the village. This makes improving access to the farm or building site somewhat contentious, or frowned upon to say the least.

Access from elsewhere is just as fraught with problems. The steepness of terrain governs this region, and nothing much short of a civil engineering project can sort out our access issues. Or that's how it appears.



We could remove some more trees from the mountain side and excavate a wider pathway with at least one change of direction, wide enough to get a tractor down, but there isn't really the width of terrain to achieve that. It's very steep, but not very wide, and it would be marginal at best, and at worst it would undermine the road, which would be a massive headache.

Access back up to the building from elsewhere on the farm is equally entertaining, and would involve crossing more than one other farm to get here, negating the possibility of coming from a different direction.

So we have ourselves a bit of a situation, not uncommon here, where you have no access for plant, and crappy, at best, access for farm machinery. Even though from the roadside its not 20 mtrs to the back of the building, to the front obviously somewhat more, its awkward, steep, very steep in places, slippy when wet, or covered in pine duff, and further confined by a stone wall down the other side. Provided you are able bodied you can get up and down without too much effort, but try barrowing a load of ballast or sand down and it becomes its own stupendous game. It doesn't matter how strong you are, you can only level fill the barrow or it runs away with itself, or spills, because you have to hold it at such an elevated angle.

What I'm trying to illustrate here is that everything that goes to the farm or building has to be 'man hauled' as Shakelton would refer to it. It doesn't take long to understand why, in the past, people farming here used donkeys and mules and asses.

The no budget build-demolition

Then began the process of demolishing the buildings. All of the demolition had to be done by hand to salvage as much material to reuse as possible.



First the roof off the adjacent smaller building to the west was stripped off.



The front and part of one side of that building were robbed out to further facilitate the excavation. Following the completion of excavation, i could begin the demolition of the main building.

Then I put up the scaffold,





ripped the roof off,





and began taking the walls down.





Keep this in mind when reading.
When building for yourself, certain things are going to slide, often those things are to do with personal health and safety, in your efforts to try and achieve, you push your own limits way beyond what is reasonable.

Constantly, I am faced with the question, how am I going to move this thing which weighs hundreds of pounds, yes hundreds, from here to here, on my own? Only you can come up with an answer to that. Do you ask someone for assistance every 5 minutes, or do you try and figure a way of doing it on your own that limits the possibility of you getting hurt but hopefully achieves the aim? The choice is yours, if it's a choice. For a lot of builders that choice gets made for you, and you end up doing it on your own, and your back and your joints pay the price.



This 17' 8"x10" (thats 6mx200x250mm for those of you who work only in new money) chestnut purlin weighed a great deal. I lowered it down as I demolished one side of the building, robbing stone out around it as I went, then had to slide it out of it's housing the other side, lift it out, all however many hundreds of pounds (come and lift it if you don't believe me) and hump it across the building site, and out over the scaffold.





Compared to digging out, the demolition was easy. But it still took me over a month of hard labour. Erecting scaffold, dropping walls, dropping scaffold, etc etc etc. and piling stone,





until it was all down, and I had cleared away the site, in preparation for the next phase.





When i thought it was almost done, something else became apparent, that had, until the clean up, remained hidden.

The no budget build-rubble control

When I was excavating the oversite, I was thinking about the ways in which I could use the rock that I was digging out.
Here are those ways. Some of the rock, the best grade material, will go back to building the house.
The next grade, in both size and shape has already gone to building a terrace wall on top of an existing terrace.



The footing for the wall was hand dug, and that material, along with the next lot of trenching will go to in-fill a raised bed the next terrace down.



The foundation to the wall is crushed stone, graded out from the oversite dig, too small for laying, but ideal as a footing material, when compacted. It is free draining, and solid.



The wall was built using rough grade, field stone, excavated in the oversite dig.



The back of the wall was infilled with crushed stone to act as a french drain, removing the risk of rainwater backing up and causing the wall to fail. An outlet was left in the wall for grey water and rainwater run-off from the house to feed into the raised bed.





