More Purchases

As of less than an our, Husband and I are proud owners of some cast iron stairs from near Dover, UK, which will be coming out to Poland sometime next week, again, courtesy of eBay.

Watching those last seconds tick away on the auction and clinking our classes of red as the "You have just purchased" email came through were very moving moments for us, our build is getting really real.

Pressure is on to find a piece of land, get the architectural/administrative things underway and get this party started.

But I'll worry about that tomorrow.

For now, here is the new addition to our family ;)

Purchases

Our first home purchase has been made, and somewhat unfortunately, it was not land.

This may seem like a crazy and spontaneous purchase, but the truth is that Husband and I decided on two pieces of interest that we'd like to have in the house:
one, stained-glass or otherwise antique church window,
two, antique cast iron spiral staircase.
These were supposed to add interest and be our only splurges.

We came up with the window idea after visiting friends of ours in Australia. They have a beautiful home in Melbourne and their open living/dining area features very tall and very colorful church windows, which as I understand were also salvaged for the house build. They also had smaller church windows in another part of the house.

Can't remember where the idea for stairs came from, though.

Well, the first purchase, a window, has been done. A little different to what our friends have, it's etched, rather than stained, and considerably smaller. Both are attributes, our copy is original :P That is to say that we copied the concept but the final outcome won't be similar at all. Plus our house probably won't be large enough to accommodate multiple church windows, and we'll probably be limited to placing them in an interior dividing wall, as it probably doesn't have good thermal properties.

The best thing is that the purchase wasn't really a splurge, as we'd prepared for. There wasn't much interest in the eBay piece, we got it for only AU$182.62. It'll probably cost us that again to ship it to Poland, if not more, and there is the stress of getting it here in one piece, but fingers are crossed.

Now I'm looking at a spiral staircase and perhaps by the week's end I'll have the other purchase done, too. Then we get the land and build the house to put them in! Certainly all other purchases will be purely practical, as these are the only predicted unnecessary purchases.

Nunga Mai Nura

Nunga Mai Nura, to the best of my knowledge, is Dharawal for Dream Place and is/will be the name of our home.

Learning Curve

We've seen strawbale houses before, but in Australia, so husband and I went to take a look at a straw bale work in progress near Warsaw to compare how the technology holds up in this rather different climate.

As the technology remains somewhat experimental, its great to see how different architects, builders and owners approach both the limitations and the possibilities associated with straw bale.

The house we saw today in no way resembled the modest and square MS Paint-sketches I posted yesterday... A beautiful building is underway - but an expensive one too. Featuring curvy walls, one fully-windowed wall and wood singled wavy roof this is clearly a bale builder with cash to spare - unlike us. He also had the luxury of getting two architects on board - neither of them had previous bale experience.

Here's the house's website. It's called the Spiritual House

One of the great ideas the architects came up with - and the design is supposed to have magically revealed itself upon owner and architect during meditation - is a hollow masonry wall which is to absorb and radiate heat from the stove/fireplace throughout the center of the house (in addition to in-floor radiant heating).

Another was using logs and even trees for functional and aesthetic parts of the building - ceiling/balcony supports. Some of them were cherry trees that were being grown on the building site. A nice touch, I thought.

One of the worse ideas, in my opinion, was the excessive use of wood. A small forest was sacrificed to create not one, but two skeletal structures to house the bales inside the clay render. And in this obviously post-and-beam structure, wood was also used every two bale-heights for compression purposes.

Wood works great and is an obvious partner to straw bales, clay and in fact the entire building industry. But serving no other purpose than as slots in a giant straw bale version of "Connect Four" only to end up trapped behind 25 tonnes of clay render seems a bit wasteful.

I love working with wood and hope to be able to take some time off work when our build gets going to hand craft some sills and posts for the house. But I also hope that our house will have a much more modest construction and use much less wood, for cost purposes primarily, but also to show that a bale wall really doesn't need that much help from trees to keep it standing.

Last thing I wanted to say today was that, even with giant gaping holes where windows will go, unplastered bits of bale, an uninsulated roof and a bare concrete floor on a snowy winter day, the inside of this building was actually quite warm. Sure, my toes froze in my gumboots, but the rest of me was doing alright. I'm not sure if straw bales and clay plaster have any intrinsic warmth of their own, or if its just the cozy impression they give, but even bare and unfinished that house is doing well in this winter weather, kudos.

Planning

This morning I came up with a great idea...

