The good life

Yes. I can shed some light on 'the good life' as I'm 9 months away from embarking on that myself. I'm moving abroad (Austria. Many reasons for that.) and have spent the past 4 years preparing ourselves. We bought a small holding with a dilapidated house which we rebuilt from the ground up. The benefit of doing that was twofold. Firstly, you get to design and build the house exactly the way you want it. Secondly, it's much cheaper building your own house than buying it. If you can find land with something similar, it's well worth exploring. Our layout in the end is looking to be around the 260k mark, where with a 'proper' ready built house, we would've been looking at twice that amount.

Now, something else worth exploring. Wood burning central heating. With gas prizes going up and down like Paris Hilton's knickers, wood burning central heating is really an ideal solution for central heating. We've had ours installed last year and our gas bill dropped by 90%. You can have your heating running full pelt 24/7 and not worry about a nasty bill towards the end of the quarter. As long as you have wood, you have heat. It's becoming an extremely popular way of heating in Scandinavia, Germany and Central/Eastern Europe. For some reason it hasn't caught on yet in the United Kingdom which is a shame.
For a boiler you're looking at around 1k - 3k. You will make the money back within 2-3 years. From then onwards you'll be in profit.

Solar panels. I'm looking into that myself right now. The initial cash layout seems to be nasty and I'm still not sure how effective it is. We're not too fussed about electricity prices anyway seeing our gas bill is non-existent. What we would like to do is run solar energy to the warm water boiler seeing that's on 24/7 365. That should be possible.

As far as livestock is concerned, can't help you there. We don't plan on keeping any animals apart from dogs and cats. We do however plan to have a vegetable garden, but just for R&R. Produce prices are low enough at farmers markets and supermarkets.

It's all about the lifestyle man.
 
regulus said:
Now, something else worth exploring. Wood burning central heating. With gas prizes going up and down like Paris Hilton's knickers, wood burning central heating is really an ideal solution for central heating. We've had ours installed last year and our gas bill dropped by 90%. You can have your heating running full pelt 24/7 and not worry about a nasty bill towards the end of the quarter. As long as you have wood, you have heat. It's becoming an extremely popular way of heating in Scandinavia, Germany and Central/Eastern Europe. For some reason it hasn't caught on yet in the United Kingdom which is a shame.
Click to expand...

What's your wood bill like?
 
There has to be a limit to that until you get pulled up on that by the local coppers. I'm sure you can't just go on for years hacking away at the local forest.
 
Learn to love potatoes. They're ridiculously easy to grow. My sister's efforts this year involved planting the seeds and leaving the plot to go fallow for 6 months, and we've had two dinners for 4 out of them so far - and that's one out of each 5ft furrow, of which we have 6. She spent much less time & effort tending her potatoes than I spent digging over the topsoil and putting the furrows in, but they're still 'her' potatoes, for some reason.
 
Chest freezers. My brother just has an allotment and he fills both of his, could do so several times over. He does it as a hobby and gives away most of his produce but if he wanted to live off it he'd want to freeze a lot more of it.

Winter greens, spuds and pickling goes a long way of course but we're no in the dark ages anymore :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom