March: Cold spring

Across the valley they have been building a bunch of new chalets: great ugly concrete excrescences like mechanical ticks buried in the skin of the land, sucking its natural resources - gas, electricity, water... But over on our side of the valley, a different kind of seed is growing. So far it looks like a strange muddy heap, but who knows what it will grow into?

Early March was fine, but then winter came back with fury: two straight weeks of gloom and rain with occasional breaks. Our first and second batches of seedlings were obliterated by the wind and rain.

After an autumn unroofed, soaking up moisture, and a cold gloomy winter, the house is chilled through. Patches of new cob take forever to dry, mould grows on the surface. But you sense underneath that the world is tilting, that today - who knows - might be the day the year turns, that the house will never be so cold again, that today may be the day when building stops and living starts. One year on - we broke ground back in March 2006 - the house isn't finished, but now we're not building, just tinkering - electricity, plumbing, worktops, shelves, a coat of paint - well, and we still have to do the floor!

Toss another board on the fire!

2007

January: See February

February: Interior work

you are shivering
in a caravan
in February

by a bizarre installation
of your own devising
entitled "unfinished wreck"

congratulations
it's a house

At this point you start to realise that it takes a lot more than a roof and walls to make a house habitable. Like windows and a front door, plaster, paint and limewash, stairs and railings, curtain rods, shelves and storage, electricity, water... Come February it starts to feel as if you are trapped on the empty stage set of a kitchen-sink drama so advanced it has no need for an audience. And there's no kitchen sink, either.

In a typical building project most or all of these fiddly little jobs is contracted out to specialists, who will generally be doing the same repetitive job over and over again on a number of virtually identical houses. Most "self-build" projects are not that different either, except that the person making the phone calls and writing the cheques will actually be living in the house, and has an interest in making it as good a job as possible.

Snail Cabin, on the other hand, is actually being self-built, in the sense that we have (so far) built every part of the house ourselves, with the help of friends, family and volunteers.

Perhaps this is an inefficient way of building a house. The truth is that it's taking us a very long time to build a very small house - although not all that long, in person-hours, when you realise that we're only able to be there at weekends and often there's only one person working. And we probably spend a lot less time (and certainly, less money) fixing mistakes than on a typical building project where it's about getting the job done as fast and cheap as possible. Of course, when you do make a mistake it's especially galling because you have nobody to blame but yourself (or worse, your partner). Like when I forgot to put sand in a batch of clay paint which resulted in the paint cracking off the walls a week later and having to be scraped off and repainted.

But even if you accept that we are slower and more mistake-prone than the typical house-building team, so what? The object of the exercise, after all, is not just to end up with a house. We want to have a house that we can be happy in; but more importantly, we want to be happy with ourselves. Self-build in not just about building a house, but about building yourself, too. Self-awareness and self-confidence, the ability to realistically assess a task and your own capacities, no to mention physical fitness and skill with your hands, and knowing that you can craft your own shelter out of whatever it at hand, all give you a great deal of mental freedom. This comes at a price, of course, in time and discomfort. But then houses are expensive - and sitting in an office to pay for one isn't all that pleasant, either.

December: Rainproof at last!

At last we got the roof on. In driving rain, ten days before the winter solstice, six of us managed to haul the heavy 6-by-9-metre butyl rubber membrane into place. The house's rubber rain hat was the most expensive single component (although the wood for the roof cost slightly more, in total) but it only took twenty minutes to install. OK, admittedly it still needed to be trimmed to size, glued down around the edge, a small section to be added at the back of the workshop where it didn't quite reach, the addition of flashing boards around the edge of the roof, the drainage pipes to be out in for runoff water, and the the two skylights to be sealed into the roof so that they wouldn't leak - all of which wouldn't be finished until mid-January. But this was not just a symbolic milestone, it meant a real change in the nature of the project: no longer was our work in jepoardy from the weather; no longer did we have to struggle to protect the house every time we left the site, only to come back and find the wind had blown away the tarp, yet agian. Now it was stable. Now time was on our side. Mind you, it still felt like a bit of an anticlimax.

November: Rain and slow progress

We're still inching towards finishing the roof. We built a second, smaller reciprocal frame on top of the first, to make the opening small enough for a skylight; finished cladding the frame, and treated the roof with borax solution and linseed oil. Now we're hoping for nice weather over the next long weekend (in early December) to put on the rubber roof membrane that will, at long last, make our house weather-proof.

Already, without a permanent roof covering, and with the door and most of the windows still not closed, the house is proving to be very snug when it's raining outside, with a small fire burning in the fireplace.