But let's start at the beginning. Husband and I have been playing the planning game for some months now, as recommended in More Straw Bale Building. We've looked at house plans and realizations and considered what we do and don't want in our own home.

The planning game mostly concerns our downstairs, as upstairs will be a bunch of bedrooms and a bathroom, and we don't expect much more than functionality from them.

So downstairs, we wanted a mud room with adjoining wardrobe, a small bathroom/toilet, a very casual and fairly large living room space, a "formal dining", kitchen with an adjoining sunroom/breakfast area, and a spare room which, depending on need, can serve as a TV room, home office or guest bedroom. I always had a pretty good idea of how much space I'd need in these rooms and about the traffic corridors that would need to be considered. But how to put that onto paper always baffled me.

Now I am not an architect. So my thousands of sketches of floor plans rarely expand out of some square or rectangle. But even looking at ready designs online, I kind of had this idea about a kitchen towards the front of the house, with the living and dining areas lining the back wall - ideally, the south facing wall.

But I went back to the drawing board this morning, thinking about the uses of these places. I put formal dining in quotation marks before. That's because, rather than meaning formal in the way of fancy cutlery and chandeliers, I more had in mind the fact that this would be a single purpose room. The vast majority of family meals to be consumed in this house will be eaten in the kitchen or at the small table in the adjoining sun room - the latter is possibly an add-on in future or something we might get rid of altogether when we get closer to go time. We thought about getting rid of an official dining area altogether, because it would be so rarely used. But I cannot imagine my home being one in which I won't be able to host Christmas meals or invite friends around for dinner parties.

Time for the big reveal - if the dining room is to be so rarely used, why should it get south-facing windows!

Taa daa. Seems so obvious now. Can't believe I didn't come up with this so much earlier.

So now I have the planning game, with circles and squares indicating what goes where, drawn up in paint. I even took it further and started to draw in how I'd see the whole thing together.

In the top picture there are really only the rooms, mentioned about, in their rough configurations. The stairs marked in will hopefully be Victorian or similar reclaimed cast iron, and I actually pushed them out to the side a little thinking a bit of rounded bale wall would do nicely wrapping around the staircase.

So here's the plan.

Through the main entry way (perhaps double doors? Definitely some sort of reclaimed) there'll be mirror and side table to the left - mirror for dressing coats and scarves in, table for wallets and phones.

To the side is a wardrobe, with hooks and other steps taken to accommodate guests' coats, hats, shoes etc, and a cupboard for the occupants' things. I'd like to have this organized, so all the outer accessories are stored and put on here; gloves, shoes, scarves, sunglasses. There's also an ottoman on which one can sit to put shoes on.

As you go through the house, to the left (perhaps more straight on in the final version, as I'd like this to be the hub of the house and for traffic to be automatically directed this way) there is the living room. I predict a mish mash of furniture, I'm hoping for a hanging/swinging chair, maybe a chaise lounge, a couple of chairs and couches. Most of this should be light weight enough to be easily shoved around, closer or further from whatever. I'm happy for an anything goes feel in this room, and if, when entertaining, I get three or four circles of furniture going on as people group off to do their own thing, that'd be mission accomplished.
I'm also not a fan of the traditional coffee table, as it often results in banged shins for me, but I do like side tables and those old-school bars - all of which are light and mobile - so one could pull one up for their coffee and push it aside when they don't need it.

Through some glass bi-folds to the north ;) is the aforementioned dining room.
I'm thinking of putting a buffet in there, my grandparents one, if they give it to me. I was thinking of giving it a face-lift in the way of a new paint job. I was also wondering whether I should invest in a double aspect stove, that way on the (rare) occasion that I'm entertaining with a dinner, the fire can be enjoyed from both living and dining rooms. But this is probably unnecessary.
The point of the double bi-folds is also that, on those really rare occasions that there are like 40 people in the house the table could be moved to go through into the living room with another table or tables attached to the end to make it super long.
I'm Polish. Such events do occur.

You'll notice some lines representing steps. I was wondering if the feeling of "space" couldn't be achieved vertically. That is, rather than having a 20sqm living room, if I could get away with a 12-15sqm space that felt "spacious" because of high ceilings. I'd then go through and take advantage in the dining room, also. But this is unnecessary.

