The Start of Our Home Journey
The Beginnings
Every summer since we moved to Kenya back in 2017, we travel to Europe to see family, friends and keep the connection to the places close to our hearts. 2020 was different.
Plot visits
Plot visits adventures
The year that Covid hit the world we were all set to travel and booked all tickets quicker than any other year, but end of April the virus entered one of the last countries - Kenya. That meant we didn’t get to go back to our home countries and spent a lot of time at home. With so much time at hand we started thinking about interiors, investments or some other activity that would be fun and would have a sustainable side to it. According to a Dutch blogger building a house starts with a practical problem or a dream. For us the practical problem - old piping, dark houses with dark floors, an unpractical architectural layout of the house, generated the dream - building our own home to our own taste and design.
Typical dark floors
From Idea to Reality
The initial idea was a real estate investment - buying a place to rent out. We screened the market for real estate projects under construction and visited some of them, but quickly noticed the new properties were quite expensive and there was little left to be said about the layout of the interior or the finishes. Having realized that, another thought popped up - buying land with an existing house on it that we could renovate and restyle, or buying a plot and building from scratch - the best in terms of letting the ideas and creativity go loose and same costs, if not less, as renovating an existing project.
We started the research, compared a couple of places and were lucky and blessed to find an empty plot within a couple of days that was affordable, lush with vegetation and trees and the right size for what we had in mind. We found the plot end of September 2020, signed the contract end of October and started the paper work journey of getting all the papers and approvals (more on that in a next post).
Signing the land documentation during Covid Online Learning and Working - October 2020
Excavator prepping the road to the plot
As we were waiting for the papers we were visiting the plot quite often, prepping the road, removing the bushes, doing measurements to see exactly where the beacons (metal round bars poured into concrete around 30 years ago) were to make sure we’re staying within the plot borders and simply connecting to the place and letting it speak to us. We would try to picture which would be the spot we will enjoy the most for our garden, do research on the location, the type of soil and of the trees present (we wanted to keep all of them) - whether indigenous or not and on what the story of the plot actually was (more on that later).
Plot measurements
Clearing the bushes and sisal plants with machettes
More clearing. More room for creativity and thought. The area where the Tree House is now.
At the end of March 2021, we were able to start building. On Friday March 19, together with the contractor, we set out the location of the houses with strings and chalk powder and once we made sure all is set out properly, which took until after sunset hours, we were ready for our spring break vacation starting the next day. Although we missed the ground breaking, we were happy to end the legal, structural and architectural paper work with an unwinding trip to one of the most historically rich and inspiring places of Kenya - Lamu.
Setting out the house with ropes and chalk
Done after sunset
Next morning on our way to Lamu