May 11 2008 - a Blog-sharing interlude….

I’m relatively new to Blogging, and am learning a lot from the kind people who have found my site through other websites and blogs and have left comments and directions to other places. Last week I was tagged by Gillie whose Blog at http://www.skybluepink.typepad.com is full of lovely things to cook and make, warmly and generously written and all illustrated with beautiful photographs from her home and garden and the surrounding countryside. She asked me to take part in a “meme”  (don’t know why it is called this) which has been great fun, and gives me the opportunity to plug a great book and spread the word about some other Blogs I enjoy. 

The exercise asks you to pick up the nearest book set in a foreign country and do the following:

1) Open page 123

2) Find the fifth sentence.

3) Post the next three sentences.

4) Tag five people and acknowledge who tagged you.

So this is the book excerpt - from “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver, one of my favourite American writers. You may know her from her novels – The Poisonwood Bible, The Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven and Prodigal Summer, but her writing is rooted in her background as a biologist – she sees nature with a poet’s eye but a scientist’s knowledge. She is a keen ecologist and this fantastically readable book charts her family’s move from Arizona to a farm in the southern Appalachians, and their efforts to eat only locally-produced food for an entire year, growing and rearing much of ihemselves. Each member of the family is allowed one non-local luxury (coffee, chocolate etc) and the book is packed with recipes, anecdotes and growing tips.

 

“Local food is a handshake deal in a community gathering place. It involves farmers with first names, who show up week after week. It eand an open-door policy on the fields, where neighbourhood buyers are welcome to have a look, and pick their own food from the vine. Local is famers growing trust.”

I am sending it to:

Yarnstorm http://www.yarnstorm.blogs.com - the first Blog I ever found, and still one of my absolute favourites, with its feel-good tone, inspiring ideas and lovely pictures of a creative family life. Maybe you already know it. The author, Jane Brocket, has also written a superb book The Gentle Art of Domesticity (Hodder & Stoughton).

Earth and Tree www.earth-and-tree.blogspot.com - this is a lovely site which I have just discovered, charting the author’s efforts to live a more “natural and earth-centred life”. She also has another lovely Blog called hedgewitch with lots of stuff about the history and folklore around herbs and how to grow and use them.

Three Beautiful Things www.threebeautifulthings.blogspot.com -  The author simply lists three lovely things that have happened to her each day, and her entries are an essay in economy and lyricism. I do this whenever I can in a notebook and have found that engendering a sense of gratitude for what I have can be a great path to happiness…

Money and Sofia www.monkeyandsofia.blogspot.com - I met the couple who run this site many years ago when they lived the good life in rural Yorkshire. Since then they have travelled in a customized camper van to Portugal where they spent a few years looking for the ideal house and site and are now in Canada. In summer they grow their own organic fruit and veg; in winter they make the most amazing felt toys, knitted socks and other goodies that have revolutionized my present-giving.

Liivian Talossa www.liiviantalossa.blogspot.com- I do not speak a word of Finnish, and nor do you have to in order to enjoy this lovely site, with its stunning and sensitive photographs of a sensitively lived and observed life. Lots of lovely Northern light and nature.

Hope you enjoy this interlude!

Back to the eco-house railway carriages next time… With more pictures.

X 

 

9 MAY 2008

Well, work is certainly underway! From the front garden the house entrance still looks more or less the same, framed in a haze of apple blossom and surrounded by bluebells.

But venture in through the front door, and you soon see daylight up ahead.

The top two train compartments on the left hand side have been carefully cut out to create the extra space for the kitchen extension. And much of the former kitchen/future utility/shower room has been taken down and is in the process of being re-built. We were prepared for that. But what we had not bargained for was the fact that the floor had been dug up and foundations laid for the cement slab. So where only last week we stepped out of our sitting room on to carpet, we now step on to scree chippings. It was a surreal experience to sit on the sitting room step with a cup of tea looking straight across on to the garden. I kept losing my barings and having to remind myself where the divisions of the new rooms would be.

