Building a Rainbow - part 2

On choosing wood as a building material, we had entered the maze like world of timber frame construction or solid log. If we chose logs, should they be round ones, square cut, laminated or plain and what thickness should they be? There was a bewildering variety. Why is it that initially choices look to be so simple but the more you delve into them, the more complicated and difficult they become?
At the outset, we had discounted a timber frame house as the feeling was that we would lose a lot of the style we had initially fallen in love with. We wanted wood with a capital W and frame houses normally had most of their internal walls constructed from sheetrock. We had also stayed several times in a log house belonging to a friend in Virginia, USA and loved the ambiance of the natural wood - the air inside the house always seemed so much fresher and sweeter smelling and there was just something essentially pleasing about living in a building that was so naturally at one with the environment. After all, we told ourselves, one of our main aims was to make this house as ecologically sound as we were able.
With these thoughts reverberating through our heads, we had started off by spending weeks trekking round our region visiting constructors and suppliers and had become more than a little disheartened with exorbitant prices, vague delivery dates and quotes that never arrived. Disillusionment had set in and we had been about to give up on the whole idea when we saw a TV program devoted to a self-build project which was actually being constructed in the UK with logs from Finland. The house looked wonderful, the price was good and the presenter assured our eager audience of two that Finnish timber was infinitely superior to that grown in more temperate latitudes. Furthermore, the forests that provided the timber were managed and sustainable. We were transfixed as the program showed the owner of the house discussing his plans directly with the suppliers at their factory in Finland. Wow! That could be us we thought.

BUILDING A RAINBOW

CHAPTER ONE – NORTHERN LIGHTS AND LOG HOUSES

La Vie est Une Chance - Saisis La
(Life is a Chance - Seize It)
Mother Theresa


Unlikely as it may seem, we traveled from the South of France to the far North of Finland to buy a kit house. Even in the height of summer, it was somewhat of a culture shock. The contrasts were starkly defined. The incessant sawing song of the cicadas was exchanged for the occasional whine of an arctic midge. The pulsating colors of fields of sunflowers, banks of oleanders and ripening vines for vast expanses of still lake and dark, cool forests. We left our searing southern sun for one that was altogether softer but which remarkably was still shining at midnight.
I wondered as we flew ever northward, whether the log house we hoped to buy would survive all these contrasts. Would it sit as well in our Mediterranean meadow as it would by a Finnish lake? Would all that hi-tech insulation keep out our summer heat as well as it did the freezing winter temperatures of Finland? Logic told me that of course it would, but then of course only time would really tell.
We weren’t going to be building this house in some avant garde district of Paris but in a conservative rural backwater and although from northern Finland to Southern France, we were still within the EU, it was a long way from Brussels! We would have to face censorious planning restrictions and would need to satisfy not only skeptical local planning authorities but the village Mayor. Mayors of small villages have a lot of clout and in out of the way regions of Southern France are not noted for their modern outlook, or interest in unusual eco-projects. The main [read ‘only’] preoccupation for most Southern French Mayors is the state of the vineyards and this year’s harvest.We already knew that our choice of design would be very limited. Our roof for example would have to be covered in the local terracotta tiles - unchanged in style from when they were fashioned over the thigh of a Roman Centurion. With planning guidelines dating from some time BC, heaven only knew what other restrictions we might be presented with.