Nine years ago my wife and I headed out from england to portugal, to try and be as autonomous as we could.
we didn’t have much money, but we had bought a piece of land with some natural resources, and I figured if carpenter/builders like me could build houses in the new world of North America, 300+ years ago, with little more than the tools they had and some knowledge, why couldn’t I?
obviously, on the side of the mountain, access is entertainingly hopeless, and everything had to be carried by hand from the road side, or barrowed off site.
I built the house on my own (entirely), not initially as some crazy imperative to go it alone (I worked largely on my own previously in England) but because money was so tight I couldn’t afford labour or much materials. It took months to clear and salvage the site of the existing stone buildings by hand, then hand dig the footings in rock. according to my wife, i had obsessive crafting disorder, as i had to make everything i could by hand with just site tools. i felled the trees, milled then made the frame, the shingles, the weatherboard, doors, windows, flooring, stairs, and the kitchen. If I didn’t make them, we couldn’t have them, or a house. what little money we had went on insulation, plasterboard, winging and plumbing, fixings and lumber i didn't have.
(just after i'd finished putting the shingles on)
Intermittently, I built things for other people, from stairs to massive timber frames, just to try and fund my build costs.
(house, nearing external completion)
(weatherboarding)
(window trial fit)
(top flight kite winder stairs, walnut)
(couple of shots of the kitchen during installation)
2 weeks ago, just as I’d finished plumbing, we had the 3rd, in one summer, of ‘once in a lifetime’ fires rip thru this region. None of the fires were accidental, everyone knows the companies that plant eucalyptus forest are responsible, but no way of either proving it, or preventing it from happening again. this time, the implications were catastrophic for us. along with a number of other houses in the region, our house got burnt down.
92% of the district/county suffered. it looks like a war zone. untold miles of 30m+ trees reduced to stumps.
This isn’t a political rant, or a please feel sorry for me post, I just wanted to update a thread I started a few years ago, and one I had been asked to share, but hadn’t kept up with. I just wanted to thank everyone on this site for their support whilst I built the house. You have no idea how much your kind words meant to me, how they spurred me on, how they gave me hope and encouragement when there was often little to be found elsewhere.
I cannot begin to tell you how difficult the whole build was, not just for me physically and mentally, but for both of us emotionally as well. It was, until the fire, the most stressful thing in our lives. it had taken 7 years before we were finally living in the (unfinished) house. we wrote about the build and life here, in this bit of portugal in a blog, ourlifehandmade.wordpress.com
We lost everything in the fire, the house, pretty much every single tool I owned (which was a lot) and all our other possessions, all the things that mattered. Its been a hard couple of weeks, we are getting through it though. I have a plan to build again, when I can find another place, and get some tools, and try and start again, although I’m not religious, it is a thing of faith and hope, the stuff of life.