In the end I managed to get my head around it, and was able to go round with John, the builder, saying roughly where we would want things like the kitchen doors, sink and cooker. I took down measurements and will send him a more detailed plan this week. It’s all so exciting. I’d wondered if Mary (nearly 4) would find it disturbing to find her erstwhile home taken apart and open to the sky, and had been careful to prepare her. But I needn’t have worried: she ran around laughing and kicking up the scree with her pink wellies. As long as she gets her long-promised bunk beds there will be no trouble there. I’m the liability when it comes to sentimentality. I couldn’t help but feel glad that we had not been around for the actual cutting out of the compartments, and found it strange to see the scraps of old wallpaper with which our predecessors had decorated one of the rooms we had only used for storage exposed to the air and fluttering in the breeze.

There’s now no hot water nor electricity, and the remaining rooms are packed with our possessions, so we were heading off to my uncle’s farm a few miles away to spend a couple of nights. Must get a new tent so we can camp on the lawn in the course of future visits (a mouse shredded the last one). There was just time to thank John, Doug and Richard profusely for all their amazing hard work, hand over a wad of cash and write a cheque to ‘William the Concreter’ who will be coming to pour the ’slab’ for the foundations in a few days time. I wonder what will await our next visit!

Caption: Me on the step down from the sitting room and Mary in what will soon be a new shower room.

30 APRIL 2008

An entire month since the last entry…. This Blog business is no lark, particularly when you’retrying to finish a book. (Something called ‘The Wonderful Weekend Book: Reclaiming Life’s Simple Pleasures’ which John Murray are publishing in October. The deadline is tomorrow morning and the manuscript, re-read so many times I’m bored silly by it, is finally ready to send.)  Tucked up in bed with a cold, I’ve just spent a good half an hour looking at the Three Beautiful Things Blog (www.threebeautifulthings.blogspot.com) - a wonderful site where the author simply lists three good things that have happened to her every day - and admire its lyrical brevity.  So perhaps more frequent yet shorter entries would be the best thing for this Blog. Especially now that I have some progress to write about….

Work is finally underway on the carriages. I can’t wait to get down there this weekend and see what has been going on - and share some pictures, which won’t, by the sound of things, be as pretty as the ones I’ve been posting in previous entries. But hurrah for that. Having said goodbye to the architect, it’s now just us and the builders, and I love it! (Please remind me of this comment in a month’s time when I am tearing my hair out and cursing the day they were born…) The immediacy of the process is refreshing - it’s so much easier to get things done and decisions made when we don’t have to put everything past a ‘professional’ who then has to make a detailed drawing and check every subsequent nail and roof tile against it. John, the head honcho, is extremely practical (as you’d expect from a builder) but also has a great eye. He’s already had some good ideas about how to tackle the roof and our ideal preference for an upstairs room, but is investigating the existing roof first, to see what he finds, before we finalise the shape, style and construction. 

Given the unusual nature of this building, and the fact that we more or less know what we want from it, this “feel your way” approach seems to make sense. Thank goodness the planners seem to agree - the fact that we have tried and failed twice to go down the “official” route, and already have permission for a building far larger and more dramatic than the one that will now be built, seems to be in our favour, and I am hoping we will be allowed to submit retrospective drawings once we know exactly what is going on. 

Last time I was on site was two weeks ago, just for the day, when we finished emptying all the rooms except those in the seaward-facing “birdcage” carriage, which are acting as store rooms, packed to the gunwhales and swaddled in dust sheets. After two trips to the recycling centre with the car boot so full I couldn’t see, and emptied of all the furniture, pictures, books and rugs, the long central space between the carriages looks huge, and it’s easy to understand how the new scheme should work. I’m very excited, and trying not to squander funds on stuff to fill it up again with from the gorgeous new Toast House & Home catalogue (www.toast.co.uk). 

John’s voice on the phone tonight was excited - it is good to work with people who are enthusiastic about the project and keen to get work underway. They have already taken out the section of interior carriage wall that needed to go to make the new kitchen extension, and have kept it intact either to use in the upper room or to flip round the other way and use to repair the exterior of the severely damaged compartment (see the picture top right of the Blog masthead) that is earmarked for my study. The former kitchen, soon-to-be utility room, has been partially taken down, and the next step is to create the new foundations that would also support a small upper storey. So much of the existing concrete floor - really just a floating plinth laid on the shingly soil - is being broken up and removed. And the rain pouring down through the openings in the roof is creating a fair bit of mud. It sounds as if we’ll find a proper old mess on our arrival. But, after all this time waiting for work to start - that’s just as it should be. I’m so looking forward to seeing it all.

