The Way we get our Helpers

We have for the whole summer, from May or June till October volunteers coming to help build our house. We find the helpers through three different organisations: Workaway, Poosh and HelpX. They all have the similar idea that the volunteer helper comes and stays with us, we provide accommodation and food and they work for six hours a day five days a week.

Until now we have been very happy with how it has worked for us. We mostly have had people for a few weeks but some will stay for longer. We would welcome people to stay for many months and this way they would learn and see much more than in a few weeks, but a few weeks is also good of course.

Poosh is an organisation for sustainable self-builders only so if one is building their home in an eco way they can seek for helpers through that organisation. Workway and HelpX is for any kind of work so not only for people building their home.
So we put an add up saying we need help and telling about our project and the helpers make their profile and tell who they are and what they are interested in and then the helpers look for interesting places they want to go to and contact the hosts (us) and ask if they can come. All contact happens through the organisation web page.
Then they come and stay with us and help us. They get a nice experience in a foreign country, they get to see countryside, how people live here, how we are doing our project and they lear how to do whatever we are doing just then when they are here. We get help, we get to learn from our helpers too, we get to meet interesting people and we get energy from people coming to see our project and being inspired.

A good exchange!

Digging the foundations

Last week the digger arrived in the yard so the road is ready! Kind of. It still needs the surface on so right now its very bumpy and soft. But people come to work by car!
After the road was done the digger came to work on the site. Well, first we cleared it from trees, cleaned the surface and decided the exact place for the house.

Then we had a man come to take coordinates of the place of the house for the municipality map.

 Site cleared from trees. Photo taken on the 6th of July.

Almost all rocks in place. Photo taken on the 11th of July. A big change!

Then we had the digger come in. He/It scraped the surface, took the stumps and stones away to the side of the road with a tractor and trailer and then leveled the area and made the spot of the house slope down from the side of the house 3 meters away all directions so that the rain water flows away from the house instead of going underneath it. Then Mick marked the house spot again and the spots for the 9 big rocks. He did it with string, sticks, nails, a level and some help.

For the last few days the digger guy has dug the foundation. So digging, filling it with smallish stones, then laying huge rocks on top. The house will come on top of the rocks so quite high.

All the time that this was happening we had our dear helpers peeling, clearing trees, peeling, building  walls to the shed, peeling, moving logs, peeling, sharpening the peelers, peeling, building a rain cover for the peeled logs and peeling.