Survival UK Forums

By gum its not often I get jelous of other folks, but the two girls who built the eco house on Skye tonight really got under my skin. £150K for a superb eco house in a stunning location that will cost less than £50 a year to heat even though its only a couple of hundred miles from the artic circle.

They appeared far more content and enjoying life than the stuck up silly cow and her banker husband who spent millions of pounds converting a cellar into a posh pad in Londonabad last week.IIRC she spent more on her kitchen worktops than these girls spent building their entire home.

AL if you read this on your Ipad I'm jelous of you too ?

I didn't see the show, but I wonder if they used one of the Dualchas houses. Dualchas is a young, skye-based architects practice. They specialise in designing homes echoing traditional designs (e.g. Crofting longhouse) but built to modern insulation standards. Typical approach is open plan design, with a centrally located wood burning stove, lots of glass for solar gain and a hyper-insulated outer shell. Dualchas means "Heritage" in Gaelic. They have teamed up with a company to produce their designs in kit-form.

Twas a local archiect who designed it, and it was built by the islands main builder a chap called Donald who has built over 300 houses on skye but this is the first eco house he built, twas a truly fascinating show well worth watching on 4 /7 or on the repeat later on this week, Twas 99% timber, no stone, its got a grass roof like they have in the other community i want to live in at Findhorn Eco Village.
Its lozenge shape, grass roof, large sea view windows plus loads of small windows all of the Scandinavian double glazing standard. So when they did the air pressure test it scored a truly remnarkable 1.2 which is very very good.

Got to admit you buggers up in the highlands and islands definately have the upper hand and best overall environment from a solely prepper viewpoint.