This week February started with the promise of receiving offers from contractors. But like those tv programs about building your own house show you that things don’t always go as planned we of course have not received any.

Mistakes

I have often wondered if the people who participate with these programs are all stupid for making the same mistakes but now I figured that some mistakes are not mistakes at all, they are just the way things go and you just don’t know that and you think “I am sure that that won’t happen with my build”.

So what did happen, well our consultant John called the contractor Vincent who then told him that he did not want to work with the pressed earth blocks we were planning to buy because he could not find any expertise, no house has ever been build with these blocks, walls yes, Finovens yes but Vincent was in no hurry to burn himself on using a product which he didn’t know and couldn’t guaranty.

Unfortunately Vincent had these blocks since half December and just now decided to mention this fact. Believe me Vincent is one of the good guys. He is willing and able to listen to a foreign woman speaking basic French with surprising patience and he even understands that we would like to build a house as ecological as possible.

John and I had a talk with another contractor, a big one here in the neighborhood who kind of smirked at the idea of building a house with strawbales and asked the standard question about mice. I really hope Vincent comes up with a good offer because I can see a future of discussions if I have to work with this big contractor.

Instinct

So back to the pressed earth blocks. I kind of saw it coming, I had this feeling, this premonition. The suplier told me in October that as soon as I could I should order the blocks because they had a long drying period.

The blocks are expensive and I was hesitant to order them. I kept pushing it forward, waiting for the offer from contractors to see if we could even afford them but time was going so fast. If we even wanted to use these blocks then I should have ordered them at least in January for them to be dry in April/May.

I got really nervous about it but still I did nothing. Turns out that sometimes, yes only sometimes doing nothing is the best thing to do.

Replacement

Now Lotte was back in the game; searching for a suitable replacement. She and we settled on sand-lime bricks ( Couldn’t really find a good translation for it from Dutch so I really hope these are the correct bricks) with isolation. I called Vincent who enthusiastically told me he knows the material well and he will get the offer as soon as possible.

To be honest, for me it is a relieve that we are choosing a material wildly available and known here in Belgium, although the pressed earth blocks would have been the best choice for us it was not in the cards.

So I guess this is just one of the many things that will probably change with this build, it is for us to adapt or stick to our guns, at least we are one very little step forward….hopefully.

For us it is clear that something needs to be done to sustain our way of living and one of the huge impacts on our environment is the way we put a roof over our heads.

In order to create a clean personal environment and to minimise our footprint we build “green”.

The goal of our adventure is to be as neutral to the environment as possible. We want this to reflect in everything we do. And our house is the largest and longest lasting part of the project. So it will get a lot of attention.

Earthships. A short personal history…

You may well be aware that for a long time we’ve had the intention to build an Earthship, hence the name of the blog. It completely fulfilled our needs the first time we laid eyes upon it.

And our needs at the time were getting off the grid. Earthships are capable of doing just that. Not all the systems they use and the way they’re integrated are completely original, but an Earthship is more than the sum of its parts and the combination works.., beautiful buildings can be made. I even made a floor plan based on the Trott’s Earthship.

But, as time progresses so do plans evolve. We meet people, read books and educate ourselves. Ironically, or maybe it’s just the way of the Universe, we met a young woman during a volunteering week working on an Earthship who studies to become an architect specialized in sustainable housing. Isn’t that brilliant? And isn’t that one hell of an opportunity, even our time-lines kinda match.

So, what are we going to build? Honestly.., no idea…, yet. The house still has to be designed.

But I can tell you some of the criteria, and obviously it has to be build as sustainable as possible:

Materials

The materials are, of course, very important, they define the building. As a consequences the choice of material is paramount to anything else, thus they have to be:

• locally purchased (getting it close saves on carbon)
• recyclable (for when the house is torn down, or rebuild)
• from a renewable source (minimizing our carbon and resource footprint)
• non toxic (we do not want to poison ourselves or the environment)
• recycled (mind you, a lot of stuff is already being recycled, disrupting existing recycle chains might do more harm than good)

They can’t, of course, comply to all of the above, but when all materials apply to at least one of the points we win something. When more can be applied even better. Getting our wood, for instance, at a local mill would tick of three of the criteria: locally purchased, renewable, recyclable and non toxic, ahh.., that’s four… not bad.

Not Expensive

Well, this is a cheeky one. Off course we don’t want to spend to much.., one of the reasons is, we don’t have that much to spend. Another reason is an exemplaryone. We’d like to show that people can build a self sufficient and sustainable home.

Off the Grid

As mentioned before, we’d like to be off the grid.
It is possible to buy “green” energy from the utility companies, but you’d still be depended on them. I would like to suggest that anybody who wants green power should choose that option, not everybody can go off the grid, or completly self suficient. I know we can’t in the house we live in at the moment.

So, in conclusion: We still have find a piece of land. After that we start designing the house. But, work is in progress, the architect is investigating possibilities and we are still searching.

Don’t forget to read the previous episodes: Process of Elimination and Off the Grid.

Comments and/or questions are welcome…