Happy New Year...

So although we´re 5 hours behind a lot of our friends and family, we have made it into 2013 too and along with fireworks, dancing and drinking come the resolutions! I thought I´d get started on mine straight away and get things moving with this blog.

Since I last posted, the house has pretty much been finished structurally.  We found a reliable a builder as builders go and pushed forward with the roof, the plastering and the floors throughout the remaining part of the house. Our carpenter slowly but surely put together our windows and doors just in time for Christmas and we got our land closed in with some wire fencing after an unfortunate incident involving our rabbits, a few chickens and a couple of the neighbour´s dogs. The exterior walls are all now painted with lime and look really good and although we haven´t started any gardening yet, the rains came and have left everything nice and lush and green again. We also bought some turf for around the front of the house and that´s made a big difference.

Tony has tweaked the water harvesting system to handle the sometime torrential rains we get to allow us to make the most of the wet seasons (having learned from the last dry one!) and it seems to be working really well seeing as in a fairly minor rain a couple of days ago we collected easily a 1000 litres. That´s with only half of the guttering on too.

We´re also having the chance to really test the house´s coping ability at the moment, as well as our friendships! We have had a few visitors over Christmas and New Year and the poor guys have all had to spend their holidays on the building site with us. The hot water system which is perfect for two of us, struggles a little bit with 6 people and showers have to be staggered and although we have plenty of water at the moment, we would have to be careful having guests at dry times of year.  It also doesn´t help that one of our solar panels seems to be malfunctioning and may have a problem with a diode or something meaning we dont have as much electricity as we should and having upgraded the inversor, we are now finding that we dont really have enough power sometimes. All said though, the house is holding up very nicely and it´s fantastic to have our own space to spend our free time with friends.

So, what next? The kitchen!  We are still using our make-shift kitchen at the moment and have bought a fairly cheap, standard kitchen kit to install in our beautiful, spacious, one day, kitchen/diner.  Having made a frustrating and almost relationship destroying bathroom cabinet of a similar style a few weeks back, we decided that the builder might have to take charge of this one!  Unfortunately he discovered that the wall wasn´t perfectly square and so out comes the cement again.  Every time we feel like we´re getting close, there´s always a step backwards just around the corner but we are definitely getting closer now.  The floors are looking great and just need to be sealed to stop them getting marked or stained and there´s a lot of painting, gardening and furniture buying still to do but we´re nearly there! At this point it´s tempting to just kick the builders out and say it´ll do! but we´re going to persevere and hopefully in a month I´ll be able to write on here about trivial things like planting herbs or shades for curtains rather than how to have a bath in a teacup of water, squeezing more power out of dead batteries at 10 o´clock at night or tricks to make crooked walls square up to a pre-fab kitchen unit!

In the meantime, a happy and green new year to everyone. I have a feeling 2013 is going to be a really good one!

Back in the swing of it...

It has been a looooong time since I have posted here and progress on the house has been slow but steady over the past few months.  We are still experiencing a long and dry summer, in fact there has been virtually no rain for over 4 months - not the best news for an off grid house which depends on rain water harvesting.  Our neighbours have been really helpful and continue to help us with our water shortages and we have taken steps to ensure that we wont be stuck in this position again.  We now have several more water tanks and could effectively live for 2-3 months with no rain just relying on our stored water - but it does still have to rain in the first place!


On one hand, lets hope it doesn´t rain so we can get the roof on before the water gets in but on the other hand, its sad to see everything yellow and dry and know that only a few of the plants are going to make it through - apart from the orange and lemon trees which are flourishing! Rabbits and hens are also doing fine although the summer egg production is not as good as the winter it seems.



Since I last posted, all the walls are up and the roof terrace is on top of the kitchen.  The walls are all rendered, the garden wall is finished and we´re waiting for a builder to get started on the roof hopefully this week or next for the remaining part.  The carpenter us supposed to come and measure for the windows and doors this afternoon and a guy who cuts trees is going to come and tidy up the forrest then use the branches for fence posts to finally close off our garden.

We just got back from a month visiting the family and so have a new enthusiasm and energy for the project which hopefully will carry us along for a bit.  We also have a visit from Tony´s family planned for February so it´s great to have a real deadline to work to. Hopefully you´ll see some real progress in the next few posts!

Summertime...

Summer has truly arrived here.  Warm weather, happy people outside enjoying the weather, birds and butterflies flapping about, motivated builders and generally a smily sort of feeling about the place!