 

31 MARCH 2008

Buying a “project” such as our railway carriage house always entails a certain amount of time spent living with the possibilities. At first this is great fun. I always enjoy the “camping” stage when one has just taken possession – and even sleeping with our coats on in front of the woodburner had a certain romantic charm in the early days, when this splendid 19^th-century French model

 

was also our only means of cooking. Hot water was confined to an electric kettle or another ancient hob one kept permanently on top of the fire – and though there was an electric shower in the damp and derelict bathroom, the idea of taking off all of our clothes in the freezing cold and standing under a device with the dubious habit of dripping all over the wiring left a lot to be desired. Slowly we got things straighter, taking up mouldering carpet to reveal rather less mouldering lino beneath, laying seagrass matting and woven plastic rugs, hanging makeshift curtains at the windows and redecorating the rooms so that flakes of old paint no longer fell in flurries on our faces during the night.

Evenings were spent with sketchpads and a bottle of wine, making lists of our “dream home” elements and conjuring up ways to incorporate them into a house cobbled together from a pair of old railway carriages. Guests who dropped in for tea or came to stay for weekends all gave their twopence ha’penny worth – and a select few, including a couple of architects and designers, had their sketches filed away for future reference. At first we were just looking to make the place water-tight, windproof and comfortable – a bolt hole with eco-credentials for long weekends by the sea. Top of the list was some sort of viewing tower from which to observe the ocean – the front windows look out over a field of horses to the sea wall, but it is slightly frustrating to be so near to the sea and yet not be able to see it. Then, with the birth of our daughter came plans to make this our full-time residence in time for when she started school, and the plans got more ambitious, aided and abetted by a couple of architects, with whom we spent endless hours discussing possibilities and amending drawings.

The first one, a bluff and likeable local man whose own house and studio (a clever conversion of an old wool store) we had admired, spent a year getting one scheme into planning, only to have it turned down on the grounds of “massing” – too much new development in one place in the form of our large kitchen extension with two bedrooms and a balcony on top. Several other schemes followed suit, but we found them increasingly at odds with the rather ramshackle charm of the existing carriages – Frank still talks about one meeting when, faced with a flat-roofed structure stretching right over the carriages with a series of box-like rooms and triangular protuberances on top, I sat speechless with my head in my hands. (I must say I can’t remember being so rude, but was simply at a loss as to what to say.) An architect friend came to the rescue with a single-storey scheme with a row of rooms stretching away off the end of the kitchen, and the option to turn the corner and create a ‘U’shaped building around a garden courtyard enclosed on three sides, but this, again, was disallowed by the planners. Then, remembering an off-hand comment by another architect friend – “You could always raise the carriages up and build beneath them,” an ingenious plan took root to raise the rear carriage up in the air to create a couple of bedrooms and bathroom upstairs and leave a huge open-plan living space beneath it, with a woodburner with tarred black brick chimney in the middle of a glass wall onto the garden and an outdoor oven on the other side.

Somewhere along the line, the first architect had had to close down his practice when his wife (a lovely woman who endeared herself to us by calling us “the railway children”) became seriously ill, and another, younger chap came on board. Like us, he was a part-time Londoner and part-time local who shared our love of salvaged and reclaimed materials and seemed, at least in the early months, to run with these ideas. Gradually, however, the run slowed to a walk and then an inexplicable standstill as the project stalled for months and eventually went in for planning three months behind schedule. Only when the scheme had been passed, and more snail-paced drawings were permanently in the pipeline, did it become clear that, inspite of us being clear about our budget from the outset, we had planning permission for a building that we couldn’t hope to afford to build.

True, the scheme had become more complex due to a structural engineer deeming it necessary to raise not just one but both of the carriages, but the chickens started to come home to roost when quotes for the various different components specified by the architect – metal windows, zinc roofing and so on – started coming in. Two weeks ago, with still no sign of even a rough outside price for the job, Frank and I sat down and calculated, in our heads, the labour costs as far as we could manage, plus the already priced elements of the design (this was not including basics such as the metal beams for holding up the carriage, the cost of the timber, brick footings and chimney, half the roof, the stairs and upper storey). The figure we came up with was already outside our agreed budget. There was no way the sums could work. The builder confirmed that the scheme would cost double our agreed budget to build and another 50 per cent to fully fit out. Even more alarmingly, he estimated a year-long build, and we now only have five months before our young daughter starts at the local school.

