Friday, August 27th, 2004
Already back to school and 2 months have gone by since you heard from us. The pictures showing the digging at the new spot for the house are online. Unfortunately, instead of announcing we're putting a roof on the walls, we're still negotiating at an "escargot's" pace with the municipality.
At least, we can take comfort with the fact that they're not just saying "No, not in this town!". Mind you, I don't think that would have stopped us anyway... We got a letter from the Environment Ministry stating that using old car tires to build a house is OK with them. That was one of the requirements from the town officials and the easiest to get; it took only one month to reach the right person. We had to write a letter explaining the project, how we'll use the tires and how many, for them to return a letter stating that it was all within the law.
We met again with the officials and provided along with the previously mentioned letter, a 57 pages report that I got from Earthship Biotecture that includes part of the engineering study for Dennis Weaver's earthship. Yesterday they got a copy of the Potter's permit. They'll get back to us... probably with more questions.
We also had to reassure them about the regulations concerning water catchments and waste water disposal. They had read the articles we had given them earlier and noticed that most earthships use rain water, compost toilets and reuse grey water which are all illegal in Quebec!!! It's much too "green" I guess. I intend to use the extra time we were allotted in order to investigate these aspects of our building...;-)
At least, my brother's house is coming along. The foundations are poured and the floor is in place. The walls should come up next week. There are now some hydro poles and a transformer along the entrance to the Chemin des Escargots. A well was dug but a hydrocrack machine has to come because the debit is not good enough even after digging 405 feet.
In fact, there's a lot of building going on at our place. A beaver decided to move in and is building it's third dam, we saw it this morning swimming back up the river. The first dam was upstream and didn't bother us really but now it's a bit much. If this continues, there'll be an island with hardly any flowing water on our side. The neighbour on the other side has been flooded on a good portion of land and although there are no houses, I think the beaver's life is at risk. Cohabitation techniques exist but are quite expensive and difficult to implement so I doubt that this option will be tried. We would have to install through the dam, at the height that is reasonable for us, enough pipes to manage the debit of the river. 20 feet upstream, we'd protect the end of the pipes with a wire cage so that the beaver couldn't block them. Then you wait and see if it decides to move out or to start felling trees to get ready for winter.
And finally, I would like to invite you to visit the website of Julia Bourke. She's the architect who built a strawbale house right in downtown Montreal. We went to an open house 2 days ago and really enjoyed it. Many details are very much like what we're planning for our own house. The nice stucco for the walls, the cement countertops and the open shelves instead of cabinets in the kitchen, exactly as we pictured it!