There has been some major progress over the past week as far as the building work goes!  We have a little team of four hard working bricklayers, 5500 bricks, about 16 sacks of cement and a heap of sand and rocky sand piled up outside the house.  The idea is to get cracking on the remaining walls and also build a small garden wall to mark the front of the garden, the aim being to relocate the public dog loo which has established iself on our grass. So far so good! Pretty much all the walls are up and only one door in the wrong place, which by our track record is pretty good.  It has also made things much more private for us as before whenever we stepped out of the house we were standing on the platform in plain view of the neighbours, which seems to tempt them to come down and talk to us while we´re having our late Sunday morning breakfast in the sunshine. Now we are hidden by walls and can eat in our pjs in peace.

With every step forward there is inevitably a step back in this process of building a house but at least this week`s mini disaster wasn´t too serious.  We have had our doubts for a while about a few of the installations put in place by our first builder and with the warm wether, a few whiffy smells had started coming from our bathroom plumbing. Tony decided it was time to check on Old Rodrigo´s grease-trap for the showers, kitchen sink and wash-hand basins.  As this was an add on to the original designs for the house, we sort of forgot where it was located exactly and so Tony spent the day on saturday like a mole, digging here, there and everywhere trying to find the grease-trap.  Eventually he did find it and sure enough it was blocked, over flowing and stinking!  After a couple of hours up to his shoulder in it, he decided to forget it altogether and make a new one. By carefully selecting a container, stones, sand, netting and some bits of pipe, he put it all togther just in time for the washing machine to evacuate and slosh the whole lot into one big sandy soup.

Hopefully it didnt do too much damage though and once everything settled it seemed to be working fine, just struggling when over-filled.  The washing machine is proving difficult all round.  It over fills the grease-trap, it uses an massive amount of water and it´s pretty heavy on the power.  The lights flicker and as I learned (on Saturday at 6.30pm once all of the hardware stores were closed for the weekend) it can burn out all the fuses in the invertor if left on at the same time as other heavy appliances, leaving you completely in the dark with a fridge full of warming food.  Lucky cars have fuses and we were able to at least get our lights back on!

On a more positive note, I spent the day on Saturday painting what will one day be our guest room and it´s great to now have at least one space pretty much finnished and without mess and clutter.  Unfortunately it doesnt have curtains or furniture yet so we haven´t been able to enjoy it so far.  Soon though.  Our bathroom which we decorated the weekend before is looking very nice and now has all the bits and pieces (and if I´m honest clutter and mess) in there.  The solar water heater is working a treat and we met a woman last week who makes natural, eco friendly soaps from olive oils and natural flavours which dont clog up the grease-trap supposedly so we stocked up on a couple of those.

On the Sunday the mission was to finnish the pond but at a scorching and windy 28`C we couldn´t face it!  We dug for ten minutes, altered the plan to leave it pretty much the size it was, called it a day and went swimming in the river along from our house.  A much better idea!  This weekend coming, we wanted to measure the pond and buy the plastic liner so that we can get started filling it and planting stuff in it but it´s now Friday and we still haven´t measured so it´s seeming a bit unlikley.  It also still hasn´t rained since my last post so seems a bit pointless to waste our precious water on a pond that we cant drink or wash in at this stage. We´ll have to see, a flash flood could change everything!

So this week, fingers crossed for rain (as a Scot I never thought I´d be heard saying that!) and also for a good bit of building work from our guys!  Hopefully by the next post there should be some good photos to show.

Hot water - Clean water - No water...

The water heater was finally installed the weekend before last and we let it sit and soak up the rays for a full 24 hours before hopping in to test the shower temperature.  It was majorly disappointing actually!  Tepid just about sums it up.  Pretty frustrating after having spent a small fortune on the kit. The water pressure was also shockingly bad so we went to sleep a bit disheartened that night and didn´t really know what to do.  It wasn´t until the following afternoon when Tony tried the water again and just about scalded his hand that we cheered right up again!  It seems it just takes a while to get 150 litres from cold to piping hot but now that it´s heated up, it´s averaging a nice and steamy 65´C which is just perfect!  We even have to mix it with cold water and that´s in the morning, having had no sunlight all through the night.