After the french drain was infilled, everything else I couldn't use was run over to level up the terrace to give both a level from which to build off of and in the future an area that will be paved. The landscaping has been left intact as possible, to help segue in the build.

The no budget build - excavation

My plan is to extend the existing building on three sides, and through it's elevation. This means removing an existing building to the west, and cutting into the bedrock both to the east and west, to excavate a sufficient footprint, thereby keying the building into the mountain, rather than perching it on the mountain. One of the reasons for this was to try and eliminate the possibility of having the building rack because of sub-terrainious movement. Looking at the existing main building led me to believe there had been some movement, as most of the walls were out of upright, and ran in and out of alignment, some of that could be put down to poor construction, but I didn't imagine all of it was.



The excavation seemed to highlight the existence of bed-rock movement, as huge blocks of slate often sat slightly separate to each other, or adjacent but shifted, as if they had been wrenched apart.



Rightly or wrongly, I choose to excavate first, demolish next. My principal reasons for doing this were that I wanted to have a reasonable siting to put the scaffold on, from which to demolish the building, and in addition, I wanted to use some of the excavated rock to build a new terrace and create a level site in-front of the main building, making the process of building easier, and giving me a better storage facility.

There has been approximately a 2- 2.5m x 7m section to remove either side of the building, that ran anywhere between 1.5m-2.5m high. That has varied between a thin topsoil and bed-rock to a mixture of soil and rock.



On the eastern side it was about 98% bedrock, on the western side about 30% bedrock and the rest a mixture of variously packed soil and rock.



All of the excavation I did by hand. Most of it with hand tools. Principally, a pick, a shovel, a mattock, a breaking bar and a barrow.



Ahh the joy of pick and shovel work. It has taken a long time. It has been hard labor indeed, helped by the relentless scorching sun.

Something else that's funny, in an odd way, is the fondness you develop, and dependence on a particular tool. On the last house I built, for us, it was two things, my dewalt chop saw, and paslode first fix nail gun, ah joy. Fond memories. Two great bits of kit that really speed up framing.

I guess it's the same with everything, you develop a fondness for the tools of your trade, they are the things that enable you to earn money and to live, and maybe if you're lucky or talented they help you express your ability as a craftsman as well, if that's your thing.



With some aspects of building, depending on how you look at it, they help you develop a zen oneness with the thing you are doing. Laugh as much as you like, you will only understand what I mean by this if you have actually done what I'm talking about, and for a protracted period, don't expect zanshin when you get out your black and decker work mate and kronky homebase hand saw to do some DIY, it doesn't happen overnite, or even after a couple of years, but takes a lifetime generally. The similarity between martial arts and building is a strong one. Not in what they produce but in the way that you work. You will only really grasp this if you have done either or both of these things 'Grasshopper'.

So far here, it's altogether lower tech than back in the UK, and currently like stepping into the past as it's back to the pick. To be frank in all the years I've been building and all the ground work I've ever done, I've rarely ever had to get a pick out. Probably a result of living in east anglia, where there is no rock as such, you could always get by using a shovel, and at worst get the mattock out, but here, when you hit bed rock, there's nothing like the pick. Where it wins over an electric, pneumatic, or hydrolic breaker is it enables you to grub out larger sections of rock without splitting it all over the place and wrecking all the faces.



I used an electric kango on some of the bed rock, when it got too awkward to continue picking it out, there are only so many days even I am prepared to work when all you get out of it is a barrow full of chipings for 8 hours entertainment.

There is an additional method to the way I am choosing to work, you can call it permaculture if you wish, I would just say it's being resourceful and forward thinking. I am trying to waste nothing, I know that there will be building related waste, I am just trying to minimize it, and find another outlet for it. It's not just the cost of waste disposal, and here there really aren't the skip hire companies to haul it out anyway. It's a different mindset, about how can I use this thing to it's best and most advantageous.

