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

olives are in and the yurt’s as cosy as a sheep’s belly

Maurice and Natalie and two person sized bags of sheep’s wool insulation accompanied me this weekend for some farming and fresh air- well apart from the air directly underneath the insulation when you are squashing into the yurt roof. sheep’s wool is the greenest of the green, which means the dust that comes off it is not toxic glass, but it still gets in your eyes and mouth. i opted for sunglasses and a scarf round my mouth as protective gear.

meanwhile my guests got busy harvesting olives. i’m proud to have helpers coming to do farm work, everyone enjoys themselves and it’s work that i just don’t have time to do. i’ve just registered on the WWOOFing website as well because my trees really need some love and attention and my plans for the next few months only involve stone, diggers and lime mortar.

the olive harvest was much better than last year – two buckets full! but there’s still half a tree of good olives, and three trees of small ones – maybe ok to make oil? – left if anyone else wants to come and help!

on sunday afternoon we walked up to the viewpoint on the hill in the sunshine – amazing every time, i love it up there, i should go every weekend.

do you want to see photos?

just had an insulation delivery

i didn’t spend a huge amount of time researching which was the most eco option before i bought it (partly because it is for the yurt – not the official eco-build project), but check this out:

http://www.goinggreen-athome.com/sheep-wool-insulation.html

the “greenest of the green” insulation choice. hooray

and it is particularly good at keeping temperatures down in summer and keeps insulating when wet. perfect!

i’m increasingly concerned about the non-breathable fabric i built the yurt from. it gets very wet on the inside, but since the sheep’s wool deals well with moisture i’m going to put it up and see what happens. i mean if it insulates well, then the air next to the yurt canvas should be much cooler than the air inside the yurt, thus solving the problem no?? we’ll see

shrew and straw

shrew – it was dead in the rainwater collector. why didn’t i fix the lid before??? it only took a minute with the staple gun. so all 250 litres of water i carefully collected has been flushed out of the system

straw – i went to visit a hotel made of it. how did a straw bale building with no frame and a living roof ever get planning permission? a mystery to me, but they have banned it now in Teruel. lovely though http://www.masdelbot.com/

the toilet – pooing only though –

…and the view

stage area so far, ignore the water tank and the muddy wheelbarrow

the beginning of the house

no photos i’m afraid, nothing to see here except 7 stakes in the ground incorrectly marking the corners of the building. a good lesson in why not to judge right angles by eye in the campo.

it was a worthwhile exercise just to see how the shape nearly fits on the ground.. especially since it’s a bit to large – so we’re going to have to change some measurements before i do it properly anyway

drama: there was a heavy frost this morning. to combat it i put a shitload of wood on the burner. “yes, it’s like a furnace and the waters nearly boiling”, then all of a sudden… “shit the chimney didn’t look like that before!!” what was a pattern of flakes of metal had turned into a smooth grey surface. i closed all the vents and threw water in the stove, creating heavy smoke which i had to open the door to get rid of.  but stove working fine again afterwards with a normal amount of wood and it cooked a sweet potato nicely. the duck tape around the aluminium sheet is a little bit dried out. SAFETY POINT  – i keep a fire extinguisher in the yurt like a good scout.

rabbit: juanito, friend, yurt cover maker and hunter, invited me and marcos to eat his killings. i’ve never really eaten rabbit, but it was amazing.. possibly the sauce more than the meat.

 

 

 

diy chimney instalation follwed by fire emergency

Friday : misson – buy a stove and one of these:12:00 Encants market – stove €89, hot water bottle €6.95  (how did i ever live without one..)

12:30 asked around – hardware store, then industrial machine type shop and am now waiting outside a tiny backstreet door labeled “metallisteria”. a woman in a tabard  moping the pavement assured me he would be back soon.

12:47 have decided to stick the chimney fitting together with velcro and just bought some

13:07 give up waiting, but then bump into metal man on the street who grumpily talks in terms of “days” to cut the aluminium and he wants exact measurements. apart from anything else this sounds pricey. (i am on a budget of zero- or verrry fecking close to)

13:28 at the organic veg. patch in horta to buy little baby cabbage, cauliflower, chard and leeks from a man in a wheelchair whose daughter speaks english and mandarin.

