Hi all!!
You can’t imagine how much you start realizing the importance of water untill you really don’t have it around!
I only stayed at my woodland for the weekends and some days during the week… sometimes I forgot to take a barn of water with me… and I always regretted it deeply…
You can’t put any thee on, you can’t wash your hands and face after digging ground all day, you can’t clean your material or do the dishes… and this is only when I’m around for a weekend.. imagine what it would be to live without water… impossible!
When building you’ll need water for all kinds of things.. one of them is to construct the fundaments… and as it is the first thing to do… I just had to arrange a watersupply!
In the chalet (which’s gone now) used to be waterpump… but as it has been many years since the chalet was used all there was left was a metal tube coming out of the floor… actually two of them…
I digged them up and one was leading to a pit right at the spot where my fundaments are comming! BUMMER! I’ll need to fill that one up to prevent my house from sinking in…
The other one was connected to a flexible tube.. That’s the one!
Now, old waterpits (yes, dear Wouter, that’s a word! - sorry inside joke-) have the nasty habbit of collapsing when they haven’t been used for a while… and this one wasn’t used for many years… so there was only a little chance it would still work…
But guess what? It did !!!
It seemed almost magical to see the water, chrystal clear, coming out of the ground… a gift from nature!
More information and pictures are coming up on this subject!
Oohyeah, on a personal note: Riet, your butterfly has become a permanent inhabitant in the forest… she’s been around since the first day!
Ok,
Here’s the rest of the “Water”-story.
Because the watertube and the pump were located inside the groundings of the house I needed to move the pump somewhere outside the building area. At that moment I didn’t know where the old waterpit was located.. and to be honest at this moment I don’t know either… What happend?
As I was digging the earth from around the tube I noticed how it went further and further into the forest… when I was well outside the buildingsite surroundings I stopped digging as I was sure the waterpit had to be somewhere inside the forest… There was no reason for digging the soil further on and hurting the roots of plants and trees..
So now I had a large amount of tube comming out of the ground. I could do three things:
1) Cut the tube and use the remaining end to re-install the pump
2) Leave the tube above ground
and
3) Put the tube underground
I chose the last option… If I would have cut the tube than I would have had a problem when I needed a longer tube when the house is finnished… so I needed to install a connectionpart between the two tube ends… I don’t like connection pieces as they are always a hazard to leaks. I didn’t want to put the tube above ground because all plastics tend to degenerate in UV-light… so it was obvious to put the tube underground.
Because I didn’t want the water to remain in the tubes when I would disconnect the pump (in winter), I decided to roll the tube into a spiral and protect it with roof tiles.
After covering everything with earth, I needed to make a “holder” for the pump. And preferably one that’s stronger than the previous one (which was only temporary).
I made a little “construction” with bricks I found underneath the old chalet and fixed a big pole in between.
This way I could use my chainsaw to easily sharpen the end.
Once again I could use the pole rammer which my friend Gène made for me (again with great greatitude!!!) to ramm the pole deep in the ground (making sure not to harm the tube offcourse). This would make a perfect holder for the pump.
Oohyeah … about the waterpits: Good news! It seems they aren’t that deep as I was affraid for! They seem to be only 1m deep… That means I don’t have to worry about filling them up after all!! Woohoo!
Hi all!
It has been a while since I wrote something on the hamadryad blog… Allthought there are no real breakthroughs in my housedesign, I have been very busy!
I decided to give up the rent for the workingplace in Stekene center and use the barn on my little woodland instead. It’s not only cheaper.. it’s also allot easier to have all my equipment nearby the buildingsite.
The barn was .. how shall I put it… “a total waste”… The roof consisted of asbestos plates and two of the four walls were collapsed.
The first thing I did was remove the roof and bring all the rubbish to a recycling parc. It took me 3 rides with a fully packed van…
Secondly I reinforces the two walls and builed a skeleton in front of them with wood I recovered from the chalet I broke down.
Then I cleaned out the floor.. there was about 20cm’s of mudd and woodchips.. it was hell to sort out all the pieces of plastic and metal.
I put a plastic ceiling on top of the barn and supported it with wood I recovered from the chalet (which I plan to use for the floor in my new house later on).
There was a huge pit in the middle of the barn. It was used to work on cars before. Now I prepared it to store all my stuff behind lock. So i put a plate on top with some pivots at one side and padlocks on the other…
this way all my stuff is out of the way when I’m working and it’s still close enough when I need something..
And this is the result:
That’s it for now… comming up next in this topic:
- building a temporary composting toilet
- Arranging water supply