How to determine roof pitch (in percent)

The Charente seems to have a very unique way of determining the pitch of the roofs in this area.  Once you know how it is done it is easy but until then it seems beyond understanding. It has taken us three goes, two meetings with government appointed architects and four forum postings but at last we have it figured out - we think!

In it's simplest form the roof pitch has to be 35%. To get this you measure one metre from the roof plate inwards, then at the one metre mark you measure 35cm up. The angle that is formed between the 35cm and the 1 metre is the pitch. The narrower your building the higher the pitch. I have attached a drawing to make it easier to understand.

Automated system

I have been away in Florida living the highlife and while I have been away the second meeting with the planning department has taken place and the most wonderful Murray (our architect) and our most wonderful neighbours in Jumeaux have dealt with everything.

The first meeting with the planning department went quite well. Our neighbour in France, Adrian, attended on our behalf. They had four or five points that they raised, namely with the windows and the roof. It seems in the Charente you can only have a maximum of three different rectangular window sizes and we had four. Plus they have to be at least 20 cm taller than they are wide. This was a relatively easy fix. The biggest blow came when they described how to determine the roof pitch and the new pitch is low, very very low, which means that we no longer have a loft or a place to put my lovely cheap ebay round window.

There were a couple of other small issues but on the whole it seemed quite positive and easily fixed. The next couple of days after the meeting were spent in a whirl of organising, translating and changing. We have had to put a proposal forward for our sewage system which was pretty involved and we also decided to put forward a proposal to keep the existing pitch on the roof.

I got all the translating done but hadn't finished getting it checked before we set out on holiday so left Murray with everything which he got finished and sent off. Once he had made all his changes I also emailed the planning department to go with the hard copies we had sent to our local mayor's office (the mayor's office being the first point of contact on all planning issues). It was just as well I emailed the planning department with our changes and proposals as they had not received anything from the mayor's office and the second meeting was done with little A4 printouts of all our changes.

Everything seemed fine in the second meeting except the roof pitch was once again a bit of a contentious issue. It seems that we still did not fully understand how to determine the pitch but after the latest meeting I think that has been resolved and we are going to redo the roof once again. Not as steep as we would like but not as shallow as first feared. I will put the exact details of how to determine roof pitch in the Charente when I finally understand them completely.

We still haven't sent our sewage proposal to the right place but will get to that this week.

On the whole the outlook is very good (oh we can't have a tin roof either and will have to go with local tiles which is not necessarily a bad thing but will require more preparation to make them adequate for water harvesting). We are now looking toward the finishing line - we hope - of the planning process! All I can say is yay :)

Two pieces of communication

In this last week we have had movement on our application front. On Tuesday we receieved a confirmation of receipt of our application from the mayor's office in our local town. This gives us our application number and lets us know that things are slowly turning. This was a joyful occasion. We deduced that if we hear nothing else before the 1st of June then we would be home and hosed. Unfortunately today I received an email from the second line of defence as it were in the application process and they had a fair bit to say but they also had some solutions which is good.

To put it bluntly the pitch of the roof is too great (it needs to be 35%, whatever that means), the window openings are not long and narrow enough, we have put in a fair few wide windows and it turns out that in this region the windows need to be tall and thin (like I wish I was :P), the garage needs to be simplified and we need to apply for a sewage something or other (this is where my google translate let me down).

They also said we were missing two parts to the application, one of which was the descriptive notice. Now since that fell under my jurisdiction I know, without a doubt, that it is done.

On the other hand they did give us a time and place to meet with a government appointed architect to help us with these problems so I am in the midst of trying to find somebody to attend the meeting for me as I can't really make it back and I don't think my French is up to it. Once I have done that then I can address the issue of the missing parts of the application and verify exactly what is missing and perhaps send it again.

This may seem like bad news but I think it is pretty good as they seem to be quite keen on helping sort these issues. Will keep you informed!

Permaculture: saviour of the world that nobody can afford

So I have been sort of interested in permaculture for a while and reading bits and pieces but now that we have our blank canvas to create I figured it was time to really come to grips with it. Unfortunately while there are a million and one courses out there you have to be a millionaire to attend any of them.

Permaculture is any system of sustainable agriculture that renews natural resources and enriches local ecosystems or the design, installation and maintenance of indefinitely sustainable human communities set in balanced ecologies, both urban and rural.