The only minor problem we have been having is a bit of a water shortage.  It has hardly rained in two weeks and the tanks are getting a bit low, especially with the showering time increased significantly with the temperature.  One big storm will fill the tanks and usually there´s one every few days but not this week.  It´s funny actually because it´s the first week we have everything up and running, we have the water heater, we bought a fancy drinking water filter with about 8 different filter stages, figured out the washing machine problems (electronic panel machines dont work because of the dirty electricity from the AC/DC convertion), the float switches are installed in the tanks to make sure the pump stops and starts at the right time, put a new filter in the down pipe and washed the gutters, even installed an automatic water system for the hens............ but no rain!

H for HOT water!!

Meeting a green family...

Now back into the swing of things after our trip to Bogota and well and truly skint thanks to all of the unexpected expenses of the past couple of months (visas, car troubles, extra staffing and suprise costs at the hostels), we have turned our attentions once again to the things that we can do for free (or nearly free) around the house.

The past two weekends have been spent weeding, burning scraps, digging the bio-pond, leveling the driveway, tidying and retidying after the builders and generally pottering about in the garden.   We also tried to decipher the gender of the chicks using the ring-on-a-string technique. Results proved inconclusive. It has been really nice actually and although we initially though that we would prefer to be doing something fun and expensive, it´s been really nice to enjoy the free stuff; the sunshine, the ´super-moon´, the birds and that great feeling of exhaustedness after being outdoors all day.  The cold shower is almost bearable, maybe even refreshing on a sunburn!

The solar water heater has arrived and is taking up one of our two rooms while we wait for it to be installed.  The tubes are all fitted, the sun is shining and we´re good to go.  We just need the guy to come and install it for us.  Hopefully in the next couple of days.

A friend introduced us to a great little family who live in Popayan last week and we went out to their house, not too far from where we live, with the plan to have lunch and visit a waterfall.  When we arrived however, we were amazed to see that they too are a wee bit green... actually, quite a big bit green!  They built their house from scratch with traditional techniques using clay and bamboo, plus local and recycled building materials.  They have even solved the lime paint puzzles which have been plagueing us for months by using earth dyes that they dug out of the ground around their house.  The house is mains connected for water and electricity but has no black or grey waters as the grey waters are filtered and used on the plants and the black waters are non-existant as they use only a compost loo which all goes back to the earth once composted down. Needless to say we probably wont be invited back after bombarding the poor hosts with questions for the entire afternoon.  We didn´t feel very green at all after talking with these guys! I think that green splits off into a few different categories.  I´d say they are more hardcore rustic green while we´re more moderate high-tech green and I´m sure there will be many more variations to come accross. The family are very helpful and nice people and although there are many of their systems and ideas that we dont want to or cant implement, there are loads that we do want to and they have said they are very happy to help with whatever we need.  They are our new green gurus!

A couple of things that we have taken from our visit with a plan to implement straight away is to make an animal / garden shed type thing in a corner of our garden.  The idea being to keep all of the things which help each other together.  It will be a small structure in bamboo with a solid floor and a roof (I think 2 msq should be plenty), divided into three parts.  The back half will be for the chickens so that they can have an organised indoor area where it´s easy to feed them, collect eggs and clean out the poo which we want to start composting for the plants.  The other half will be divided in two and will have an enclosure for Florence (the second hand rabbit we should be aquiring next month) with a poo collecting system and storage for her and the hen´s food. The little section left over we want to make into a little cubicle with a compost loo, just as an alternative for when we´re out in the garden or when we know (thanks to Tony´s weather station!) that we are entering or in a period of drought.  That way we wont have to waste so much rainwater in just flushing the indoor loos as often.  I´m also excited about the idea of dirty wellies not traipsing in and out of the house just to use the loo all day long.  The idea would then be to make a composting area right next to our shed which would in turn be right next to our plantain trees and veggie plot.  It´s all still in the planning stages so far but it shouldn´t be too difficult to do and it´ll be great to have everything more organised.

 Speaking of organisation, I´m just about at my wits end with the builders!  They dont tend to do things room by room but rather one job at a time.  That means sanding everywhere one day and painting everywhere the next, then drilling eveywhere, then grinding everywhere.. you get the idea.  It means mess everywhere all the time! Not even one corner where you can hide things so that they dont get covered in dust or cement or wood shavings.  I have given up even cleaning up after them and there´s nowhere to put anything anyway so we are living like pigs... or more like snowmen at the moment with everything covered in white dust!  They promise that by Monday they will be finished and will move on to the outdoor things again.  That´s the plan anyway.  On Monday we start building again, more men on the job with the plan to get a few more columns and walls up this month. Meanwhile, though, the relaxing has to be done in the garden!

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!