It's me trying to be as thoughtful as I can. In part this attitude to building has evolved over my career, and in part this place has offered me the opportunity of looking more thoroughly at how I do what I do, and also it was something I read in john Seymore's complete self sufficiency handbook, he advocated an approach to farming that did the same, waste nothing, what grows on the farm stays on the farm, and using things to benefit other things, beyond the immediately obvious, for instance the reasons you would keep pigs isn't just for their meat, but also to rotavate, to consume waste matter, and to fertilise your land by spreading their own muck, not easy to get shrink wrapped meat in sainsbury's or asda to do that.

The no budget build-chainsaw preparation

Things have a way of happening, and early on, prior to any of the construction process, we got offered the possibility to purchase for felling, a number of walnut, chestnut and cherry trees in another mountain region.



Prior to felling, I tried to envisage, in the traditional way, components of the house, whilst they were still part of the trees. I can't tell you yet how successful this was. In times past, all the component parts of the house were numbered as the timbers were cut out of the trees, to enable the subsequent framing of the house on site, I couldn't do that, but what I could see was a possible use for most of it.



I felled a lot of trees, and so far have processed a lot of raw lumber into useable material for construction, but not anywhere near enough, a tiny fraction of the lumber needs for a wooden house. It was a sensible and sensitive approach. I've been back to the site a number of times, and am glad to see that all the trees have subsequently coppiced, and where there was one trunk, there are now twenty or more shoots growing up. Rather than destroying a habitat, it has been a habitat that has been managed in a sustainable and sensible way, utilising the existing native hardwoods. A lot of people see the chainsaw as the epitomy of destruction, i would argue that it depends on how you use it.



The lumber came in a number of loads, some of it is still parked on the driveway awaiting processing.

The no budget build-explanation

It's a funny thing, when it comes to things, there are always other ways of doing things.

Sometimes it's easy to get hung up on technique, or form, or both, or if your are making something, to get hung up on materials, or the way you see things.

Sometimes doing what feels right goes against everything you have learnt. Sometimes that may be the best course of action, and sometimes the worst.

Sometimes it takes a lot of experience to have faith in doing what feels right, and sometimes the reverse, sometimes your experience can get in the way, and you inadvertently hold yourself back.

It's a bit like that line in Joseph Heller's book 'Catch 22', when captain Tapman the group chaplain is trying to explain his inability to see major Major, "You can see him, but only when he's not there." To which he's rebuked by a senior officer, "are you describing some mystical experience...?" because that's what it can sometimes boil down to, a mystical experience with whatever you are dealing with. And sometimes you can find the extraordinary in the mundane. Although this isn't an article on mysticism, but building, they can be one and the same. It depends, on how you look at it.

It's common knowledge that there's a fine line between genius and madness, perhaps its a little less common to understand that often you need both, and that many times they are the same thing, like light, which can be both a wave and a particle, it depends on how you look at it.



For anyone reading this that doesn't know who I am, and to give you a context, I am a carpenter and builder, a woodsman, a bushcrafter, a maker of things, (by the way, that's not a picture of me, if you didn't know, but Marty Feldman).

We moved here a couple of years ago to try and become as self-sufficient as we could, that in essence is why I am doing what I am, in the way I am.

Part of that idea included building a house that would be as efficient and ergonomic as is possible for me to manufacture. A house unlike any I had either built or was part of building before, but using all the knowledge and skill I have gained in that time. Having said it will be unlike anything I have previously built, it will of course bring some of those parts together.

I've built stick frame (contemporary timber frame) where you build with relatively small section timber in a modular way that's essentially held together with metal fixings, nails, screws, ties, fastenings, brackets, straps and hangers, and I've always worked on the renovation and upkeep of traditional timber frame, post and beam style houses, that are essentially held together with the type and strength of housed joints and wooden pegs, but never built one. Its like the holy grail of carpentry, like building the birchbark canoe was for me in terms of bushcraft.



