Starter Smallholders

During the winter of 2004-5, we found an architect and started work on the design of a new house. It was a time of great excitement, and for a while it looked as though we were actually going to be able to start building in 2005. After much discussion, we settled on a design for a small two bedroom house (with the existing home/shack being available for guests) with a tiny office area upstairs. A huge amount of thought went into the house and into getting everything we need into as small a space as possible. It is to be made from squared logs about 7 inches thick, supplied by a local company that uses environmentally managed woodlands. We would have to take out a mortgage to build it, but if we did a lot of the finishing off work ourselves, we hoped to keep the total mortgage down to less than 40,000 Euros, a figure that we could imagine repaying without too much difficulty each month.
With all this in the background we approached the spring with a new sense of determination. I bought a chainsaw, so I could cut down some apple trees that were in the way of the new house and a stand of young alder trees that spoiled our view to the East. A few weeks after buying it, and before actually using it, one of our neighbours offered to do the cutting for us, leaving us free to work on the garden. Although disappointed that I was not going to use my new toy, I gladly passed that work on for the extra time it would give us. With the buzz of the chainsaw in the background, we dug over the vegetable beds, added compost and planted seeds and the seedlings that had been growing on our windowsill for ages. We hired Rita's daughter and a friend to pick up the bricks and bits of roofing that had been dumped in various places over time and put them all in one place, and planted a herb garden in the bed by the house.
Our enthusiasm was further fired by the beauty of last spring, when the apples blossomed hugely, as can be seen in the picture, and everything around us was green. We decided that we wanted to live there, despite the obvious complications. My work as an international school teacher would be quite impossible, unless I was prepared to commute for over an hour morning and evening. Rita, on the other hand, had already given up her office job and was working as a freelance translator and writer for various organisations. So long as I could pick up enough writing and proofreading (something I am already doing to a small extent) to pay the bills, we could live fairly comfortably from her salary, and my main input to the household would be in the form of food production.
Everything looked rosy: the house plans were travelling through various offices, my modest attempts at food production were modestly successful, and I was learning all the time, our neighbour had cleared a lot of excess brush and apple trees to open up the land around the house, the bank had agreed to a mortgage when we had planning permission and a valuation, and we had even got our less-than-two-year-old working on clearing wood.
And then things started going wrong. Slowly at first and then with increasing momentum. It started at the environmental health office, who insisted on us installing a full septic system, despite our determination to put a composting toilet in the house and reuse waste water. A huge extra expense. Then came the fire department. They could not guarantee to get to a wooden house so far from town (roughly 12km, in reality) so we had to install our own fire fighting equipment - more expense. Then the bad news from the surveyor. It was going to cost more to build the house than it would currently be worth on the market. This also meant that we had no leeway left in our finances. If, as it inevitably would, the house cost more to build than we had planned for, we would be out of money and unable to borrow any more. Then the thieves started breaking in again. With the local police, we worked out that they were visiting on Mondays or Tuesdays, breaking into the house after we had been there for the weekend, helping themselves to any food left in the cupboards, and taking a few items that caught their eye. With nothing of value in the house, we were not too concerned about the present, but could not see how builders would be able to work under such insecure conditions.
Heavy of heart, we started to look at other houses, homes that we could move into more or less immediately, and that had neighbours very close at hand. We still wanted to live in the countryside, at least for a year or so, but no longer had a clear idea how to go about it.
We looked at a few houses, and trawled the internet for months, but up to now, the only property that we have liked was priced so far above market value that it would have meant mortgaging our souls to buy, and left us with little money for repairs. We are unsure how to proceed, and half the point of starting this blog is that by writing down ideas and options as they occur to us will help our decision making. In the meantime, I have signed on for another two years at my school, keeping me in gainful employment until the middle of June 2008. Hopefully we will know how to achive our aims sometime before then.

I made my first mistake soon after buying the house. Having noted all the bindweed, I realised we would need a power strimmer to beat back some of the undergrowth that was threatening to take over the entire property.

