We're building - Rural Wet-Dry Tropics Permaculture Laboratory

The existing house of our farm is located on probably the worst spot of our land, so to make things work out we need to build a new house.

The old house has a great view, but it has no space for anything because it’s located on a narrow ridge. It’s a perfect spot for tourists though, so we have a future use for it!

After terracing a good chunk of our most usable land in the middle of the farm (picture above) we have now started the construction of a new house. We located it right in the middle, between gardens and terraces. Our food will be growing all around us, on short distance; you know, as a good permaculture setup should be.

We decided on a steel structure as the basis for the building. The house will consist of two parts, the kitchen plus social area and the bedrooms. These pictures show the start of the kitchen.

Cutting the profiles, assembling and then painting them took a couple of months. It’s easier to do that when they’re horizontal…

Then the first complete frame went up…

And the second one, you can see the kitchen part take shape now.

This way of building is a bit of a test for us. The frame already shows the door and the windows. We just have to fill the spaces, by which ever material we want to try. If something doesn’t really work, we can replace it with something else relatively easily. This allows us to learn, and we can use that knowledge in future builds.

We also build the roof before the walls, which is unusual in construction… But it gives us shade when sunny and shelter when it rains. Plus this roof won’t touch any walls, to keep a ventilation space above the kitchen. We’re in the tropics, so that’s pretty important to keep things cool!

To make sure all legs are on equal depth we measured that. To be honest, we did not put them all equally deep, because we want the roof to be slightly off level. Like that we can connect the gutters close to the roof and the rainwater will flow in the right direction because of the minor slope we cause like this.