Those of you that know me, know that I am obsessed with old technologies, my wife calls it obsessive crafting disorder, OCD. flint knapping, firelighting, shelter building, canoe and paddle making, bow making, knife making etc etc. I want to bring the approaches of the old ways and some of the technologies and integrate them into the building of a house. Potentially, it will make it a very eccentric hand crafted home, bespoke, as opposed to mass manufactured, with low energy embodied materials. Hopefully a thing of beauty will emerge, a nest not a box.



When you speak to people who build their own home about the reasons they are doing it, it's often because they want a chance to design the way it looks or performs, and sometimes because for them it's a more affordable way of owning their own home, or a home they would like to own. To an extent these are things I want, but it would not be true for me to say they are what's behind why I want to do this. I like making things, and building a house is like a giant (rick ocd) project. But, one that I hope, will have real value outside of my own interests. I like to challenge my abilities, constantly push them.

I want to make something that is essentially simple, functional, beautiful and a joy to live in. A place where you can breathe out rather than a place where you can't breathe at all. A haven. Conversely, I am all too aware that the process of getting there is far from easy, at times unpleasant, painful physically, emotionally and spiritually. Building can destroy people and relationships and be the obverse of the very thing its trying to achieve, harmony, balance, a place to nurture and be cared for, a place to live more fully. Inevitably, by the time you complete a build you need to breathe out, in every respect.

Already, the process of doing this has taken longer than any complete build I have undertaken or been a part of. I know there are many reasons for this. Even with all the best will in the world sometimes things don't always run how you might like them. Some days things appear to go well and other days you get deadlocked or worse, driven backwards, all I know is if you can stick it out and try and keep hold of the end picture, things have a way of evening out over time. And the maxim, 'what do I have to do today?' will see you through the project, and help you feel less daunted, one stone at a time, one day at a time. When you break it down into little bits, hundreds, thousands of little bits, it might surprise you what you can do, even eat an aeroplane! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito)

There are 'strange attractor' type benefits to building yourself, for yourself, and on your own. Sometimes the delays in apparent forward progress actually work for you, as you are able to refine your ideas and the way you do things that isn't governed by time. Some might call that indulgent, but the pressure of deadlines is always there in the back of your head.

What I intend to do is build a traditional post and beam timber frame house, with a stone face, and internal straw-bale infill with lime render. To make a building that's as sensitive to its environment in terms of vernacular context as well as choice and use of materials, and in this way to build economically from a labour and financial point of view. To be as pragmatic as I can about what I do and how I do it. To constantly try and achieve the highest possible build quality I can, in respect of fitness of construction, elegance of design and proportion, and functionality.

Where-ever possible, to use the materials on the farm, to salvage stone from the existing buildings and any excavated during the site clearance, and to harvest timber, where I can, from the forest. Where I need to purchase materials, to source them as locally as possible.

To build in a modular way, using a combination of American and English approaches to framing, that benefit being able to achieve this singlehandedly. That means "no" to barn raising, and lifting of entire bents (a large section of frame) as I don't have a crew of 30 or more, and "yes" to adapting the methodology of stick framing, where you essentially put up one piece at a time creating the bays as you go.

Building one storey at a time allows you to use smaller length posts, stacked, and not have to pre-assemble the entire bent. And raise it as one. The acquisition and assembly of shorter span posts and beams is more manageable, although there will be more joints to cut.

In order to get to that place I have a lot of work ahead of me. I first have to carve out two sections of the mountain, one either side of the existing main building, and then demolish the main building and any other buildings necessary, but to leave as much as possible of the existing stone work in situ.

Juicy fruits

Have been getting hot and steamy with a friends juice extractor steamer thing.





I've made about 50 litres of red and white grape juice



We've still got grapes left, the best ones, which I am planning on making a bit of wine out of, the weather looks like being rubbish for the next few days, so I may be treading in the rain!!!! doh.