This seems rather strange as most of the people who follow permaculture and are interested in this sort of thing are people who are concerned with the state of the world and want a naturally sustainable, barter system to become prevalent so that we can halt the destruction. All of this is fantastic in theory but then they want to charge you hundreds of pounds to learn. Obviously if this is their livelihood then they have to charge something but it really isn't accessible to the people who would probably implement it the most out of sheer necessity, so they are cutting out a whole swathe of the population who would help save the world because they don't have enough money to live the consumer type lifestyle we are all caught up in.

I can tell you that when I finally come to grips with it I shall be extremely open with paying my knowledge forward!

Submitting the application

After a week and a half of non stop work, mainly from Murray (our poor Australian friend who made the mistake of staying with us and then was roped into drawing everything and doing it in French), we finally had our planning application completely finished. It has gone through some iterations. First we were going to apply for every single building we might ever want or need in the one application. This included our eventual family home but then we came across another snag (just one more snag in a never ending stream of snags). In France, if you want to build a dwelling over 170m2 then a French registered architect needs to have done and signed the plans.

You guessed it - our house was over 170m2 by a fair amount. So then we decided we might be able to get it under that amount as the final usable floor space can have items deducted like 5% for walls and anything under the roof that doesn't exceed 1.8m. This left us with an extremely pitched roof and one bedroom. In the end we decided to abandon applying for the house as well and just applied for the cottage, garage and american barn.

Of course being a relatively rush job the morning I am about to send it I realise we haven't put the solar panels on the 3d render nor have we put the wind turbine on any of the plans so a frantic email to Murray once again and finally we were ready to post them off. Here is the end result (pretty spiffy if I do say so myself):

http://www.scribd.com/doc/29219316

Open file

Buying the land

Once upon a time I worked for a humongously large investment bank. Life was good, life was sweet. Without warning a tsunami of an economic downturn hit us and before I knew what was happening I was washed overboard. The company threw me a life ring in the form of a relatively substantial amount of money which I gratefully latched on to. To my great surprise I washed straight up into another job (though just a temp job) and it was like nothing had ever happened so I decided to use my windfall to change my life as I had grown tired of the incessant commuting to work and all day at a computer in an office, working for large corporations.

To this end I decided that I would buy land somewhere in the European Union as that was the most affordable. Croatia caught my eye as it is about to join the Union and has plenty of rural land at extremely affordable prices. I announced that Croatia would be our future home and my siblings had a few qualms. By the time I had soothed their qualms I had managed to pick up a few of my own and one fortuitous day, when I was following links to different Croatian land websites I mistakenly found myself on a French land website instead and that, as they say, was that!

Immediately a feeling of rightness settled over me, the sun shone, the angels sang and without even discussing it with anybody I started my search anew, this time in France.

Almost immediately I found a few parcels of land that would suit so I grabbed my youngest sister, Boo, informed her we were doing an impromptu flight to the South-West of France and off we set. For two and a half days we looked at various bits of land in the Charente and the Haute-Vienne. The original piece of land we went to see was beautiful, with most of what we wanted but it was relatively small and had a bog smack bang in the middle. 'Don't worry about it, build a pond' everybody told us but that would have left us with even less land so wasn't really a viable solution.

On the last day, just before we were about to head back to England, empty handed our real estate agent took us to see a big parcel of land (7+ acres) that might be available as the owner had decided he was too old to build and move to France.

While not perfect (there was no running water or trees on the land) it did have a lot of potential and a CU (French certificate stating the land could be built upon after an application is submitted) and it was HUGE! We got back home, discussed it with our other sister, Kimmy, and decided we would go for it. A short while later our offer was accepted and the wheels of French commerce started turning.

Virgin territory

So here I am, never having blogged before and never having built anything before (I don't think flat pack Ikea bookshelves count). My goal is to document the whole process - whether I will actually fulfill that goal is another matter entirely.

The whole project is being undertaken by myself and my two sisters. None of us really speak French (which is perhaps a bit of an understatement), none of us have any useful sort of skills but we do have a dream of living in a strawbale house and many books to help us get there :)

We have already purchased the land which I will talk about in more detail in its own post and we have just submitted our planning application which also needs its own post.

Hopefully people will find this helpful and our network of strawbale mad friends and people wanting to participate will increase.