The end of my first week in the cottage, and already I am starting to know all its little quirks. Where the wet rot lurks – where the damp is – where the fungus is – where the rotten brick is, and which bits of its sturdy, yet delicate structure...
We returned home today to discover that the wind turbine had suffered a catastrophic failure and lost all three blades. 2 of them were embedded firmly in the ground below the turbine, and one has yet to be found. I repaired one of them a week ago, and straightening...
Today we had our first visitor to the cottage, and Sinead did us proud. We tackled the thatched roof in the living room, and managed to pull the old timbers, turf and straw down without burying ourselves. It is amazing how much material was up there – the pile...
When we made the decision not to go to Wales and do our thing under the Welsh One Planet Development planning, I felt rather guilty, even though we had found a fantastic place here in Northern Ireland. A year of planning, meetings, travel, and making new friends, as...
Today was a ceiling day. Here is what the ceilings in the house look like. Fairly flat and unassuming. You’d never guess that behind the surface lies this. Yes, a time travelling ceiling. 20th century on the outside, 18th century on the inside. It has perhaps...
The newly found window on the outside. No horriblepebbledash here. A half day at the cottage today, and I wanted to find the source of the Massive Fungus, so climbed into a little gap between the old house and the Horrible Extension to investigate.It didn’t take...
Well, we finally got started. Not the smoothest of beginnings, as the truck broke a fan belt half way there, and then a mile from the house, I knocked one of the mirrors off on a telephone pole. Brendan and I were there first, and greeted Claire cheerily only to...
We watched this lecture by Toby Hemenway this evening, in which he talks about the meaning of sustainability, and how agriculture as we know it can never be sustainable. He gives the example of the longevity of horticultural societies, and explodes a lot of myths...
I’m compiling a map of broadly ‘eco’ places – anything that is involved with a low impact, sustainable approach to life, from Transition Towns to permaculture farms, and interesting buildings. Other than the ones I already knew about, finding...
Part of the joy of doing everything yourself is what we politely call ‘learning from experience’, or more commonly, ‘f**king it up’. Yesterday was a ‘learning’ day. First, I discovered just how close to a hot stove flue you can put...
Eco-DIY and Building Advice from the Eco Home Centre: Self build the way forward for communities?: This is a picture of the Wintles development in Shropshire that is based on the principles set out in ‘A Pattern Language’. The houses wer… read...
ThisTED talk by Dan Philips is fantastic. In it he discusses why consumers, the building industry, and society at large need to break out of the comfortable patterns that lead to massive waste, and how he makes use of that waste to create unusual, and highly personal...
