invitations, invitations, invitations….

version en castellano

this week i have mainly been planning. first i need a perfectly sized hole, then i need some metal, then i need to mix a shedload of concrete to fill said hole. i think i need 113 bags of cement, and i think i need about 13 cubic metres of ballast. but further calculations and youtube diy videos are required.

here are your invitations – please please respond or at the very least check out the google calendar to see which weekends might be convenient for a country escape

1) 18th Feb – a failry chilly, yet sunny weekend. i need someone to hold the other end of the string!

2) 17-18th March “Concrete and Caloçotada!!!” I invite you to a warm place to sleep for two nights (in an appt in town) and calçots beer and wine to enjoy on sunday. In return i just need a few hours of manual labour on the saturday… we should be at a nice spring temperature by this weekend. there are 6 spaces

3) any weekend from march onwards ever thought you’d like to learn how to build a stone wall? that’s what i’ll be doing most weekends from the end of march onwards, please come, hangout, help out (a bit) and check out what we are all about at Boodaville

destruction!! no words are needed

click the picture see photos / clic en la foto para ver mas

before...

after...

storm damage

the yurt two weeks ago

version en castellano

the yurt yesterday

in the uk there were hurricanes, on the spanish coast there were weather warnings and trees down, in the yurt there were maurice and natalie.

the weather forecast looked great from the diagrams and temperatures, but somehow, as i sent them off to arrive in darkness without a car, for their january holiday at the land, we missed that key part of the forecast that gives the wind speed. they arrived and were actually trying to sleep in the yurt when the roof got ripped off! natalie said she could hardly keep her feet on the ground as they abandoned ship and took their bags up to the house at 3am.

two weeks ago i had a nagging feeling that, after spending 150 euros and a day of my time on sheep’s wool insulation, i should put up more guy ropes. that insulation is now spread around the hills. the giant tarpaulin ended up in a tree halfway up a mountain, hooray to natalie for rescuing it. the most astonishing thing though – the sofa got flipped on end, and that is a heavy sofa.

i like to focus on what stayed up. you’ll see from the pictures that the wall built from adobe bricks collapsed, but that the wall which is just mud on mud has survived. and the super natural thatching effort on the roof of my tiny shed (grass, mud, linseed oil and nothing else) half survived. if i’d though to put chicken wire over it earlier i think it would have been fine.

the forecast wasn’t lying about the temperatures though and over an extremely mild and sunny few days the damage has mostly been fixed

have sheep been grazing behind the yurt? no, that's my insulation in the bushes

broke

my three hour thatch job didn't come off too badly. notice it folded back rather than fell apart

john's xmas tree planted. fits right in i think

chicas and chainsaws

do you like mel’s safety gear? those trousers are made of metal.

starting the chainsaw took us about an hour, you really have to give it some welly. but then we took down two dead trees – an almond and an olive. the first trees i’ve ever chopped down – we did the wedge in one side and everything

apart from getting winter wood, i did very little this weekend. the temperatures are still ridiculously warm for november. there was some wine, some napping, a freaky dream about Mel’s dog having human hands and burying its head in a bucket of pee.

My important job was picking up an official paper certifying that i am now a farmer, and as usual i tidied up and inspected growing things….

mel's greenhouse out of sticks and old bottles - a great idea that i'll be copying

the parsley seeds have sprouted, i planted them where they'll get loads of water off the yurt and it seems to be working

i haven't planted any onions for 6 months, so these fellas are doing well. good luck to them

i gave the yurt a fringe

my what an attractive hairstyle

versión en castellano

it's made of grass, you may be wondering why i did this....read on

most of the jobs i do involve mud. some of them with the addition of powdered milk and oil. but all until now have been well thought out. yesterday, after an experimental irrigation system using the folds of the yurt cover to direct water towards some parsley seeds, i had some spare mud. it looked like it was going to rain so i quickly decided to fringe over the dodgy join between the yurt and the porch roof. i didn’t have enough mud, or grass and it was getting dark so i’m not expecting it to last long or work.

