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.