Sorry, just to check - the flood came over the roof of your house ?
Are you putting the log house further up hill? :-?
Love the idea of the house btw - inspiring once the kids get older
Are you putting the log house further up hill? :-?
Love the idea of the house btw - inspiring once the kids get older
This winter the worst we had was 3cm in 24h, and the river stayed a good meter below the level of the floor of the mill, so we now have a better understanding of what kind of weather conditions constitute a danger - the rain we had at the end of 2019 was the worst in 70 years or more.
The mill itself is ancient, and built out of enormous boulders, each weighing tens of tonnes, so the structure was entirely unscathed despite being battered to hell by both the force of the water and the debris that came down - everything from trees to trash to trailers. The roof got pretty badly torn up, so we've had a tarp over it for the last year, as we intend to take it off and put a storey on top this year anyway. Overall, while it was a crisis (we waded out in thigh deep water in torrential rain, and had to walk to the nearest village as our car was already gone, cats screaming in their bag... all a bit traumatic tbh), we've turned it into an opportunity - it spurred us into building the cabin, it's shown us what the river can do and what we should therefore plan for with our projects (for instance, I moved our entire battery bank a few meters further uphill), and the damage to the roof has encouraged us to think about building upwards. It's also shown us what we can bounce back from - lost a lot of posessions, and hosing down the house and everything in it was pretty miserable. Oh, and it happened a few days before Christmas!
The cabin is about 30 meters uphill, and about half a kilometer away, on an old agricultural terrace - nightmare doing the groundwork, and getting materials in, but it's so worth it - spring is just beginning here, and I'm sat in the unfinished structure right now, watching birds flit between the treetops at window level, listening to the stream chuckling in its bed - very different to the perennial roar of the weir at the mill.
It's a challenging lifestyle, but I wouldn't trade it for the world.
I hope it's a lovely spring.
I did discover that you can totally immerse a lot of modern electronics in muddy water, and so long as you wash (urgh, heatsinks) and dry them thoroughly, they live on. Hard drives in the NAS lasted just long enough to get the data off them - NAS itself was fine. Getting silt out of microswitches is also a PITA. Thought the tv was trash, but after a few months, the water that had gotten inbetween the layers of the display dried out, and now you’d never know.
Our main losses were things like mattresses and bedding, the car, books, and a whole bunch of time - took days to hose the mud off the walls, inside and out, and we had about 10cm of silt to shovel out - it took until summer to dry out! The damage outside was also extensive - lots of clearing of debris and chainsawing of huge treetrunks balanced improbably all over the place - at least the flood delivered construction material for the tent platform, which became our home last year while we worked on clearing up the mill and groundwork for the cabin, and taming some of the utterly overgrown forest. This year, as the flood was much smaller, it delivered commensurately smaller wood - but all in all, enough firewood to keep us going until the nights are warm, and some awesome driftwood that’s becoming light fittings in the new cabin.
So far, spring is gorgeous - the valley really benefits from the floods, leaves the banks super fertile - it’s a strip of luminous green in a grey and brown surrounding.