My kitchen faces south. Which is great. In all my previous sketches it was always where the dining room is now. But I spend so much time in the kitchen, it just be silly not to take advantage of warmth and sunshine and windows, which come with a southern aspect. And the sunroom/breakfast area I've dreamed about literally since we had one in the house I lived in at 9 years old will also benefit from this (in earlier plans it was west-facing). Kitchen pretty standard - sink, stove, dishwasher (?), pantry. Either an integrated fridge or an awesome Smeg retro looking one. I also love integrated ovens, but I was thinking of mounting mine in a wall, and not an excessively expensive kitchen unit (I'm hoping my kitchen cupboards will come from a junk yard or for near-free from a website) and having the surrounding wall made up of cubby holes with baskets of kitchen stuff. And lastly my kitchen trolley come island come bar. A must. I need one large, interrupted piece of counter top space for food prep. Years of living in cramped student quarters and shared accommodation has taught me that.

So we exit the kitchen, very quickly, and go to the sunroom. This is my one lux. room that we don't have to have in the house. It cooperates well with Husband's dream winter garden. Both can be treated as an add-on, but by building on the sunroom a bit two could become one. Question then is regarding isolating the inside of the house from the largely-glass room. But we're some way away from the stage of worrying about that... Really this paragraph just served as an explanation of those boxes and lines outside the perimeter of the house.

Next to the kitchen is a multipurpose room which I've drawn up as a TV room - definitely no TV in the living room!! A fold-out couch and some storage space will instantly make this room double as a spare bedroom, it will take a little more imagination to make it triple as an office - but both Husband and I are largely paperless, and one of those IKEA-fixes of offices in wardrobes or hallways will suffice.

Lastly, toilet and sink. Enough said. Actually, no - P-trap toilets (those hanging ones) for optically enlarging the room and easy cleaning, same goes for under-basin cabinet.

The stairs are self-explanatory.

Anyway, so my cousin the architect is going to be cranky that I'm trying to do her job for her... or she might be happy that her client knows what she wants? We'll see...

Financing

Yesterday I went to my chosen bank - the only one which, to my knowledge, offers loans in CHF (Swiss Francs) in Poland. It seems I've missed the boat - as of 2012 I'd need to be netting 15,000 PLN monthly, about five times what I make, to qualify for a loan in the currency. That means I am can only get a home loan in PLN, but my initial repayments will be at least twice that as with a loan in CHF, and I miss out on having my repayments cheapen significantly when the currently high value of the franc comes plummeting down - long overdue already. If I'd gotten the loan only three weeks ago I'd be laughing.

Never mind. The situation has forced me to rethink my plans. Previously, I was considering perhaps a large-ish property and a large-ish house with a few lavish luxuries. Instead, I'm thinking of applying for a much lower loan, just to cover the cost of the land, and building with the cash I have put aside - an amusingly petty 100,000 PLN inheritance and some 25,000 PLN in savings.

While I'd previously considered, for example, a polished concrete floor, I'm now thinking rammed earth or compressed clay or something. I'm also considering other alternatives that are even more budget friendly than what I was thinking of earlier...

I'll now be contacting my architect/cousin to get her thoughts on the issue.

Meanwhile, there is a plot of land in the area near Warsaw I was looking at. It's 760 sqm. I haven't seen the property yet, but a friend of mine dealing in real estate in that area will show it to me probably this weekend. She says I might need loose a bit of space, because I need to allow access to the property behind it, but the ad says it's already set back behind one property from the road. Either way, I'm enjoying the concept of having a neighbor buffering the noise of traffic for me :) I'll be sure to take some pictures when I do see the property. Hopefully it's a south-facing plot (though if not directly facing a road and lets say squished in behind other properties to each side, won't I be able to face a house any way I please?).

For now, here is the online ad for the property:

Genesis

I have just decided to start a blog. My first blog. Because what else should one do when they're avoiding tackling the growing pile of tasks and responsibilities while at work? Ok, there's probably a thousand other things I could do, and the one thing I probably should do is what my boss is paying me for. But as I've played enough tetris and solitaire to last me a lifetime, and the aforementioned work just isn't that much fun, starting a blog it is.

So I've never blogged before. Not too sure how its done. But seeing as how I'm a very curious person and when I read blogs I'm usually interested in knowing something about the authors, I guess I'll start with some kind of introduction.

I'm 25. I've been married for a little over a year. I live in Warsaw, Poland but I come from Sydney, Australia. I have a job - it's actually quite well paying by local standards. But I make in a month here a little more than I'd get in a week in Sydney.  Never mind conditions. Unpaid over-time is a fact of life, and job security is an unknown concept.

I live in a 38 sqm apartment - it has small rooms, a tiny kitchen and bathroom. For most Polish newly-weds - not bad.

