Movement at the station (or the foundations have gone in)

So I have been very silent for a while. We managed to get our planning permission through once we had resigned ourselves to having a normal fosse septique and put away our eco dreams on that front. That was the only thing holding it up. We went to SPANC near Chabanais and met with a very nice gentleman who spoke quite good English and with his help we got it sorted.

We decided to start the build this year as we only had two years to get started once we got our permission. The beginning of the year started well, with quotes coming in thick and fast. A lot of people hadn't heard of rubble trench foundations before so we ended up going with the most expensive quote we received but we thought it would be worthwhile as the builder was knowledgeable and very interested in green building himself. I have heaps of images which I will put in so you can see the progress of the foundations.

link to pics of rubble trench foundation

Then came a blow - we couldn't get our financing so we decided we would postpone the cottage build and concentrate on the workshop/garage build but then we had another blow - we couldn't get any straw locally because of the  drought the year before and obviously we didn't want to import straw, both because of the ecological and monetary cost. We had committed to building in June so we couldn't access the harvest from this year either. And even when we tried to organise straw after the harvest, bad timing and missed opportunities abounded leaving us in the same position we were previously, without straw.

We are going to try again for our financing next month and if it goes through we will try to get the barn built (where we can store our building materials) and purchase all the roofing materials and other things we find on sale, ready for the build next year.

Our new build date is now September 2013, after next years harvest where we have organised with a local contractor to get local straw, to our specifications which means everything should be in place, ready to go.

We have had heaps of people interested in volunteering and have had to put them off because of the various debacles that have happened. I will contact them all again next year and see if any are interested in coming then.

The silver lining to everything is that it has given me more time to decide on the hot water heating system and to get a bit more organised. I really think that measuring twice and cutting once is a maxim to live by and this gives me plenty of time to 'measure'.