15:45 at Leroy Merlin (ie B&Q) where they have some aluminium but cut nothing to size

16:00 followed a sign saying aluminium at the industrial estate, they gave me directions to a place that actually sells aluminium who are now giving me extremely convoluted directions to the other industrial estate where i may be able to get what i need.

16:25 chuffed about successfully following directions but can’t remember shop name, randomly pull in here to ask directions. my, is that a pile of metal offcuts next to a huge machine that slices metal? i think it is

the  stubbly man in a boiler suit was smoking while he found a sheet roughly the right size and got to work. the heavy machine pins down the metal then “bummff” slices it. he played around with tubes connected to compressed air and then used a solder to cut the circle.

between him and the other guy who had his ipod on while trying to resurrect a rusty car chassis i was expecting a horrific accident at any moment. my joy at finding this cheap and cheerful workshop was slightly dampened when it turned out not to be cheap – €10 was double what i expected, but i got it. yoop.

15:48 the windfarm near Caseres looks kind of impressive when there’s an orange sunset.

19:18 building supplies shop Calaceite : after discussing the best positioning for the chimney jigsaw and which types of tape i need for fudging together things that get hot, i was gossiping with the owners of the shop about the english caravan invasion and how the council is trying to ban them. i can understand why when the only light apart from the stars on the Arens road is from a tv inside a luxury motorhome parked permanently in a deserted valley.

21:35 soup and trying to decide if karl pilkington could ever be funny

22:10 hot water bottle, wooly hat, fluffy socks and two duvets

Saturday : mission – put the stove in and go to an “eco-fair” in a nearby town

10:07 building a wall out of a mixture of horseshit and powdered milk which has now gone sour and absolutely stinks

11:00 deciding where to put the stove

11:12 clearing out the insects i found living in the folds of the insulation. this could be a fun weekly task

11:32 still deciding where to put the stove so there’s maximum gap between the chimney and the wall

15:32 done but not tested and on the way to Ráfales

17:35 beautiful town, shit fair.

i don’t think a stand with imported plastic toys should be allowed to feature in anything eco. there were a couple of people promoting biomass and a talk on farm subsidies by a dull government bod. i was happy to stick it out until he finally reached his point, but Marcos was less patient.

18:35 after dark waterfall exploration – El Salt – AWESOME!!

19:05 stopped for a beer in Valderobres

02:35 after two hours in an almost empty bar playing eurocheese techno Marcos is still insiting this is the last drink befroe he takes me home. why didn’t i drive?????

the streets are rammed with gangs of teenagers  in tiny skirts and thigh high boots. this is their night of the year or something, hundreds of them totttering and shouting.

“no Marcos i don’t want to go to the disco with them….”

04:52 home at last and its cold enough to warrant stove testing

04:58 yurt filled with chemical smelling smoke, water thrown on fire and evacuation to sleep in the house. more experimentation required during daylight hours with company. there was a definite panic right there, is this because i bought the cheap stove? eeeek

Sunday : mission – plant veg, tidy up and go home

20:17 success

insulated but creaking..

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to those of you who don’t believe in the strength of the yurt, i have to admit that the roof blew off on monday. but only partly and only until me and bernat wrestled with it and forced it back down again with more tent pegs. it creaks quite a lot now

but on the bright side there’s a proper double bed in it now – ha ha! it fitted through the tiny hobbit door!!  the sides have been pegged down and covered with gravel for the winter and we hung up (fireproofed) curtains/blankets/towels all over the inside for insulation.

the porch wall continues to be an interesting experiment in building with fecal matter. the second section perches relatively precariously on top of the first – this wall will not be very straight – and i’ll be very impressed if our carefully m¡xed render is actually weatherproof; horseshit, flour and water goo, powdered milk, straw, sand, and olive oil.

over at the vegetable patch the chard and the carrots seem to have survived two weeks without water, but the rest of it was looking very very dead i’m going to plant a load  more winter veg in a few days….  what should i be planting????

