Our friend Gerjan Roza has arrived today to help us make the house look good enough for potential tenants. Starting tomorrow, he’ll be blitzing the garden and doing some painting. I’m so grateful for his help, because with all the work in Roger’s bungalow still going on, this is just too much for us to take on right now.

We’re both at Harrow at the moment, working away at our old day jobs. Alex’s will finally finish on Friday, Hilde’s mid December. In the meantime, lots of quotes for windows are coming in, and we just got a really good one for external insulation. We’re getting ready to wrap Westacre up warm for winters to come.

We’ve had a major change of mind in the last week or so. Rather than rent a house to live in while we renovate Westacre, we have decided to live on site. Mostly to preserve our sanity. Let me explain.

The reason why we wanted to rent a place away from Westacre was that we wanted the space clear to do the work uninterrupted. Also, we thought it might be a good idea to create some distance between ourselves and the very intense work we’d be doing.

However, there are some down sides. First of all, renting a house or flat costs money. Having this regular cost would put us under pressure to finish the project as quickly as we can. From working on Roger’s bungalow, we’ve learned that we can’t be too precious about the time scale. We are, after all, learning as we go along and some things are just going to take longer than we expect. We need to work hard, and we can’t afford to let the project drag on, but we do need weekends and a social life. Doing the work has to stay fun for it to be sustainable for a year and more.

Secondly, living at Westacre will save time that we’d need to spend looking after the rented house. We were really not looking forward to having to look after another garden, for example. The one we’ve got is big enough. We also won’t spend any time commuting and will be able to step straight out of our living space into our work.

We’ll also be at Westacre and will be able to put down roots immediately. It will be easier to make a working relationship with the garden from the beginning.

We’ll be able to use part of Westacre to store furniture and other possessions that we wouldn’t other wise have space for. This will save us money, and we’ll have easier access to our stuff when we find we need anything.

We will still need to separate our living space from our working space, but we can do that relatively easily by renovating the old part of the house first and living in the extension. And when the old part of the house is finished, we’ll swap over.

This change of plan makes us feel good. It feels like the right thing to do. We’ll be saving energy in many ways, and using it where it’s needed. And it will be more sustainable for us, the human beings in the equation. Permaculture at its best.

In permaculture design, much is made of zones in the garden. Zone 1 is the most intensely gardened and contains things like seedlings and frequently used herbs. Zone 5 is the wild forest. 2-4 are everything in between. Zone 0 is the house, the centre of activity.

Zone 00 stands for the people who have to create and maintain the system. They too need to conserve their energy and use it as effectively as possible, so the whole system is sustainable. If it doesn’t work for us, it doesn’t work at all.

From today, this site will get a lot busier. As well as Hilde’s blog posts and occasional videos, you will get regular news updates and daily words of wisdom. If you enjoy them, please leave a comment.

We want to maximise the production of firewood on our little patch of land, so coppicing seems very attractive. We will plant some ash in the front garden, which is not otherwise very productive, and there are already a number of young informally coppiced hazel stools around the back. Hazel is attractive because it grows even faster than ash, and we can harvest nuts from it while it’s growing.

Some of our best resources are in the hedgerows. We have a number of fairly mature ash trees, and lots of already-coppiced hazels which look like they are ready for cropping.

Here’s a first idea of what windows we’ll have, and how they will open.

The opening lights are shown with a red chevron. I’m planning to ask for quotes for “Euro” style tilt-and-turn windows, and regular casements. Even if we just get casements, Hilde is very keen that they should open inwards, since it makes cleaning them so much easier. I’ve tried to keen the number of opening lights to a minimum, in order to keep the cost down.

Windows B and E are show with top-hinged upper casements. If we get tilt-and-turn windows, then these lights can just be fixed.

Window I is a sliding/folding door with a level threshold.

(The side-elevation isn’t very accurate, but it’s good enough to show the window design.)

(Same thing as a PDF.)