Getting Started

Everything is quite simple when laid out on a piece of paper. It takes on a life of its own when the idea is put into practice.

My intention is to build a rammed earth house. This is a simple idea and rammed earth houses have been built for millennia. It's just a matter of taking some locally occurring soil, stabilising it a bit and then ramming it into a form in the shape of a wall and hey presto, the wall exists. So I used the soil that was immediately available and built a couple of test walls. Obviously I want to use a soil that will result in a stunning looking wall. Finding 'suitable' soil also means that an engineer who specialises in soil analysis (geotechnical stuff) does a set of tests on the sample and tells you whether it will work or not. Included in the advice is the amount of road lime (hydrated lime) and moisture (water) that should be added to achieve the maximum compaction and stabilisation. This I did and the fortunate thing was that the soil was available on the property, despite our first sample not being suitable at all - and then the problems began. The soil was near the river and extracting it would have affected the riverine/wetland area and this in itself ruled it out. However before the environmental opinion, extracting soil is the equivalent of mining and here I need a mining license. Despite my title deed permitting me to do this, I was advised that many government Acts run in 'parallel' so despite having permission in one forum does not mean I have all the permissions necessary. Any bureaucratic hurdles in a non-functioning bureaucracy is akin to achieving the impossible, so the decision was taken to import the soil from a registered borrow-pit. And this we have now done and today 9 June, we received the last delivery of around 300 six cubic metre loads - which is enough to build several houses.

Besides counting trucks, we have laid electricity and piping for water and irrigation. The property is 300m long and down the centre we have ripped a trench about four feet deep. Into this we have put two electrical supplies - one from the town supply and a second that will come from the proposed solar farm. Every house (we may build a few and develop a small intentional community) will have a combination of the two supplies and hopefully when the town supply crashes, which it is prone to do, then we will have an alternate 'green' supply. On the water reticulation front, there is a borehole pipe, a drinking water supply line, a rainwater harvesting line and an irrigation line from the local watercourse. Buried deeper is a geothermal cooling loop which is a big experiment. Where I live tends to get quite hot (not compared to Kuwait) and we are looking at using a buried cooling pipe to provide cooling to the house. Whether this will work or not is subject to debate which will be finalised when it is tested.

Being an empty plot, a few roads needed to be cut. These will be compacted and then paved with grass pavers, the type that are open to permit grass to take root and allow water to seep into the ground rather than run off at 90 miles an hour. I am mentoring three young men who are busy making these on site, which is resulting in quite a significant cost saving while at the same time setting them up in what I hope will be a successful, though small business.

With all of this activity, the site looks a mess. In fact it is quite a shock as to the extent of the work that has been done, especially the digging and scraping. I have used mechanised equipment to cut and dig and the power of these machines is quite something to behold. To do this by hand would take several hundred hours and many months and I just wonder how people built houses without the limitless power of what we have at our disposal. Certainly they would not have cut it into the slope as I have done, but I hope the house when complete with its planted roof will not be visible to the neighbours and will require a minimal amount of energy to run. But the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.