Waiting..................

We still have no progress to report with the building! I´m starting to get a bit cross about it as there doesn´t even seem to be a reason for it, just the builders putting it off and putting it off. We´ve been back a month now  and all the materials for the next stage are bought and still nothing!

We´ve also had to make a couple of sad desicions because of hostel related business. We may have to relocate (the hostel) in the next six months or so and that could be a difficult thing to do if we´ve spent all our money on our lovely, ´green´ house. So, we´ve decided to build only the first half now and move in, hopefully by December (that is, if the builders actually do any work before then!) with the plan to chip away at the rest of the house as and when the finances let us. We were quite excited to have our house built and finished by this time next year but it seems business will have to come first this time. Anyway, we´ll still have our room, two bathrooms, a study and a laundry room (acting as a kitchen), so it´ll actually be similar in size to where we live now. The bulk of the expense will also be taken care of with the solar pannels, water harvesting system and filters and all the rest of it so hopefully it wont take too long to get things moving again, maybe 6 months or so after we move in.

On the positive side, the chickens are all healthy again. In fact we are the ones who are snotty and sniffly this week as summer has arrived and brought with it dust storms and hayfever. The veggies are also doing well and the tomatoes, onions, sunflowers and beetroots have started sprouting up, no sign of the peppers yet though. I´m making a second keyhole type garden to use up the rest of the seeds that I have left over as here it´s not easy to by less than a field´s worth of any one vegetable. We have also started getting our guests in the hostel to start helping with compost collection and so we should have plenty to fill up those keyholes. Watering is the issue with summer here. With no roof to collect rainwater off so far, we´re now carting tanks of water as well as the usual, buckets of compost, tyres for the forest stairs, old clothes, seeds, medicine for the chickens, building and gardening equipment, sunscreen and snacks. Lucky we dont have a nicer car. The poor thing is so full of junk that our mechanic sent it off to the car wash before he would check over a problem with the fuel pump! We tried to put bamboo poles on the roof at one point too but after a few nasty scratches, decided it was cheaper in the long run to pay for a truck to drop it off.

Our Ned Flanders neighbour let us play with his grass strimmer last weekend and now we can see what we´re dealing with! We missed a couple of bits and some other bits are completely bald but on the whole it´s a big improvement. I was toying with the idea of getting a grass cutting sheep but after reading about clipping and worming and suicidal tendencies, I was pretty much put off. Once we have grass, I suppose we´ll have to figure out how to cut it. Currently we just have weeds which we´re slowly but surely digging out.

Tony bought a mini wind turbine on ebay this week. I´m not sure quite how it´ll work here given that the staff at the hostel were complete puzzled as to how clothes can dry outside on a line in Scotland if it´s cold there. They have never experienced the common sight (especially where I grew up) of knickers wrestling themselves horizontally off of the line and finding their way into a neighbour´s garden 5 houses down the street. 100 mph winds are not that uncommon in the NE Scotland and in Popayan we experience around 8 mph winds once a year in July/August and dedicate a kite festival to it! Well, we´ll see how it goes, it´ll be a fun project anyway.

At the moment we´re looking for a chest freezer to turn into a fridge. The zeer was great and successfully cooled a cucumber for 2 weeks in the blazing sun, before it was eaten in a salad. It´s a few degrees warmer than you´d like your beer though and has a fairly limited capacity. Seemingly by bypassing and reprograming the thermostat on a super A* energy efficient freezer, you can create a pretty good fridge that consumes only a teensy amount of energy, not much more than the super expensive solar fridges and much bigger.

Other than that we´re just waiting (not very patiently) for the builders to get our house built!