Archive for the 'General' category
November 23, 2009 2:47 pm
Electricity – check.
Water – sort of.
Gas – tank outside, nothing inside.
So, no central heating. On the other hand, I have a microwave and an iMac. Humans have prospered with less.
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There are a dirty great pile of old feed bags lying around in the windmill, most of which have now been classified “rubble”. I am allowed to hoard “collectibles”, but “rubble” is to be consigned to the appropriate bins provided by the building contractor. If I had my way, nearly every little screw and half brick will be reclassified as a collectible and consigned to my growing collection of junk, but Ilze is keeping a tight rein on the definitions.
Categories: General, Photographs
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The lack of updates haven’t been for lack of things happening, just a lack of time to report back on them.
1. We now have planning permission
 This is good. The terms under which we received the planning permission were strict, perhaps even draconian. We are not allowed to change the structure or façade of the main building, which means being very limited in where we can place windows. Our upstairs rooms will have few to no regular windows, and we’ll have to make do with skylights. Ilze hates this (and loves sunlight), while my aversion to sunlight and fresh air leaves me pretty neutral on the issue. I believe that light is something you take charge of and control, rather than the other way around.
If this house was somewhere on the coast of Spain I would maximise the size of all windows to make sure we have the best view possible, but in this case the grey of low cloud over Flemish countryside (which I love) isn’t the worst loss in the world. We’ll have a perfect view from the living room, so for the bedroom we’ll just have to make do with skylights, mirrors and artificial sources of brightness.
2. We are now shopping around for contractors
And when I say we are shopping around, I mean we should be shopping around. We have a lastenboek from our architect, which is like a shopping list on which a builder can base his (invariably too low) estimate. Locals have warned us that Belgian builders nearly always end up underestimating the cost by about 15%, so if you’re on a tight budget like we are costs can easily get out of hand.
3. Storm Damage
Our tree damaged in a storm in February still hangs by a thread. I still don’t own a non-electric chainsaw, so perhaps I should invest in one. Any man should own a clean handkerchief, a Swiss Army Knife, and a fuel-powered chainsaw. You should probably carry the first two on you, the chainsaw I’ll leave up to your own discretion.
We also still have a hole in the roof, from where some times blew off. Fixing this has proved harder than I thought, mostly through lack of trying. There’s a public holiday coming up, I really should give it a go. Unfortunately, the kind of days I have free time (like public holidays) are the days the hardware stores are closed. Just my luck…
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Recent high winds and heavy rain over Western Europe caused massive damage to property, while we got off relatively easy. There’s a hole in the roof of the barn, about 30cm x 1m big. I’ll have to improvise a fix to keep the load bearing walls and wooden beams dry, although it won’t be worth fixing properly. The roof will be replaced completely in a few months. A tree next to the windmill split close to the trunk, which is now pressing against the outside of the wall. I’ll have to get in there with a chainsaw and cut the branch down before it causes structural damage. Pity I only have an electric chainsaw, and we don’t have electricity on the property yet. Time to either buy a generator or a non-electric chainsaw, I guess. A man can never have too many chainsaws, right?
Categories: General, Photographs
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October 28, 2006 10:33 am
Belgium is known for paperwork. Like its larger neighbour to the west, the Belgian civil service is fueled by a passionate love of bureaucracy and red tape. But living in Belgium means dealing with paperwork and senseless rules and petty bureaucracy, so we braced ourselves and filed our revised house plans at the Lubbeek town hall last week. Correction: we braced ourselves, but only Ilze and the architect went to file the paperwork, taking the approach that feminine wiles will warm the heart of even the most recalcitrant civil servant.
The new plans mean that the volume of the house will be increased from 1,000m3 (for which we had planning permission) to slightly more than than. Wonder of wonders, the Lubbeek town council had no problem with that. The architect smiled, the clerk smiled, Ilze smiled, stamps were produced, paperwork was approved.
But nothing happens that easily in Belgium. If this was a regular property, the paperwork would have been ready for handing over to the building contractors. But alors… the property is classified as “duel use”: we have a bit of land in the back zoned for agricultural use, we have a part (on which the windmill stands) zoned for light industrial use, and we have the part where the house will be built, which is zoned for residential use.
This rainbow of zoning means our building application has to be bumped up for approval on a regional level, which has to happen in neighbouring Leuven. This is not a process as simple as smiling and having your paperwork stamped, and can realistically take up to three months to complete. That takes us into May before the contractors can start any work.
If we’re lucky the house will be habitable around the end of July, beginning of August. Lovely.
To top it all, a drainpipe has come loose on the windmill. If I leave it like that, rain water running down the walls will surely lead to staining and ugly marks, perhaps even structural damage. So I’ll have to don my monkey shoes and climb up 14 meters with a frame better suited to staying on the ground and shouting instructions. Even lovelier.
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Buying a run-down windmill will make you question your own sanity. Many times I’ve stood at the bottom of the muddy trench that is our driveway and asked myself: “What did I get myself into?” (Actually, I usually ask: “What did Ilze get me into?”) But then I stumble across someone like Fitz, who bought a missile silo on eBay. Good luck Fitz. At least I know there are people with even more daunting projects than mine! [Found via Houseblogs.]
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Some jobs require a top-down approach, while others work better bottom-up. Building a house, for example: I’m a firm believer in the traditional way of doing this. You lay the foundations: check. You build a few walls: check. You add a roof (for which the walls come in handy): check. And so you continue, until you get to hanging curtains and reorganising the furniture for the tenth time. This is the way sensible people do it.
So why is Ilze in London at the moment, shopping for doorknobs? We don’t know whether the foundations will need reinforcement, our walls need to be lifted to increase volume, and the roof needs to be replaced completely. In addition, we have several tons of industrial equipment littered about what should one day be our kitchen and living room, and no obvious way of shifting them.
So Ilze went for an alternative approach, getting the doorknobs first and making sure the rest of the house matches them. She comes from a great contrarian tradition; when all the other rats appear to be swimming downstream, why not break your back going upstream, because clearly this is where the greater reward will be. By the end of the week we will own several pairs of spiffy English doorknobs. Now to just add some doors to those…
Categories: General
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This is good. The terms under which we received the planning permission were strict, perhaps even draconian. We are not allowed to change the structure or façade of the main building, which means being very limited in where we can place windows. Our upstairs rooms will have few to no regular windows, and we’ll have to make do with skylights. Ilze hates this (and loves sunlight), while my aversion to sunlight and fresh air leaves me pretty neutral on the issue. I believe that light is something you take charge of and control, rather than the other way around.
