A Temporary Home
We all know that building a house takes time. At least, building a proper house takes time.
When you realize that most homes build nowadays have a life expectancy of 20 years (which is shorter that most mortgages) it makes sense to put a bit more effort into building your home than the average contractor.
Hence.., it will take some time to build a proper house.
That is how one gets to decide to put up a temporary home, preferably right next, or behind the house to be build. And that’s what we’ve been busy with the past weeks.
Buying a Home
What we decided upon is a couple of units and I’ve just been told that is a very generic phrase, so allow me to elaborate on it.
With (much) bigger projects, contractors tend to build temporary offices near the project, which is obviously convenient. These offices can be made out of one or two ‘units’, up-scaled to anything the contractor needs. Even two stories with 10 or more units per floor.
These units are also used for temporary living and that is what we choose to use. All other options seemed to expensive, to small or to impractical.
Eventually, we bought the units from a couple in Limburg (Holland). They’ve been living in them for 2 years while building their home. Our challenge was to find a way to transport our new home for 220 km to Chenogne.
Moving a Home
At first you might think this is easy, which it wasn’t, but in the end.., it wasn’t so bad. It just took a lot of hard work, and a very, very long day. But, you cannot just put these units anywhere.., a bit of groundwork has to be done beforehand. And Niels (you remember Niels right?) and a friend of his offered to do the work for us.
Moving Earth
Now, this was to be done the week before the units were to be moved. We wanted to place them as quickly as possible and the couple whom we bought the units from had a permit deadline.
Anyhoo.., the boys worked for three days in bad weather and had to level the piece of land where the units would be placed and make a 70 meter long path for the trucks to drive on.
Laila had a freaky week in which she had to rent groundwork equipment, book a hotel and buy gravel for the path.., all in French (sort of) and pretend she was working at her regular full time day job.
The Longest Day
As far as I can remember we never had a day quite like this.
We got up at 4 AM, because we had to be in Limburg at 7 AM. Then 6 hours of loading and off loading the units, a 2.5 hour drive, waterproofing the roof and forgetting to eat and drink our lights turned somewhere at 8 PM.
Activity