Construction of the lodges began in June 2008, slowly at first as we were keen to treat the first two as prototypes, realising we may have to make small design changes to during the build process. Having laid concrete foundation pads and serviced the plots with necessary utilities; water, electric cables and sewerage, we were ready to start erecting the buildings.

This involved bringing in a huge crane to lift the glu-lam frames into place and then fit the timber frame panels and bolt everything together. Within two or three days we could have a basic building up with a waterproof membrane on the roof to keep out the weather. More about the fitting out later.

While the lodges were being built there were many other things to consider.
Two potentially very expensive issues were high on the agenda; water supplies and stone for roads and foundations. We had approached our local water utility company asking for a price to feed a water supply into the site but the quotation was of staggering proportions. We thought again and decided to take a chance on drilling a borehole as we had heard rumours of an underground lake in the area. We brought in a specialist drilling company and after a couple of days drilling...bingo! We had struck water, not only that but pure spring water under pressure!

We also suspected that there could be gravel under our field so we tasked Les our friendly ground works contractor to start digging and within a very short space of time he returned with a big grin on his face saying "I've hit gravel, masses of it". Within a week we had a grader and crusher on site and we were making our own stone and gravel on site. Sometimes you need a bit of good luck.

We had felled a number of trees around the site which were either surplus to requirements or rotten, so we brought in a log saw and splitter and set to work chopping up a huge mountain of wood which had been accumulating, the result was several years supply of logs all chopped to 330cm long so they would fit inside the hi tech log burning stoves soon to arrive from Switzerland. It is difficult to calculate just how many lorry journeys in and out we have saved through our self sufficiency bust it must be many hundreds.