Being able to build our own home has been a dream-come-true and we will always remain grateful for the opportunity. The planning process was not straight-forward. You can read about it here in an article Ele wrote for Permaculture Magazine.
As well as straw and timber, we built our home with a good mix of permaculture design experience, love, dreams, naivety, a willingness to learn and lots of helping hands.
The build started in 2011, though felling, sawing all the timber and ground preparations started in 2010. The build was documented in a blog which can be found here.
Design
The house is a roundwood, cruck frame construction with straw bale walls. Our focus for the design was on local materials, accessible building skills and energy efficiency but also on creating a place with beauty and soul. The design was heavily influenced by our time spent with Ben Law in Sussex and the building he went on to build shortly after our apprentice season with him. Massive thanks to Ben for leading the way and writing his book ‘Roundwood Timber Framing’ just when we needed it!
Amongst the significant features the house was designed to be able to function without electricity. This means that the wood-fired Rayburn for heating hot water and the solar thermal hot water panels we built is all thermo-syphoning (meaning that the hot water naturally rises and circulates to the cylinder). We don’t need electricity to pump the water.
The water comes from the barn at the top of the site where we have 6500litres of storage. This gravity feeds to the systems in the house and garden.
The electricity we generate comes solely from 6 solar panels (about 800Watts). We again have made efforts to reduce the need for power and this means running some devices only intermittently- particularly the fridge and pond circulation which both only run when our batteries are in the top 10% of their charge. We have a 1000W inverter which we use for some devices we cannot power direct from the 12vDC or a DC-DC converter. This is mainly a printer, blender and the pond pump. All the lights are 12v LED’s.
We have a phone line attached to the house – our one concession. We do need internet for the business, though we are a long way from the cabinet and on a copper wire so connection is pretty poor (at least by modern standards).
We opted to have an outdoor composting toilet. This encourages us to go outside regardless of the weather and we love it. Cycling the nutrients back to the land rather than seeing them as ‘waste’ makes so much sense.
In more recent years we have added to the systems with a wood fired bread oven built from old night storage heater bricks. This is big enough to cook a dozen loaves in one go and makes amazing pizzas too!
Cooking with wood in these ways feels wholesome and right to us. We are always experimenting with ways to use the resources we have on site efficiently, and another useful way we achieve this is by using a kelly kettle through the summer months to boil our drinking water.
Another fuel efficient way of cooking is on our self-designed and self-built pyrolising wood stove- perfect to cook big pots of stew on. When burning this is almost smokeless as the wood gasses are re-burnt by the introduction of warmed air at the top of the burn chamber. Anthony is still refining the design (he can’t stop himself!).
