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).