Ecological House Building

After planning for years and searching for the special place, we found it at last in the fall of 2005.

Of course, there is nothing comfortable of buying a decayed cabin with an old small mismanaged garden out in the deep forest. But it suited us and our plans perfect!

It is not a farm, but it has been once, and it could be so again. Still a whole lot of work remains... It used to be a farm 1850 to 1960, until it was rebuilt to a weekend
cottage.

We now work with the restoration of this beautiful place and here we are going to build our ecological house, in which all solutions are based on holistic ecologic thinking, the reuse of constructing material (of which much is antique, 1910-2s) the use of isolating material such as straw, hemp, flax and clay. Yes, part of the house is going to be built in strawbale infilltechnique.

So, where´s this
place then and who are we?It is in Västergötland, Sweden. 70 km northeast of
Gothenburg, the closest community is Sollebrunn, closest town is Alingsås and other cities that are close is Trollhättan and Borås. This place lies in the country!

Inside a forest close to a lake called Anten. This is a very old district. We are Charlotte and Jan Olov Wikhall with our two kids Edvard and Alexander and our dog
Scilla.

We live at this place in a caravan and has done so for 1,5 years. During the winter 07/08 we have been restoring our barn (ecologic of course) doing a bedroom and livingroom there, so now theres bigger place (!), yes, as it seems something like this has to be built step by step.

Theres a thousand of things that has to be done. First of all, the house itself. Now, all there is is the cabin ”undressed” from board, covered with tarpaulins. Inside there is a mess of loose bricks from the chimney that we took down in the summer of 2007. Two things has really delayed the real constructing to start, the first was Charlotte being sick in electrosensitivity and the miraculous recovering due to energy medicine in
2006 and the turn with the local health care authorities in 2007 regarding our choice for the drain!

In accordance to the permit, the water cleaning marsch. Indeed an intelligent ecological very simple solution. Look at it at www.vattenmiljo.se/index_eng.htm

After many turns it now seems like our permits finally on it`s way. Nevertheless, plans change all the time and our
effort this year will not be starting to build the actual house.

We see that a lot of things has to be done first. All things has to be in place, as simple as that. There will however be construction work in the summer of 2008. We plan to continue with the barn, and that involves work with clay and straw, floor of rammed earth, and an extension of the barn build with smaller strawbales and clay.

The installation of a 24v electrical system with solar panels and more. We also plan to get in order our handling with the garbage and the wood (there sure is a
lot of wood in this place) and based on old drawings from 1923 we are going to build a small house for garbage/wood with walls of plaited sticks and clay.

Hope for you to come and stay with us as a wwoofer..

Welcome!