The roundhouse kitchen is now moving along at a rapid pace out of necessity – it feels a bit like build up at Chelsea or Hampton Court Palace Flower Show, all hands to the pumps.  Long, long hours being put in by all but no-one seems to mind, the atmosphere is great, with lots of good humoured banter – it’s turning into a really exciting project and everyone can see where it is going now that the henge and reciprocal roof are on.

We are starting to organise the landscaping and terracing of the outdoor space and we’ve discovered the delights of earthship building, using old tyres from the local lorry park – a great way to turn slopes into terraces in double quick time, and it looks great now let alone in twelve months time when it is covered in greenery, added to which it’s strong, long lasting and is recycling at its absolute best quite apart from being free.

The mains water pipe is now in place and I am so happy that I have convinced the Bengineer that he should take a temporary break and become a plumber for the next little while!  I’m not sure how keen he is but I’m so so relieved and it will be a good challenge for him!

The stone pillars are now in place for the yurt platform and Ali, the boat builder, is up in the cart shed busy building the platform. It’s a complicated structure that has to be built in four pieces for transport reasons so you end up with lots of angled cuts in the timber – hopefully it’ll fit together neatly at the end and marry up to the pillars down in the woods!

The yurt which was started by the lovely Dave and Alex back in January is almost complete. This is no indication that they are slow yurt builders just that they have got involved in so many other projects in the past five months.  It will however be worth the wait as I think that it’s going to be our best made yurt to date. And so it should be as I strongly believe that if you don’t go into a project with the view that you will improve on previous work perhaps you shouldn’t start in the first place!

In fairness, Dave went off to do aid work in the Congo for ShelterBox for a while and Alex has single handedly transformed the kitchen garden.  Sadly they are heading back to the UK, Dave is hoping for a permanent position with Medicine Sans Frontiers, so good luck to both of them, they will be greatly missed, thank you so so much you guys, you have been fantastic company and we hope to see you here again sometime soon.

Well we have a bit of designing to do as we don’t think the shower should go into the main part of the roundhouse as originally planned, it would mess up the yin and yang of the internal space so I think I’ll have to do a bit more digging to create extra space, but it needs a bit more thought so I’ll sleep on it!

Bonne nuit! Matt x