Water supply

This is the state of the current water supply (we have made a cover since this photo). It does work, but it's a bit sandy, it's a long way down (maybe 12-15m), and it's about 20m from the house.

Did I mention before that we dropped a pump down it and pumped a lot of water out - and it didn't take long for the water level to be refreshed and for the output to seem pretty clear and fresh (I didn't taste it).

The basic things we need to do are:

1. Repair the well top. Patch the hole in the side and make a cover so things can't fall in (I'm thinking particularly frogs, mice, insects, leaves).
2. Local consensus is that we should dig out the sand at the bottom of the well and make sure it's a good 15m deep. This will also help ensure it's clean and fresh.
3. We can use a bucket for a while, but we need to get a pump in there, or a pipe attached to an above-ground pump. The system I've seen is a pump in the cellar of the house, but since our house is a building site we may have to look at alternatives in the shorter term.
4. For a permanent or semi-permanent setup we need to bury any pipes 1.8m deep in the earth to avoid winter frost damage.

We're wondering about:

• Maybe we should collect rainwater from our roofs and use that instead of the well supply. That involves more capital expenditure on water tanks.
• Could we build a simple wind pump to extract water from the well? This would also require a large storage tank.
• What about the need for filtering the water? We filter our water now, but mainly to remove chemicals from the mains supply. We'd be filtering the well water for different reasons - removing small particles and micro-organisms. 
• Should we dig another well, and where should it be? Kasia's family have two wells, quite close together - one for the house and one in the animal yard. They do run low in the summer and the family is quite careful about their water use. I'd want to do some dowsing and see where the underground water is, aiming to get a back-up supply that was hopefully independent of the first well's groundwater supply. I'd also be thinking of using the second well (maybe with a water pump) to supply a pond system.

Piec deconstruction

Back in July/August 2012 I was doing this, partly with help from my friend Andrew (although he was mainly lime plastering the goat shed). I've been meaning to document it since.

The traditional cooking appliance in this area, and across a wide area of northern and eastern Europe I think, is known in Poland as a piec. It's a wood-burning stove that channels the heat from the fire under cooking pots and through a snaking ceramic tile-clad and clay-lined chimney, storing and using as much heat as possible before the smoke goes up the chimney.

In our house there is an extension of the piec that stands between the bedrooms and acts as an extra fireplace/heater. You can see it as it was in the photo on the right. I decided to de-construct it to learn how it was put together (and because it all needs to come out anyway).


I've put a full series of 16 photos and diagrams on my Google+ page for people to look at in more detail if they want.

I've saved the pieces for reconstruction, although I'd want to do a better job than the original. I do need to do more thinking about the similarities and differences between this and the rocket mass heaters. My first thought is that the fuel simply isn't burned as hot in this piec so the soot build up becomes a problem...

I'll be doing more reflecting on this in the future as I come closer to building my own heating/cooking stoves.

14 months away from the blog, but we're still on track

Wow, I didn't realise it had been so long. Obviously all sorts of things have been happening, mainly trying to scrape together pennies wherever possible and spend as few as possible. Last year one of the money saving things we did was to not go to Poland at all - except a short weekend in December when Kasia went alone to the dentist :(

The good news is the saving has been working a bit (although it's been stressful), and we are planning to move later on this year...

We've been trying to work out how we're going to move all our stuff, and thinking about other practical issues such as house plans, plumbing systems, water collection and heating, etc.

I'll try to put more updates on here over the coming months.

Lime Plastering

One of the things we were looking forward to on this last trip was lime plastering, but we didn't realise quite how enthusiastically we would get into it!

We'd booked ourselves on to a short lime plastering course about two hours north of OrchardyHaven, on the shores of Lake Hancza, famous for being the deepest lake in Poland.

Jezioro Hancza

The straw bale house

Lime plastering on cob wall

Clay plastering inside

We were interested in Lime Plastering for various reasons:

1. Lime plaster is a traditional natural finish that breathes and has various other useful properties (see e.g. here);
2. Our property was built using lime, so we want to keep the tradition and learn more about the material;
3. We wanted to find out where we could obtain quicklime or natural hydraulic lime (NHL) in Poland;
4. and we really wanted to meet Paulina Wojciechowska, the pioneer of straw bale building in North East Poland (she built the house we visited on our honeymoon).

It was really good to go for these two days in Przełomka. We did meet Paulina and her partner Jarema, we saw 15 people from all over the world happily camping and working together in difficult conditions, and we got some hands-on experience, although we didn't find out how to get hold of good lime.

This experience made us eager to get back to work on our own place, and thanks to Jarema's encouragement we fixed the roof on the goat shed and got on with plastering the inside walls. Andrew joined us at this time, and despite pushing him to work so hard he quickly started talking about forming the OrchardyHaven Lime Appreciation Society! While I was stuck on the roof a lot of the time, Andrew really knuckled down to the plastering job and we got two coats on each of the three outside walls - pretty good for people with such little plastering experience as us. 

Getting free sand from the quarry 500m away :-)

After a sweltering first week it started to rain - a lot! End wall plastered though...

