A wee bit green living...

We are now full time living at the house and although the place is a complete mess, it´s great.  We had a few friends round for Tony´s birthday last week and cooked a Colombian potato stew on a wood fire and spent the whole day outside, took a walk down to the river too.

We now have ceilings as of this week - so if there are still bats, at least we cant see them - and indoor doors which is a nice improvement.  We also have a makeshift kitchen, bodged together with all the bits and pieces found lying around including an old kitchen counter from the hostel.  It´s a long way from perfect and doesn´t really inspire much culinary creativity amongst the mess but it´s great to be able to make a pot of coffee, fry a couple of fresh eggs. Washing dishes somewhere other than the wash hand basin in the bathroom is also nice.

The solar panels are working well and we seem to be using less than 25% of what we have each day.  There are a couple of issues with the regulator though as it can only handle peaks of up to 1800 and although our fridge has been doctored to a low consuption, when it boots up, there is a momentary peak which trips the system and sets off an alarm.  What follows is Tony scrambling about with a torch, positioning the ladder and wriggling into the roof cavity to reboot the regulator.  It happened at 3am this morning.  He says that he has found a system to fix that inconvenience so hopefully we´ll get that fixed shortly.

The water situation is close to perfect though, we have way more than enough water just from the rain - April is one of the rainiest months here though. There´s a bit of dust making it´s way into our tank but it falls to the bottom and what we pump into the header tank seems to be free of sediment.  The only real complaint I have at the moment is temperature!  We dont have our solar water heater yet and I´m a bit of a Jessie when it comes to cold water showers.  It´s not that cold by most standards but it´s definately not warm and even less hot.  If I feel tough, I shower there... if not, I take my soap and shampoo to the hostel.  Tony calls it invigorating and thinks it´s good for the health. 

We planted some more grass a couple of weeks ago and made a little platform, planting reedlike things around the edge and that seems to be coming along very well.

Tony has also started digging a pond to bring some more birds and maybe frogs to our garden.  It´s very hard work as the earth is very compact and is that reddish yellow clay type stuff but he has managed to make a pretty big hole.

Then, this weekend we visited some friends who have just finished their bio-pool which is AMAZING and now I wonder whether our pond is really big enough! First things first though... we should really have a shower with hot water before we think about bio-pools!

.... And we're in!

Yesterday was a big day for us because it was the day we moved into our house!  Admittedly it was a bit premature as the hostel was full and there was nowhere for us to sleep but it was great to take that step and sleep over in our own (half built) house.  Things don't work perfectly and there are about a million niggly things that we realize haven't been done or now need to be done after having spent a night there, but on the whole, we are thrilled! It's a great feeling to be in our own space amongst our own things and even cooler to think that we are even using our own energy and our own water (well sort of).

So the stage we are at now is: walls for the first half all built, rendered and stuccoed with wiring and piping all fitted.  The roof is on and sealed and the gutters are more or less collecting rainwater. The pump is installed to fill the header tank, the solar panels are on and connected up.  The floors are all laid and one of the two bathrooms have been fully installed. The windows are all fitted and the interior doors are bought and ready, just need to be screwed in. All of Tony's gadgets are working, the weather station, the water level meter and the wind turbine was working fine until it took it's second and more dramatic fall from the roof, breaking off all of it's wings.

We are still missing the fuse box, a kitchen and basically all the furniture and decorative stuff, including ceilings! We are also having some water filter issues and are still having to borrow mains water from the neighbours. But we're getting there.


The sunset over the trees is great with plenty of birds swooping in and out and the smell of damp, fresh, country nighttime is delicious.  There are millions of stars too and the moon is much brighter than in the city. We sat outside and had breakfast watching the sun come up over the volcano this morning and forgot all about the stresses and frustrations of the whole process so far. Our dog Ally spends every spare minute bounding around in the grass and ferns, day or night and the hens are allowed to roam freely when we're there. It really feels a world away from Popayan and the hostels and although the whole place is a complete mess and quite a way from finished yet, we're feeling really pretty pleased with ourselves.

Through the night however, we discovered a couple of minor set backs: 
- We found a huge spider that Tony was not prepared to remove from the house.
- Our toilet leaks into our garage below when flushed.
- The electricity can just switch itself off without warning because of a loose connection.
- A bat spent half the night flapping around in our ceilingless roof.
- The neighbour's dogs do in fact bark all night long and when they do finally go to sleep at around 4.30am, Silvio the friendly neighbourhood mini-rooster takes over. There's nothing mini about his cockadoodling.

Despite all of that though, I cant wait to get back there tonight!