So this is why we find ourselves now, architect-less, slightly shell-shocked, and reverting to our initial, less ambitious plans, in the hope of getting in by September. It’s hard, in some ways, to say goodbye to a dream – that huge open-plan space with doors opening onto the garden will always haunt me. But in others it is a huge relief to know we have saved ourselves from what could have been a nightmare – logistically as well as financially. Simplicity now rules the day, with a scaled-down plan I sketched up on the kitchen table and which the builders seem to approve of. It still gives us a nice big kitchen, by means of a glass-roofed conservatory extension tacked on to a couple of the train compartments knocked through into one. It still gives me a study, and Frank a separate sitting room – and an enviably large utility room with my much-longed-for airing cupboard and walk-in larder (sad, I know, but I have always dreamed of them). There’s still a solar panel, sedum roofing and a woodburner helping fuel an underfloor heating system. What there isn’t is an upstairs – for the moment – which, in the face of rising sea levels, might be deemed foolish. But we’re hoping to go upwards in time, and have scheduled sufficient footings into the plans to create some sort of room up top.

I can’t say more at the moment – and apologise, looking at the wordcount, for possibly saying too much already. But I guess I’m making up for lost time - the shenanigans of the past fortnight, combined with a nasty dose of flu, have meant I couldn’t see a way to keep up the blog. But here we are, still dreaming, still scheming – and hoping very much in the next few weeks that the project, reduced and revised though it may be, will be full steam ahead…. We’ve lived with the possibilities for too long now. It’s time for action.

To read the entire story so far, see the ‘Green House’entries listed on the main website.

 

18 MARCH 2008

 

Along with the excitement of impending building work comes a degree of apprehension, and a heightened awareness of all that we have – and all we have to lose in the event of it going wrong. There’s no real need to worry – we have a good architect and great builders on the case, and the scheme is fantastic – but I hate all the dust and upheaval of building sites and the fact that things have to get an awful lot worse in terms of mess and general chaos before they begin to improve.

What I’m looking forward to, of course, is the home-making process once the hard graft is over. Ever since we bought the property, we have always been anticipating work in the offing, so have to all intents and purposes been camping here – only getting rid of things we simply couldn’t live with (a heavy, smelly brown carpet, for instance) and furnishing with skip finds and hand-me-downs from friends. What I’m realising, however, as I start to pack up in preparation for the builders moving in, is that the place has acquired a make-shift, make-do kind of beauty of its own. The tartan rugs and crochet throws that cover scruffy beds and chairs; the patchwork quilts and Balinese batiks hung at windows; the woven plastic mats on the floors and my daughter’s little pallet bed – somehow all conspire, in the wonderful seaside light, to create a charm we’d have been unable to conjure up at will.

(Photo above by Michael Franke)

The only things we’ve spent money on so far have been a couple of custom-made coir mats to lay over the floorboards in some rooms – and the growing collections of prints and paintings (mainly of our beloved beach) that I’ve bought from local artists. The rest of the décor has grown out of our lives in this place – flowers from the garden, pebbles from the beach (strung 13 at a time on rope for good luck), rag rugs bought for a song at a Portuguese market, children’s paintings and cards and little watercolours sent or left by visitors. I intend to hang on to some of this simple spontaneity - which is just as well, as we won’t have a lot of money for kitting out the new interior.

One thing that has worked particularly well has been the old patchwork quilts hung at windows. Not only does the quilting keep out the worst winds; they look pretty too, particularly when the low morning light shines straight through them, illuminating the colours like stained glass. The one in my daughter’s room is a jaunty bright primary-coloured design that my mother (who made it) was throwing out; hence she didn’t bat an eyelid at me cutting it in half to make decent-sized curtains. The one in our bedroom is a vintage French find, using large asymmetrical pieces (not unlike the offbeat geometry of the famous quilts of the Gee’s Bend community in America) around a pair of central panels bearing beautiful flowers.

The colour scheme of this room – which took its lead from the patchwork – also echoes the warm pinks and blues at the beach when the sun is going down.