October: Lessons from the roof

In mid-October we finally took delivery of the roof beams and boards which we had ordered back in July. As with the loft beams, we're using green oak, which is easy to work but dries very hard and durable... or so we hope. It's also very heavy: it took three people to lift the biggest beams into place.

But Snail Cabin was blessed with good friends and, on this occasion, good weather. Over a blazing hot four-day bank holiday weekend, a team of about six people raised the 12-beam reciprocal-frame roof. This is an awesomely beautiful structure which seems to defy the force of gravity: we now ask visitors to guess which beam went in first and how! But it's very fiddly to put up, especially when like me you've never built any kind of roof before. We also framed the simple lean-to roof on the rear (west) side of the cabin, one of the best value things we've done: like getting two houses for the price of one, and extra protection from the rain and sun thrown into the bargain.

After the framing came the cladding: nailing rough boards (also green oak) onto the beams to support the weight of the butyl rubber membrane and soil/straw mix which will comprise the weatherproof layer of our "living roof". Again friends and family turned up to pitch in. Thank you everyone!

The odd shape of the reciprocal frame makes it rather fiddly to cut and nail boards over it, especially as you get close to the central aperture. We are still trying to devise a way of putting a skylight in this aperture, to provide light and ventilation without leaking, and which will look in keeping with the geometric form of the roof.

• A good manual saw is as fast as a skillsaw, and you can hear yourself think.
• Chainsaws break down when you need them most, and when they work, make it frighteningly easy to make the wrong cut. But they are invaluable for what they're good for.
• A cheap claw hammer with a bent head (from removing stubborn nails) looks funny but it makes it easier to bang in nails at funny angles.
• Don't bang in nails right at the end of the board (it'll split); put them further away and angle them towards the beam.
• If your nails have small heads, turn them over so they don't pull out through the board.
• If you drink wine at lunch, you're likely make silly mistakes afterwards.
• Trying to finish a job as night is falling is a sure way to cut yourself.
• Used motor oil makes a great wood preservative, for places where it won't show.

August: On holiday

September: The art of house massage, a Zen view and three bags full

As of the end of September we are still waiting for the roof beams to be delivered from the sawmill, and the house is still under tarps. Meanwhile we've been working on the house interior; especially, giving it its first coat of plaster. The earth plaster we are using is basically just sifted sand and earth (in a ratio of 3 sand to one earth, rather than 3:2 as with the cob. This higher sand content helps prevent cracking.) There's no straw, but instead of water we use a slurry made with fresh cow manure from a nearby farm. This binds the plaster really well, and the muck supposedly contains micro-fibres that make for a really tough finish. The plaster has a distinctive but not disagreeable odour that disappears when dry. Applying it with bare hands is very sensual, like giving the whole house a massage.

Also we've been putting in the roof anchors (threaded bars bolted into the tie beam), building foundation piers for the shed roof at the back, patching up the inside here and there, building a bench, adding a mirror to the bathroom, and cutting two more windows. That's the beauty of cob: with a hatchet, a watering can and a pane of glass you can put a new window in any time it takes your fancy, and make it any shape you like (these are arched). One window is positioned in such a way that as you climb up to the sleeping loft, you catch a fleeting glimpse of the view over the estuary... called a "Zen view" by Christopher Alexander >> . I've also built up the lintels of the main windows into arches, so that the columns now look like tree-trunks growing out of the house foundations.

We got several bags full of raw sheep's wool (including some from black sheep) courtesy of Karlos and Goiatz, who are building a straw bale house near us. We're going to use it as roof insulation but first we had to treat the wool: taking out all the crud, soaking it in a borax solution to fend off pests, and hanging it up to dry on makeshift racks which give our driveway a very indigenous look. Borax is a plant toxin so with any luck we won't have to weed the drive for a few years.

August: On holiday...

July: A wall and a door (but no roof yet)

At last the wall is finished. It was supposed to take ten days; in the end it only took four months. Mind you, even a tiny house is a really big object. The wall is about 12 cubic metres (twenty tons) of cob, not to mention the stone stemwall and gravel foundation. All of which we carted up the hill, mixed by foot, lifted to the top of the wall, laid by hand, integrated and then trimmed to shape, raked up and remixed...

Cob is not, intrinsically, a quick building material. However, we've been learning some tricks as we go along that help make it less painfully slow... For a start, mixing the dry sand and clay soil roughly, in barrow-loads, has cut the total time for preparing the mix almost in half. What a pity we didn't discover this trick until we were four-fifths of the way through the house... Then lifting the material to the wall top in buckets, on small tarps or (my favourite trick) in those blue carryalls you can get for 50 cents from IKEA: much quicker than laboriously forming it into "cobs" and throwing it up there.

