The Fool on the Hill
I've sold my house and am buying, in effect, a field. And a bit of wood and a share in a common, but basically a field. This is foolish. There is no planning permission on the field, and I'm unlikely to get any. Also, it's still possible that the deal to buy the field will fall through, but my house is sold. This is even more foolish. The field is five hundred feet above sea level, at the top of a very windy ridge. This is getting idiotic. Because I thought I would have more money than I've ended up with, I'm buying more land than I strictly need; and the consequence of that is that even if I get planning permission, I don't have much money left to build with. This is mad. Oh, and speaking of madness, I'm recovering from a bout of mental illness. At least, I think I'm recovering. So, this really is insane... Oh, and I don't have any income. At all. I could claim benefit — my doctor would certify I'm not fit to work (and he's more or less right) — but I've chosen not to. This is crazy.
But. But not that insane, I'd like to argue. Not wholly irrational. There are reasons. I'm not certain that they're good reasons, but...
I will have enough land to be self sufficient, which if I'd been more prudent I wouldn't have. The land, despite its altitude, is actually good; it's well drained, faces south west, and grew a barley crop last year. It's even soil-association certified as organic. I could live on what it can produce. I probably have enough wood to be sustainably self-sufficient in firewood.
On Yurts
The last two nights I have mostly been sleeping in a yurt. No, scratch that. The last two nights I have entirely been sleeping in a yurt — it is much too cold to leave a foot stuck out for the sake of a meme.
Outside, that is. Inside the yurt it is quite startlingly warm — certainly much warmer than I would be at home. A small centrally located woodstove heats the space exceedingly effectively. My second night in the yurt was, coincidentally but rather fortunately, the windiest night for a year — and one of the wettest. In the depths of this cold, wet, violently windy night in early February, the yurt was cool. But not colder than I should have been at home, not draughty, and (apart from a slight anxiety about a tree actually falling on it) not insecure.
This yurt is from Yurts Direct, and is, I believe. authentically imported from Mongolia. It's about 6 metres in diameter — frankly spacious and generously propeortioned; it is in itself a work of art. The curtain which lines the wall has a damask weave with a crysanthemum pattern, in fabric somewhere between ivory and gold. The poles of the roof — some eighty-one of them — together with the roof crown and the two posts which support it, are of a burnt orange colour apparently individually hand painted, and yet with a regular repeating pattern, as are the doors. The doors comprise two inner doors and a single outer door, all housed in a substantial and rigid wooden frame, with windows in the inner doors and on either side of the door opening.
The Hide
The modular sousterran idea is all very well but I have to survive somewhere until I have planning permission to build it. I can't afford to rent, so I'm pretty much going to have to live — while I'm at home, at any rate — on my land. This design exercise is to see what is the cheapest and least conspicuous living space I think I can cope with through two winters. Cheap obviously means small, but surviving through winter means reasonably well insulated.
This design is fundamentally based on my present bed, which is an IKEA loft bed with a desk and bookshelves underneath — a quite cosy and comfortable working space. I started from there and thought, 'OK, how much more do I actually need'. A design constraint is the spacing of trees in my wood. They've mostly been planted at pretty exact two metre intervals, although the rows don't precisely align. I can, of course, cut trees down — it's my wood, and, furthermore, it needs to be thinned — but in the interests of hiding the hide I don't want to cut too many down. It won't be good for the planners to know I'm living on site while I'm applying for permission to do so.
The plan is a hexagon of side 1200mm — basically, that's the biggest hexagon I can fit onto two sheets of plywood. I could get a bit more space by using a 2400mm cuboid, but cuboids are ugly and that's 25% more wall. Also, it's easier to fit the hexagon into the wood than the cuboid, which would definitely need trees cut down.
Sousterrain revisited: there is a plan B
Having considered my earlier note on the design of a sousterrain for a month, I'm now going to rip it up and start again.
Reasons for not building in concrete
The first reason for not building in concrete is obvious. The embodied energy is huge. To present a largely-concrete sousterran as an energy efficient or 'green' building is hard to justify to me, to the planning authorities, or to anyone else. However, there are two other, pragmatically more compelling, reasons not to use concrete.
The joys of data transfer
OK, so, at this stage the main thing this blog is for is to find out how to import existing blog posts into Blogger. Brief summary: my existing blog uses a blogging engine I wrote myself back in 2000; it's quite a good blogging engine but it's not used by very many people because I didn't promote it enough back in the day, and so it's time to end-of-life it and migrate the existing users to something else.
Blogger has a mechanism for exporting and importing blogs. So, I thought, it ought to be possible to generate the export format, which is documented here, from my existing data and then import that. From the documentation it was clear that the format was slightly bizarre — a well formed XML wrapper around data which is actually XML and presumably also well formed but is represented as text. However, I generated stuff that looked right to me according to the documentation, and it failed to import.
Worse, the error message given was terse to the point of unusability, and there's apparently no documentation of the error codes available on the web.