oh and for any catalans reading, who may be overexcited to hear about our mushroom hunting adventures, we just found one. the rest were incomestibles. it was a great walk up the hill though, with a view away down the Val Rovira from the top. walking back through Manuel’s valley you could see his ruin from below, it’s humongous, built in and around some beautiful overhanging rocks. it may be those very rocks that, according to Benita, have pre-historic paintings on them. It’s great to get on with the neighbours – when i arrived on friday there was a sack of almonds and a note from Manuel on the table. yay!!!

preparing for winter when winter has already started

chapter 1 – drying things in the rain (alternative title: you know it’s been a good day when you end up scooping mud out of your wheel arches by hand)

this bank holiday weekend felt extremely english, ie cut short by drizzle.

friday was restful. i managed to buy a bail of straw, slightly more awkwardly now i have learnt that the word for straw in spanish is the same as the word for wank. saturday was productive; the sun was shining, the homemade cement was applied to the persistent holes around the edge of the yurt and i completed stage one of the mud wall. only to realise that if it takes me one week per section, allowing drying time, it will take me 12 weeks to finish the porch walls. that’s long. i definitely should have started sooner.

part one of the mud wall

my new friend from town gave me the heads up on free pica pica at an exhibition opening in the evening (he understands my budget), so that was dinner and i got home minutes before a huge very wet storm. lighting was bolting across the sky, i was watching it through the yurt roof, warm and cosy.

sunday started, amazingly, with dry ground and was so productive i ran out of jobs; sink done but more glue needed. cementing done but more linseed oil needed, sink fits but a decent philips screwdriver is finally top of the shopping list so i can screw it down. several layers of insulation are now fireproofed with my homemade borax spray.

monday. fun day. our hike started with drizzle and determination but with the (very welcome) appearance of the sun our pace relaxed. much time was spent pouring over the map, comparing it to the incredible views that we had – back to Calaceite in one direction, and out to sea in the other. We used Johanna’s gashed knee as an excuse to be moving twice as slowly as our guide Joan (speaking to us via the medium of book) and after reaching our high point, La Espina, we headed back down to La Franqueta on the fire access track. 11am until 7pm we were out there.

view of the winding ebro out to sea

els ports mountains. near the top of them

day 5 it started raining during the night and did not stop. at all. until midday tuesday. nothing is drying. everything is damp. the mud wall is under a tarp and may or may not ever be ready for the next layer. worst of all it appeared that the car was not going to get out. we bit the bullet and started walking the hour to the nearest village/bus stop but in a rash moment of “what the hell, its over a year since i last got the car stuck and abandoned it in the mud for my neighbour to sort out” i went back and gave the track a go. it was slidy and slow going but goddammit we made it. (hence ending the weekend scooping mud out of wheel arches – even the pressure washer wouldn’t budge it).

mud wall shopping list:

just put together my shopping list to make floor filler, cob walls and a supposedly waterproof render:

sand grueso and fino, straw, linseed oil, horse shit, flour, salt, powdered milk, olive oil, and optional cactus paddles to make cactus juice for extra waterproofing

and the insulation shopping list:

borax, boric acid (for the fireproofing spray. thanks ehow) and safety pins to hang all the towels, blankets, curtains, duvets i have been collecting over the last months

fitting a sink, (no thanks to phil)

something tells me that a piece of chipboard from an old cupoboard is not strong enough to support a sink, but when has that ever stopped me before? Marcos told me again that he thinks the whole ger will come down at the first snowfall

so i bought those cheap a-frame things and fixed some extra supporting metal bits, layed the chipboard on top and spent ages making it fit neatly over the screws, then spent a proper ages trying to draw a smaller circle exactly 2.6 cm inside the outline of the sink

finally got round to the fun bit – sawing the hole out – and was rudely brought to a halt by phil breaking saw blade approximately 3 seconds after he started “helping”

so as usual, next weeks job is just a continuation of last weeks. one day i will learn that things take a really long time. (and never think about how fast it could be done if you took it to the wood shop)

good news : la pesquera near beceite is properly lush and swimming under the waterfalls for ten minutes made up for all the DIY sweating,

bad news : erm, ahem, bed bugs – there’s still a few hanging out in the guest suite. damn and DAMN, saw gary naked – to go with the testicle leakage mentioned in a previous post, (maybe that should be good news, sorry gary)

winner of the shooting star contest : phil with 225 points