Towards the end when we were really getting impatient we started using some makeshift forms to pile the cob onto the wall by the bucketful. However, I'm not really sure how much time this has saved because we ended up having to trim great swathes off with a hatchet. Also we modified the design of the wall so that it has thick colmuns under where the roof beams will sit, joined together by thinner wall sections that don't take the load directly. This saved us a certain amount of cob, but maybe not a lot of time.

Now we know the tricks, the final push to get up to the roof height has gone relatively quickly. But now we have to wait for it to dry properly before we can put the roof on. It may be surface dry in a few days (in good weather) but we are going to leave it for a month to make sure it's really nice and dry in the middle of the wall, as well. The roof is going to be very heavy (big chunks of wood, rubber membrane and earth) and we don't want the wall to slump.

Meanwhile, we've been working on the door, which is made of green oak, like the floor joists and the roof beams (we hope). My dad did the design, on a previous visit. He went away confident that I would have finished it in a couple of days. After much procrastination on my part, he came back to find himself having to put his design into practice. Since he normally studies timber buildings, he was a bit nervous. Two days of painstaking if inexpert carpentry later, we have what must be the most measured, pencil-marked and debated door in the history of cob building...

May: Kites and cherries

June: Some haiku

Sorry, I'm too busy building the cabin to write a journal entry this month, but here are a couple of haiku.

planting tomatoes
in the tent's brown footprint
fertile with dreams

at dusk
a cow lows
i check my mobile

May: Kites and Cherries

May: More Cob

April: Building Snail Cabin

What they didn't tell you in the books I read is that building a stone wall is a lot harder than they make out. When Coenraad arrived he took one look at the stemwall and said "This needs some work", or words to that effect. We then spent the three days before the workshop rebuilding it - I was delegated the job of finding bigger and better rocks and carting them up the hill. By the time the participants arrived, the wall had gone from a heap of rocks stuck together by crumbly sand to, well, a real stone wall - not perhaps best wall in history but to me it was beautiful.

The next ten days were spent in the company of 18 people from at least six different countries, mixing, building and playing with mud; learning, chatting, singing and telling jokes in three or four different languages. Not only having a great time, but also building a wonderful and unique little house, which we are calling Snail Cabin. I wouldn't change anything... well actually, yes: I would get someone else to do the organising.

After the workshop we were busy for the rest of the month - mainly with the arrival of our second child. By the time we made it back to the land, the grass had really grown under our feet - it was almost waist high in a lot of places, and was almost smothering a lot of the trees we had planted back in January. We needed to mulch again with lots of cardboard, about a square metre of it per tree. But first I had to find the trees in the long grass - not quite a needle in a haystack, but close.

March: Breaking ground

The pressure was on. We had just over a month to build the cabin foundations, collect materials, prepare the site, dig some toilets, lay the access road, get water and electricity hooked up... before the start of the workshop in early April.

In the end we almost didn't break ground in March at all. First the building permission didn't come through, then there was illness in the family and finally bad weather delayed us further. It was the 27th before our pal Raúl and his mechanical digger finally started wreaking havoc on site. Raúl wasn't our favourite person for a while. Could it be because he knocked down the neighbours' wall without asking, laid the water pipe wrong so that it leaked, and then went off to work for someone else without fixing the problems and had to be begged to come back and finish the jobs he started?

But finally things were underway... and we had just five days (Wednesday to Sunday) to finish the cabin foundations before Coenraad, the instructor, arrived from the US.

A cob building crucially needs a good foundation with a high stemwall, to support the heavy wall and to prevent moisture from reaching the cob and turning it back into mud. We had planned to pour a concrete stemwall, but while working on site we realised that we had absolutely masses of good building stone. So we changed plans and built a stone stemwall, on top of a gravel trench for good drainage. This mean a lot of physical work - sorting stones, bringing them to the cabin site, laying them and mortaring them in place - but mostly carting gravel and stones uphill in a wheelbarrow. Our friends Iñigo and Mirentxu, who are building a straw bale house not far from us, came over to lend their physical and moral support on the Thursday, and we managed to get the gravel trench filled and the first course of BIG stones laid. - Thanks!

Then it was up to me to build the stemwall from Friday to Sunday. By the end I was starting to feel more in touch with rock than I had for years. I used to be a rock climber and there were distinct parallels - instead of trying to fit your body around the rock, you're fitting one rock onto another. It's very satisfying when you find a good fit or make a good move, but then you stand back and realise that you've placed one rock or climbed six inches and you still have 1000 more to lay or another 50 metres to climb. One thing you don't have in rock climbing is mortar, of course, which helps to get the rocks to stick together all right - it also peels the skin off your fingers so you end up pink and bleeding.