I sometimes think I could decorate the entire place using nothing but combinations found in the locality – the bluish grey, ochre and white of pebbles on the beach, the glaucous grey-green and purple of sea-kale pushing up through the stones; the pink and white with a touch of green of apple blossom (for my daughter’s room); the endless shifting blues and greys and greens of the sea – but I digress.

Next weekend will be our last weekend in the railway carriages before the transformation to turn them into our full-time eco-home finally starts. It is also Easter. I leave you with this picture of the annual Easter tree my daughter and I have just put up - some of the eggs are relatively new, brought back from travels abroad, some were hand-painted by me as a child on fragile hand-blown shells. We add a few more each year. A happy and peaceful Easter to anyone who finds this.

 

OFF THE RAILS - 11 MARCH 2008

OFF THE RAILS

11 MARCH 2008

We’ve become accustomed to the comments, over the years. “Oh look! An old railway carriage! Anyone on board?” And once, a four year old, responding to his mother’s enthusiasm with total disdain: “But Mummy, why would anyone want to live in a broken down old train?” There have been times, it is true, when we have asked ourselves precisely this question. Why would anyone with a perfectly good home in London want to spend more and more time in a house cobbled together from a couple of Victorian railway carriages that have seen better days? The answers - and there are many - include the following: Because they are unutterably beautiful - especially when the early morning sun rises out of the sea and slants through the rows of small windows to illuminate the interconnecting rooms.

Because they represent a gloriously eccentric period from Britain’s past, when all manner of strange hybrid houses incorporating trains, trams and double-decker buses met the post-First World War housing crisis with a string of ramshackle makeshift communities along the south and east coasts. Because of the endless original details and surprises: the raised semi-circlular windows of the “birdcage” guard’s carriage; heavy round brass door handles (we unearthed two in the garden); pressed brass “strike plates” near the windows for lighting matches; clunky locks and latches, and all manner of strange finds and scribbled messages left by former occupants that we’re still discovering (our favourite, on a plywood panel inserted into the bathroom window, reads: “Knickers! Pouring with rain:1980 the wettest year on record”).

Because we’d seen and loved Harold and Maude (the 1971 cult Hal Ashby movie where 79-year-old Maude lives in a railroad car). Because, when we first found the house, it had been a happy family home - painted in pale pink, dove grey and eau de nil and crammed with books and paintings - but after 34 years of being rented out with no proper money allocated for repairs, was in desperate need of attention.

Because the carriages are parked up along a beautiful but refreshingly unfashionable section of the south coast, with shingle fields behind us, horses grazing in front, and a short hop over the sea wall to one of the most unspoilt yet unfrequented beaches within a reasonable ride from London.

To arrive here after dark, bumping down the unmade track and stepping out to the sound of the sea and the sight of the stars as only they can look when there’s no artificial light to diminish their impact, is still one of the greatest thrills I know.

So, before we knew it we had not only bought the place - for the price of the plot, I might add, which still seems the most amazing bargain - but were hatching plans to make it, one day, our permanent home. The birth of our daughter in 2004 only consolidated these aims, and we began drawing up plans to convert the carriages into an eco-house complete with solar panel, underfloor heating fuelled mainly by a woodburner, turf and sedum roofing, rainwater harvesting and designed along the principles of ‘passive solar gain’ (lots of windows that help heat the place up when the winter sun is low but are shielded from the hot summer rays). It’s been a long process, spanning several years, two architects and two planning applications (one refused) - all chronicled in my Guardian Weekend column, The Green House on my website and at Guardian Unlimited - but we’re finally, it seems we’re on the verge of starting work. I’m absolutely exhilarated - when I’m not terrified, that is.

The building is the stuff of dreams - I’ve wanted to build an eco house since seeing the turf roofs and whisky barrel houses at Findhorn in Scotland in the early 90s - and will be a wonderful place to live, and for our daughter to grow up in. But there’s obviously a load of upheaval ahead - for us, for the carriages, the garden, our neighbours and surrounding environment. As the drawings near completion, we’re still not sure exactly how much it’ll all cost nor how long the job will take. But we know we want to do it, and that all the time and effort and expense will be worth it in the end. If you fancy joining us on the journey, I’ll be recording our progress - with more photographs - every week or so here from now on. Fingers crossed it will shortly be full steam ahead….

For more pictures, click on Eco-house.