the fruits of my orchard (well the tomato element)

on arrival i harvested the two tomatoes which were the only alive thing in a sad looking veg patch. there hadn’t been more than a few drops of rain since may !! until this afternoon when the grey clouds finally gave in. it’s highly probable i won’t be able to get a fire permit in time for the bonfire party – town hall are (rightly) very cautious about fire when the hills are so crispy.

outdoor living - one should always leave buckets upsidedown (especially ones you wash your face in)

the ghost house

i didn’t make that name up – 5 minutes down the track from me is “Mas del Fantasma”. Mel and i went exploring after sunday lunch and found the door open and evidence of, not very recent, activity in the old mas -  including an electric lightbulb. but the thing that made me really jump was looking up to see a hunter standing about 100m away from us when we came out. i squealed a little bit, i’m sure he loved it and i guess he proved his stealth. it was just surprising to see another human being in the valley.

then sunday night – and i know none of you arts weekenders will believe me – i cooked dinner wearing a t-shirt. that’s too warm for this time of year, i guess when the clouds came in they trapped the day’s heat.

another strange countryside phenomenon: i’ve been inspecting the olive trees and while some have barely the tiniest little pip of an olive, three trees – the one nearest the yurt, the one by the hammocks and another – are loaded down with big black fruits. how can it be so different from tree to tree? is it affected in any way by where partygoers decided to wee?

problem solving

so we found a common enemy. we will all blame carla, the lady who worked at the main district office for a few months covering a maternity leave. she only approved one of the two buildings, and also classified it as the wrong type of tourist accomodation.

who knows if it really is all her fault, but since my idea to have tourists and myself living on the same piece of land yet in different buildings doesn’t tick any of their boxes describing how country hotels should be, i am now going to live in a shed. no, hang on, i didn’t say that. i am not going to live in a shed, i am going to build one – to make sure i use all the square metres the current law allows me – then sleep in it occasinally and apply for a “change of use” in many years time to convert it to a home. this means the two buildings will be

1) a building for rural tourism/living in

2) an agricultural shed built on the ruins of the original building.

but get this… not only is it much quicker to apply for permission to build a shed, but the valderrobres planning office can give me the permission to build so i avoid any of these ridiculous three month waits. AND i can put a green roof on the shed. AND – get this – i have to become a farmer. that means i am allowed to build an agricultural building. i’m going to go and look at how to register with the local cooperative now

on the downside— we are literally back to the drawing board for two weeks

How long would it take all the spanish civil servants in the world to change a light bulb?

They would never manage to do it because they are the most useless and lazy beings on the planet.

Here’s the story of my plans so far….

The architects worked very hard to prepare some excellent diagrams and plans and had them ready in May 2010. Civil servant 1 had to put 4 pieces of paper in with the plans and send them to the planning office in Teruel. One of these papers involved him typing something. Not only did he fail to put in the necessary papers but the whole project took three months to arrive at the Teruel office.

In Teruel another civil servant opened the project saw the papers were missing and sent back a letter asking for more documents. Unfortunately he also was unable to request the correct documents, so after hassling civil servant 1 to do the correction and repeating the three month wait for him to send it to Teruel again the project application was still not complete.

A year into the process and we received a second letter from Teruel saying we still had not included the correct documents. This time an architect who works part-time for the council checked our project and helped us get the actual correct documents sent.

By some miracle we only had to wait two months for a reply this time (lets assume that was because everything was correct so the civil servant passed the envelope on to his superior instead of doing something complicated like replying). So in June 2011 someone finally opened the dossier and looked at the plans. At which point they immediately found that there were several things which didn’t comply with a law passed in April 2011 and sent it back “unapproved”. It didn’t even get registered as an application for planning permission for 18 months because of those damn lazy fools and since then the law has changed.

fecking marvelous

in other news..

in a small town past the collserola, in a grim yellow building with bars on the windows me and Joan found people who sell gabions (cages that you fill with rocks to make a wall). as expected they were quite shocked that somebody wants to build a house out of them. i’ve seen that look before. but the engineer seemed up for  a challenge and concluded that our ideas might be structurally possible, but would definitely be extremely complicated bureaucratically. oh good, i mean i want this project to take longer than humanly possible…

they also know what reed beds are (natural water purification systems) and said spanish councils are ok with them  – hooray!

obviously we haven’t talked money yet. that comes in an email later