Working on the roof

Testing lime plaster outside

The finished roof, just needs tiling next year 

Lots more notes could go in here: 

1. The sand was sharp but really fine - probably too fine for mortar or render. We didn't clean the sand either - potentially more testing and experimenting to do;
2. We used builder's (hydrated) lime, easily available from any of the local farmers/builders suppliers. We did find that Kerakoll has a Polish branch that appears to sell NHL, but we didn't manage to chase them up and find any local suppliers. We added our lime to water and left it for at least 24hrs as recommended. We mixed the resulting 'putty' with sand 1:3 and after a few minutes looking far to dry it suddenly transformed into a really sloppy mix, although usable. We found that we could still use it even three days after making it.
3. I also made a lime wash on the last day, mainly to treat our apple trees where I had to do some emergency pruning in August (last October seemed to early for pruning and Easter seemed too late, but I don't know when I'll be there at the right time so I just went ahead and pruned three trees). This was quite strange - really watery as it was painted on, then turning bright white after a minute - I realised I had made whitewash... :-)
4. Most of our plastering was on the inside of the goat shed, but at the end there was some left and I tried it outside - on concrete blocks a) in a sheltered south-facing spot under the overhang of the barn roof and b) in a more exposed east-facing spot on the gable end (where I also forgot to wet the wall before applying the render). These are experiments to see how the plaster holds up over the Polish winter.
5. The roof: most of the timbers were damaged by woodworm but after we cleaned them up they still seemed to be strong enough - we pressure washed them and spent quite a while stripping the rest of the bark (under 80% of the bark there were woodworm, stripped wood was mainly untouched); we put a breathable waterproof membrane on top of the rafters and purlins, and then 3cm thick spruce planks from our neighbour's sawmill butted side-by-side over this; we searched for second-hand tiles, but they were too far away and we didn't have time - we'll find some next year to complete the roof but it's easily strong enough to last through this winter. 
6. As you can see from the last photo I built some benches too, from off-cuts from the roof - finally somewhere to sit down (other than the toilet) - what a relief!

"The best toilet ever"

We've been back in Wakefield for a couple of weeks now and we're finally getting everything back under control in the garden and allotment here, and at home... So finally managing to do some updating on the website :-)

This is just a quickie - we have lots more to add soon. We have finally finished our tree bog! Yay!

Here's a photo collage of its construction: (L-R top) starting with stripping some roundwood poles for the legs; then finding a site; bringing in some old deski (waney-edged boards) Kasia's brother gave us; putting the frame together; the floor and the beginning of the walls; (bottom and middle) a closer view; Andrew helping out; as it was when we left at Easter, in bare space beside the barn; me putting the roof on; back and side walls and roof complete; me and Maia, but no steps yet; Maia happy with work so far; Kasia on steps of completed tree bog next to new flower bed :-)

We started this last October, did a couple of days at Easter, then finished in a couple of days this August. Probably 6-7 days work altogether, but as this kind of construction was all new to us and we made life harder by using curved roundwood poles I'm quite happy.

In the end it was a great sheltered cool place to sit - and very satisfying to use too... But don't just take our word for it - our volunteer/visitor Maggi from Venezuela said it was the best toilet she'd ever used!

Oh, I should add some technical information. It's called a tree bog because the trees around it accelerate the composting with their roots, so it should never need to be emptied. The exemplar tree bog has willow planted around it which is coppiced regularly and we did try to plant some willow but we came back to England and there was a long dry spell so the canes never took root. There are plum trees and sycamores and a large willow and a small oak around the back and sides that should do the job ok.

We got the inspiration from Permaculture Magazine and Living Woods Magazine.

Strawbale 'wrap'

During an unexpected, and mostly unwelcome, morning at home, I have managed to come across a couple of useful bits of information online:

I received an invitation via Barbara Jones of Straw Works to a volunteer week in Bridport helping with a conversion of an old bugalow with a straw-bale 'wrap' (cladding) and a load-bearing straw bale extension. The project's blog is at thewoodlouse.blogspot.co.uk. It would be great to go to join in, both because it's just what we want to do in OrchardyHaven and because I spend many happy days as a child in Bridport, but we'll be away...

Then I came across Kuba Wihan's name again, as the leader of the volunteer week, from Straw Works. I did a little research into who he was and found his website www.jakubwihan.com where there is another great looking project where an old building was wrapped in straw bales for insulation (see this link and also the pdf of pictures here).

Earth Hands and Houses

We're looking forward to meeting a couple of local straw bale builders when we go to Poland this summer. We've booked a place on the clay plastering workshop in Przelomka, 27-29 July, and we may go on the lime plastering workshop afterwards too... If you're interested, there's more info at the bottom of this page.

Paulina built the first straw bale house in North East Poland (as far as we know), and we have a small personal connection because we spent the first night of our honeymoon in the little house in Przelomka.

The first straw house in Przelomka 

I was there :)

We'll be interested to meet Paulina and Jarema, to practice some clay plastering and to find out more about the realities of building with straw in Poland and working with the local planners and building regulations.

And who knows, maybe one of the future workshops will be here at Orchardy Haven...