Tuesday, February 07, 2006
The Beginning
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.
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.