February: Lovely weather for paperwork

We always knew that this would be a hard winter, and I'm not just talking about the weather, which has been unpredictable and frustrating. Either we'd go to the land and be met with a torrential rainstorm, or else we'd check the weather forecast >> , stay home and be rewarded with a glorious sunny day. Even so we managed to get a certain amount done: mulching around the trees with cardboard to keep the grass down, getting our caravan (which was free, but needed a lot of cleaning) on site, laying out the house plan with sticks and stones, cutting hazel stakes to fence off part of the land to protect the trees from grazing animals...

So much for the fun part. But we seem to have spent most of February banging our heads against the least fun part of the whole eco-building business, which is, of course, the paperwork.

It couldn't be easier to get building permission here in northern Spain, as long as you are building for profit. Hideous blocks of flats and crappy doomed suburbs are shooting up like mushrooms everywhere you look. The construction companies, estate agencies, building professionals and banks are making a killing. The landowners are having a field day, so to speak: one day your field might be worth five grand as a pasture, the next day your friends on the council re-zone it as urban land and its value jumps a hundredfold. The scope for corruption is endless.

Paying for it all are the ordinary consumers – who, it must be said, are just as greedy, but not as smart, as the business people. Some have made big bucks buying and selling property, true. But low interest rates and buyers' expectations of future gains have now pushed prices to the point where most couples can just barely pay a mortgage. It's not hard to see that the only way from here is down. If anything goes wrong – interest rates going up, an economic downturn, or a rise in the price of oil >> – a lot of people, particularly the young, are going to be losing their houses.

But I digress. As I was saying, it's dead easy to build for profit. But if, like us, you just want to build a house for yourself and your family, you need to jump through all the same bureacratic hoops as you would to throw up a hundred ticky-tacky houses. It seems as if everything has to be dealt with twice:

• We have to appease two sets of paper-pushers: the one-man-and-his-dog operation in the local town, Badames, and the provincial government in Santander (incidentally, one of Spain's most notoriously conservative cities, where they still have a street named after the Falange Española, which would be like having a Nazi Party Street in Munich.)
  The Badames municipal government have been very lax about building permits in the last few years – spoiling this beautiful valley with swathes of suburban developments, still mostly empty. So now to make up for it they're hinting heavily that they want to issue a building moratorium, which naturally makes us feel oh-so-secure about our own plans.

• We have to present two sets of architectural plans: a "basic project" with general outlines of the house, followed by an "execution project" which in theory would allow us to just hand the plans to a contractor and get a finished building back. This regardless of the fact that we are building for ourselves and, in principle, intend to make as many decisions as possible as we go along.

• Not only that, but whereas in most countries you only have to employ one building professional – the arcitect – to supervise your project (which is bad enough), here in Spain there is a competing profession, the aparejador, who is kind of like an architectural technician. The aparejador is required to sign off to say the building has been put up according to the "execution project". Basically, this means we have to pay him to hang around the building site, get in the way and in the process learn enough about cob building in order to tell us whether we're doing it right!
  We are happy to learn the the two professions are due to merge to meet European regulations. Not soon enough for us!

As you can see, I am not the best person to deal with politicos and paper-pushers. Luckily Almudena is far better at it than me, so if we do actually get permission to build a house, it will be down to her charm, efficiency and doggedness. Myself, I find the whole business a frustrating but invaluable political education in the lunatic world of regulations.

(later) Tree planting turns out to be addictive. Yearling trees are so cheap and easy to plant that next weekend we went back for more. As well as these six species, we've been trying alder in the wetter areas of the site. Alder is the nurse tree par excellence, since it grows very fast and also fixes nitrogen from the air, so it really gives the other trees a head start.

We also planted a lot of wild fruit and nut trees: crab apple, cherry, pear, walnut, chestnut, holm oak (the acorns are edible) and wild service (I love the name); also some laurels and lime trees, which have edible leaves. Even though they may never give much fruit, we can use them as root stocks for grafting local varieties, for pollination, or even for breeding. We have 370 trees now and we still seem to have some room left...

We went to a talk by an anthropologist who was born here in the Aras valley. He waxed nostalgic about the local fruit varieties that have all but died out... pears, apples, cherries, peaches, pavías (another kind of peach), white and black plums, figs (we have two old trees on our land)... Can we locate some of the old trees and graft them back from the dead? Watch this space!