Negotiations

I haven't written for a while, but not so much has been happening on the home ownership/straw bale building front... until yesterday.

We met with the owner of the property I shared with you some posts back.Generally, the situation is such that she is in some financial trouble and needs the money from the sale of some or all of her property. Great for us, we negotiated the land at a bargain 276zł/sqm (compare that to the 500zł/sqm the neighbouring properties are going for!!) We also negotiated that the 760sqm on offer be extended to 800sqm, as this is the minimum council requirement for residential development. We had a good old time with a 30 metre long tape measure, negotiating how close to the existing building our property would reach and getting to visualize what will sometime soon be ours. Me, of course, in my "power suit" (I joke, but I was expecting negotiations over tea in her living room and not outdoors in the wind) and 7cm heels.

Here is an outline of what's going on with the property:

Basically, what you can see here is the current property (the big red box), a section of land already subdivided (smaller red box towards the front, brother of the owner of the larger property), green lines marking where our property lines will be, an access rode (marked in cyan, which will need to be extended to the second green line) some trees and neighbouring buildings. You've also got the longitude and latitude there, so you can check it out on google earth!

Now the long and winding road (thank you, Mr Lennon) begins.

Firstly, the owner needs to get a surveyor to mark out on council maps pretty much what I have done above with the green lines. Then the owner needs to go to the bank and provide me with their declaration that they will and can remove this piece of the property from the mortgage agreement she has with them. Finally by the end of the week, I expect, we will go to the notary, set out how we will go forward and make a down payment.

Then, the owner will apply to the council for the land to be divided as outlined by the surveyor, meanwhile she will also apply to council for a building permit for a small residential property towards the front of the land (front being nearest the street, next to her brother's house), as she won't be able to develop this land after subdivision - she will no longer have the required minimum 800sqm.

I don't know what else will need to be done. I hope that once we have architectural designs, which might be in the next 2 months, so before the subdivision and ownership procedures are finalized, the owner will apply  for a building permit for us, so it gets approved before the land is ours, and we can move onto the site as soon as its ours. It takes about a month to get the permit, so it would be nice to have when we get the property, rather than having to wait before we start developing our land.

So that's the long and incomplete version. For now we wait to sign notary papers, in the meantime, both our super friendly real estate agent and ourselves will be making notes of what should be included in this agreement.

Meanwhile, I've also found another potential source for straw bales. Early last year we found a farmer who could sell us bales from this years' harvest at 4zł a piece, and that's still current (note to self, should be calling him some day soon) but my husband's cousins fiance's parents also have a few hundred bales, very dry, from about 2 years ago, so these would be preferable. Also need to be calling him sometime soon to work out how many bales, what size, how tight they are and how much they might want for the bales (hoping for mates rates!)

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.

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).