But the apartment is rented.

And one of the rooms is occupied by flatmates.

Not uncommon for some Polish newly-weds. Except, I'm not a Polish newly-wed. I'm Australian. I'm used to space and bungalow living with a pool in the back yard. Heck. I miss that yard.

Not all will understand, but I've been suffering something akin to claustrophobia for the three years I've been living in Warsaw. It results from hearing the chronic coughing of some guy who lives three floors down, the incessant yelling of the dysfunctional family across the hall, the whirring of the drill as someone else renovates every Saturday morning at an ungodly hour, toilets flushing throughout the building... the list goes on. It also results from me not being able to play my instrument without someone banging on my door or wall (usually housemates, but sometimes neighbors) and the fact that I feel I need to walk around the house on tip toe so as not to disturb the downstairs neighbor. I'm never alone. In everything I do, somewhere not too far away, someone can probably hear me doing it. Sometimes I get paranoid and I think they can see me, too. It might not be that paranoid, seeing as sometimes I look into the apartments of the people living in the next building...

I remember visiting an aunt in Warsaw when on holiday with my family here nearly 20 years ago. She also lived in an apartment. I was about 5 years old, I wasn't allowed to run in her apartment, I was constantly being told to turn music down, not to jump up and down - torture for a little kid. Fortunately, I was there for one day. How my cousins grew up in that apartment remains a mystery. Poor, deprived children...

So what I'm getting to is that I've been spoilt by the good fortune of having been born and raised in the suburbs of Sydney and now I want to realize the insane dream of building a house near Warsaw.

Everyone here thinks I'm crazy. They're probably right.

Before the recession, my in-laws built something a little larger than what I need on dirt-cheap land and it cost them 600,000 PLN. (Remember my earnings?)

But, even though I'm no eco-Nazi, I do find that modern-day building practices are unnecessarily energy-intensive and largely wasteful. I'm also a tight-arse and traditional construction materials are totally over priced. For over a year now I've been doing my research and I've decided to build a house almost entirely out of used and recycled materials. The only "new" materials, I hope, will be straw bale and clay walls.

I also hope that I'll finally be able to convince one bank or another for a loan, preferably in Swiss Francs, to the value of 400,000 PLN, of which 50 per cent should get us anything between 500 and 1,500 sqm of land.

In the past year, I've read Straw Bale Building Straw Bale Building and More Straw Bale Building (among others). I've intensively researched local real-estate and have decided on where to build the house. I've researched where and how much I can get most building materials for. But nothing has come to fruition yet. I'm not even approved for a loan!

But that's all going to change. 2012 is the year in which I will become a home owner.

Here's what I've got so far:

1. My cousin, an architect, very liberal and experimental in her approach to everything and very similar to me in what I like in architecture, has promised to design the house for me. I'm 99 per cent sure that when the time comes, she'll be true to her word.

2. The land will be in the warszawskie-zachodnie powiat (county), in Łomianki,to Warsaw's NNE, on the left side of european route 77 as you travel north. The region is unlikely to become much more build up as it is bordered by the Vistula river to one side and the protected Kampinos forests to the other, which was important in making the decision, as morning traffic into Warsaw is more than a nightmare, and if it were to get worse... I'll show you pictures sometime
Furthermore, the area closer to the river carries with it the (expensive) need to consider drainage, is prone to flooding, is often infested by mosquitoes and is strangely popular among home builders which is of course driving up the price of land, I think the building closer to the forest will be cheaper overall.

3. I've sourced my straw bales! I have made a reservation for this year's bales, some farmers 30km north of Warsaw have promised to bale them up as tight as they'll go and will also hold their neighbors bales for us, just in case. The price of bales went up recently, as I'll be competing with strawberry and potato growers who use the straw to insulate their crops over winter. I will still be looking around to get bales closer to the area and perhaps cheaper. There is a lot of cereal growing in the area and Polish farmers are largely traditionalists, likely to burn giant piles of straw at the end of harvest, so perhaps I'll get onto someone who'll be willing to palm their "problem" off onto me.

So that's where I am at currently. Very beginning stages. But the plan is to set wheels in motion ASAP and I hope this blog will reflect that with regular updates and news.

I'll also be posting in Polish - or have my husband do the translations - as this should one day be a very useful guide to very many other young (and not-so-young) Polish people looking to build without breaking the bank.

As such, I encourage getting an RSS feed of this, digging, following me on flickr (once pics start coming up) and youtube (once videos start appearing).