A book review of sorts - Building a Low Impact Roundhouse

Friday afternoon, May 3rd
Low impact living is increasingly becoming an active interest of mine and by great good fortune a dear old friend of mine was clearing out a whole bunch of sustainable building related books which I am, gradually, reading and then planning on taking along to the Middlewood Trust to add to their informal library with the idea they'll be more accessible to more people sharing a similar interest there than hiding on one of my bookshelves! In the mean time, however, I'm going to use my blog as a good place to keep track of the key aspects I enjoyed or valued about said books so if I need to get hold of the books again I will at least have the title and author to start me off...

So! The first book that I got through was Tony Wrench's Building a Low Impact Roundhouse - he also has a website which I've yet to investigate fully. This is an incredibly practical book covering Tony's experience building his house in Wales - I confess that when it got into the calculations of how many supports there were etc. I started skimming. I'm not yet at the stage of needing that detail - but if you are, this may well be a book to read! It is not intended as an expansive tract on all the different options available, merely a sharing of knowledge of what Tony used and learned along the way. It also includes reflections along the lines of "in hindsight..." - always useful when assessing different options.

Being as practical as it is, I'm quite happy to pass it on for others as I'm not in any way at the stage of being ready to design my own home from scratch (aside from anything else, I have a wonderful home I'm getting to enjoy full time as it is). But it definitely provided food for thought - how much space is enough? What's critical? What's a nice to have? Considerations like how far the site of their house was from the rest of the community they were part of. I'm still convinced that there's a way to build an awesome sauna / hot tub / maybe steam room building into my future low impact living land experiment but I haven't quite got it sussed yet - there's always time!

Anyways, useful book, very practical but definitely one mainly for you if you're at the "and now I need to get down to the nuts and bolts" (or straw bales and wood stoves, as the case may be).