Alternative & low-impact building techniques

Bohio House, Cuba | Flickr - Photo Sharing!




How about this little Caribbean hideaway. Bliss, huh? Even got the veg patch up and running.
Have you thought of putting a lick of turquoise paint on yours, Ziggy?

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I'd like to, I love painting things green, in fact yesterday I painted my tower scaffold & shovel green

But i'm meant to be painting the house creosote brown to keep planning happy:(

Where abouts are you ? We can do a tailor made course on sustainable/traditional/eco friendly building techniques for you if you want.

You tell us what you want and we'll teach you how to do it. Used to teach building conservation at West Dean College, but kept getting distracted by the walled gardens & glasshouses:DOH:

 

Rebuild underway, hope to have it finished soon, work keeps getting in the way though.:DOH:

 

If I get a break from work myself i'll come and give you a hand

 

Cool, will get the kettle on.

 

That would be brilliant, a little cooperative of 3 members...

If so we want pictures of every step, so we can copy it

 

The planning laws are weird in that different areas have different rules. There is a central set of guidelines but each planning authority (bunch of untrained busybodies) is allowed a lot of scope for interpretation.

My dad was told by the one reasonable planning officer that if there had ever been a building on my land (my dad's at the time) then it would have been much easier to make a case in favour of consent.

The guidelines lean suggest that any new building should be in keeping with the local environment. By that they are supposed to mean that the proposed building will blend in and look like it could have been there forever, so same building materials and style as others in the area. They are also supposed to favour eco-friendly design and build.

You need to convince the planning dept that your building will work. If you say you wont need a flushing toilet, or mains water, they might ask you to justify how you could manage that way.

You also need to check what the classification of the land is. Half of my land is 'recreational' and the other half is 'agricultural'. I'm told that I'll never be able to do much at all with agricultural side, and might even get told off for planting the wrong stuff in there, but I have very slightly more freedom with the 'recreational' side apparently. So I'd take advice on that from a solicitor before buying the land.

That's not a safe assumption. Our local planning authority has special rules for caravans in their planning guidelines. They class caravans as the earthly manifestation of satan, and indeed they even say they'll apply for a compulsory purchase order for the land if caravans were regularly placed on there. Different rules at different authorities, so your area may be different, but defo one to check.

Might be worth visiting the website of the planning authority for the area you are looking at, just to see what sort of rules they work by.

One last thing, the planning rules are changing soon. The central government guidelines from which the local authorities base their rules is apparently being reduced from 2000 pages to 50 pages in order to simplify it. That might make it a bit less hit and miss.

Good luck.