Acting in a particularly thrifty manner, I looked at the sort of thing I thought we needed, balked at the price tag and bought the cheapest model I could find. It will do the job, I told myself, may take a bit longer, but my time is free. Wrong on both counts. By saving money, we had also saved on power, and every time I showed some bindweed to it, the machine turned tail and fled, wrapping its little cutter head in strands of weed and grass until it choked and expired. And I was soon to discover that although my time in the countryside is free-of-charge, a job that kept me in town for most of my time made time saving implements a vital necessity.

Unable to bear the thought of buying another piece of almost-identical equipment, I got hold of a scythe, used that to beat back the worst of the weeds and kept them in place with the trimmer. By the end of the year, we had succeeded in clearing an acre or so of reasonably civilized land around the house, including most of the small orchard, a spot for a vegetable garden, and the land on three sides of the pond. I had calloused hands and a permanently sore back.

To celebrate the land that was now visible, we invited a group of friends and colleagues to come and spend a weekend camping with us. We promised to feed them, if, in return, they would dig some vegetable beds in the same place as the vegetable garden used to be. Much to my amazement, many people actually took us up on the idea and came out to spend a day working in the countryside alongside us. They brought children and beer, and split to their own tasks: a friend whose family own orchards in the US looked after our trees, some experienced gardeners prettified the bed in front of the house and others dug as directed.
By the end of the year, we could see that progress had been made. The interior of the house, whilst still totally lacking in conveniences, was at least fairly clean and dry, and we could walk around the land immediately by the house without losing sight of our feet. It was time to take stock and plan for the next year.
We had also started to understand the life around us in this place that was new to us. A blackbird nested in our outhouse, an eagle owl roosted for a while in our unused woodshed and got the shock of its life as I appeared in the doorway. Deer came to our pond to drink and a family of wild boar scared me when I accidentally got too close to the piglets that were rustling in the undergrowth just a few metres from the house. Mum's firm warning grunt is a sound I will not quickly forget.
The time spent in the house, when either the weather or mosquitos were particularly bad, was enough to make us realise that we needed to do something serious about accomodation if we were serious about spending any time there. It was about this time that the idea of going to live there started to grow on us, initially as a way of justifying the expense, growing later into a 'lifestyle choice'. In the autumn we shut up the house for the winter, accepting that we would not be staying there regularly in the colder months, and started to look online at home designs and talk to architects.
One other thing happened towards the end of the first year: we were burgled a couple of times. No great damage done, nothing of value taken (well, there is nothing of value to take), but it was irritating to have to refix the window that they had taken off to gain access.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I bought a house and 15 acres of land in the countryside of Latvia. The purpose of this journal (still not comfortable with the word blog - give me time) is to explain what we have done to it and what we will continue doing in the hope that we have a feasible place to live out of town when my current contract expires in 2008.
We bought the house for its immediate surroundings: tucked into a little hollow, with untended woodland on three sides and a pond in the bottom, it felt safe and cosy.A spot sheltered from the world, and a place we could imagine ourselves retiring to as well as using as a weekend and holiday base in the meantime. In other words, like so many people before us, we bought a little piece of rural perfection with absolutely no idea what we were going to do with it. Of course, even we could see that it was not really perfect. Unlived in for several years, the land was a long way down the path of natural progression towards woodland, the house is in poor condition and far too small for our needs, and a rough track passing within a hundred feet of the house made it less private than it seemed. We saw all of this, but convinced ourselves that the track would be rarely used, that we could start working on the land around the house and then move out, that the old neglected hayfields would turn into delightful wildfower meadows without any work from us and that we could easily and cheaply build a new house without having to go massively into debt.
We went ahead and bought the place. Two months later, after delays caused by the previous owner not knowing how to prepare the papers, we went back to see our house. It looked delightful. On a late summer day in September, unseasonably warm for these latitudes, we explored with joy, barely noticing that the nodding white flowers belonged to bindweed that had covered everything and literally changed the shape of our land.
With a new born baby at hand, we resolved to buy a strimmer before spring, and figured that with a couple of weekends work, the land would be as well tended as its beauty deserved by the summer and we would start to think about the house. Oh, what folly lies in the hearts of men! How incredibly naive we were.