Creating a Home in Romania
“One of the most joyous things we can do is to find our place, the land where we belong. Having found our place, we snuggle into it, learn about it, adapt to it, and accept it fully. We love and honor it. We rejoice in it. We cherish it. We become native to the land of our living.”
Carol Deppe
Tana is what happens when a Border Collie digs under the fence to get to a neighboring Labrador.
Our rocket-stoves journey
We have a journey of rocket stove building at Bhudeva… first it was the first rocket stove (bedroom, 2011), then fixing it (2012) then the second one (living room, 2012) and rebuilding the first one (2014).
We cook food and bake on both rockets most of the winter time.
It’s time to try a next step – we are going to rebuild the one in the living room, this time we are going to make it even more efficient and add a heated bench for two on it :).
We are open to make it as a mini-workshop where you can come over and learn by doing.
The workshop
We will be building a rocket stove with a small mass attached to it and a place for sitting / reading / resting. It will be an opportunity to learn what were the limitations of the previous design (and why they were introduced in the first place) and the considerations that went into the new design. We will be building a typical rocket core with an attached brick chamber with some cob to add more mass and bring it altogether. It is a tight design that will fill a tight space.
You will have an opportunity to:
All within the settings and limitations of a traditional Romanian village house.
The build/workshop is estimated to take place in 15-17 of June 2018. The workshop time is Friday (half day), Saturday (full day) and Sunday (until 16:00). If you’ll join us, please arrive sometime Friday until 13:00 (so we can have the second part of the day for working).
There are 5 places available for participants. Sleeping will be in tents (there is plenty of space). The price for the workshop is 540 lei / participant. We are asking for 200 lei in advance (bank deposit or transfer), when registering, for booking your place. The rest will be paid cash at Bhudeva.
Please acknowledge that English is the communication language at Bhudeva.
Living conditions
We are assuming you will want to stay at Bhudeva, however there may be other options one of which is a new pensiune just outside the village (a few minutes drive) which has recently opened its doors to visitors.
If you do choose to stay with us, here are a few things you may wish to know:
Visiting Bhudeva, you are going to encounter also our solar dryers, earthbag cellar (we are now at the green roof preparation), hugel beds, solar panel or other things we play with and experiment here.
🙂
If you’re interested to partake please write Iulia at iulia [dot] sara [at] gmail [dot] com… in English and include your phone number.
Iulia and Ronen
Last winter we witnessed 24+ hours of water flowing down our road … millions of liters. The sound of running water was beautiful but the sight of that water escaping was sad. It caused some damage to the road leading up to our property.
It was, I believe, a result of a wet season and years of over-grazing higher up in the valley (causing lack of vegetation to slow the flow of water and reduced water holding capacity in the soil).
When I talked about this with someone in the village he explained to me that it was my responsiblity (as the owner of the property) to build water ditches alongside the road to divert the water flow + “we’ve been doing it like this for generations, and there’s never been a problem!” It was as if he didn’t hear me … I could not find a way to show a deeper chain of causality where choices that we make upstream in our ecological cycles have downtstream effects.
Today I came across this video and wanted to make a note of it as evidence for future reference:
via Sunni
A house that was built in the late 80’s using Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language … how sweet to hear the talk of simple, natural, real unfolding:
“there was never a real set of plans … it evolved and its part of a philosophy, you wait until you get in the context and then you decide … does the window go here? does the windo’ go there? … its real easy on a drafting table, miles from the site to go ‘ok, we’ll put the window right in the middle’ … but when you get there you go ‘lets see, riiiiight there’s the view'”
I enjoyed this video of a house that was apparently built (~40 years ago?) by a pioneering thinker (Lloyd Texley, the former head of science for the Omaha Public School District). It gives a good idea of what is possible and I can only imagine what additional improvements and potentials lie ahead: