Private: Month 1
March 16th, 2007 - Posted in Uncategorized - by Sarah|
We have spent a few days out at our plot at Camerons over the last month. Mainly measuring and mapping but also doing some initial clearing of the area where we hope to be building. We’ve had a few queries about where Camerons actually is, so here is a link to google maps: Location of Camerons. Greymouth is about 10 minutes to the north and Hokitika is about 20 minutes to the south. We’re just over a kilometer inland from the main coast road.
One of the council’s hurdles – that we have to jump in order to get building consent – is to get an engineer’s report confirming that the site is suitable for building and this report also specifies the foundation requirements. We had to organise a digger to be there to dig holes as required although in the end only 2 small ones were needed so the size of digger was seriously over the top.
Engineer and digger.
We have decided that drawing our own detailed plans was simply going to take too long (years rather than months!) so have appointed an architect/designer to do that for us. His name is Ian Redfern and he specialises in designing environmentally sound buildings for owner builders to construct. He’s doing the plans required to get building consent and he’ll also mentor us through the building process. If you’re interested, his website is www.adobesouth.co.nz.
We met him a couple of weeks ago and he visited our site and took photos. We’ve sent him our floor plan and general requirements along with maps of the site and loads of questions that he’s currently ploughing through.
We’ve also been working on our permaculture plan and have done a first version map of zone 0 – the hub of the site – which includes the house and immediate surrounds.
1st version of Zone 0 map.
One the way back from Hokitika at the weekend we also stopped off for the first time at the beach, about 1.6km (a mile) west of our land. It’s a beautiful spot, especially on such a clear day with the Southern Alps visible to the south.
Camerons beach looking South.
Camerons beach looking North.
We are currently aiming to move onto the land in a month or so (just as the weather gets REALLY cold!). We’re not sure what we’ll live in yet as the big yurt that we had planned could prove more expensive in the long run than something more conventional that we could sell on later (eg a caravan).
