A bad storm on the night of 29 February caused some serious damage to the house. An original roof truss (due to be replaced) blew down, in the process knocking over a section of the front wall (not due to be replaced). Luckily the wall fell outwards, without damaging anything else.

This underscores an argument we had with the town planning people in Leuven when we applied for a building permit. The sensible thing to do would have been to knock down the existing walls and build from scratch. Not only would this have been less expensive, but it would have resolved the doubts everyone on our side had about the strength of the walls.

Let’s be clear about the walls: this wasn’t Hadrian’s Wall, or the Great Wall of China. These were walls built to keep “inside” from being “outside”, and possibly hold up the roof at the same time. These were functional walls, never intended to do more than they were built for. They weren’t built to keep out the damp, or the cold. They weren’t built to last a hundred years. They were simply built and added to over the last 80 years or so to encase an animal feed mill. So when someone intends turning this feed mill into a house, the walls shouldn’t have to be part of it.

To this day, I still don’t understand the rationale of the town planning people’s decision to make us retain the original structure. There’s no point. If the building was of potential historical interest or value (which it isn’t), we’re messing it up anyway, even if we don’t change the outside skeleton. If the building was even just slightly aesthetic or important to the local architectural landscape, I would understand. But it isn’t, and the local architectural landscape can only be diplomatically described as eclectic. Even if the building tied in to the windmill in any way, I would understand keeping a matching set, but the building was designed in a very functional way to mill animal feed. It has nothing to do with the windmill, and only served as a carbuncle on the landscape.

So today, due to the inscrutable wisdom of the town planning department in Leuven, we have walls that might or might not fall over in a storm. At least now we have one section of wall less to worry about, as we rebuild it using proper bricks and cement.

A large wooden hopper/sorter we hoped to have in our living room was also badly damaged, as the wind blew it hard enough to break both front legs. The original can be seen here on Flickr, and this is what it looked like after the storm:

More photographs, as always, on Flickr.

Categories: Construction, Photographs
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