One word? When seven would do…

So my plan 🙂

We’ve been wobbling muchly about how the heck we’re going to get a house built on Rum. We’re waiting to hear whether we can tap into the SNH hydro electric and if so at what cost. It could be they totally sting us for installation and then we still have to pay electric bills (currently about half the price per unit that mainland suppliers charge but with plans to increase it and bring it in line and then still a cost we’d need to meet indefinitely although the greener, renewable aspect of hydro power is of course a better option than most mainland suppliers). The water situation is also a bit up in the air with the village all hooked up to a mains water supply of sorts which is chlorinated and we may be able to get attached to, or the possibility of simply making use of the water supply on the croft land and setting up filtration for drinking water. Add those rather complicated beginnings to a house build along with the fact it is miles from the mainland, a further mile from any road at the end of an access track and you start to get a feeling of the potential logistical nightmare we could be getting ourselves into.

But there isn’t a problem in existance that can’t be cured by throwing enough money at it. A few emails in the right direction soon gave me answers that anything is indeed possible but at a price. Skye homes create kit house builds for the Scottish islands and were able to furnish me with a price for the gear, a price for labour, a price for delivery and a per square metre cost for a fully managed build. Do we have that big a budget? No!

We do have *a* budget. It’s not stupidly small and people have built houses on a lot less but it would be better spent on livestock, crops, polytunnels, setting up the things that will give us an income, a living. It will easily cover the cost of the building materials but the cost of turning a pile of materials into a dwelling is the larger, scarier one that is keeping us awake at night.

Meanwhile I’ve been reading lots about Rum online and talking via email to Vikki – the Development Officer, who is very candid about the challenges the community is facing. There is a real transitional feel to the island just now with the independance from SNH such a recent thing and people only just realising the freedom and responsibilities it entails. The people who live there have so much invested in making it a viable community, somewhere that new people come to live, tourists come to visit and a sustainable set up moving forward. There are great things happening there and the energy and potential for further, even greater things to happen which makes it such an exciting prospect, if a rather daunting one too.

So we have spent much of our time whilst in Glastonbury, (when not drinking 😉 ) endlessly talking between the four of us, bouncing about ideas about what our priorities are – do we invest money in a static or caravan to live in and get the croft set up first, then look at a house build? Do we jump in with both feet and just get the house built first before we let our funds slip through our fingers and then worry about the croft and set up afterwards? Do we build a small house and then think about adding to it in latter years as and when we can afford to or do we blow as much money as we can on making it as big as possible so at least housing is ticked forever? Do we go for a conventional build or do we stay true to our beliefs and aim for eco / green / sustainable / alternative methods? Do we let the kids run riot with their notions of helter skelter slides instead of staircases and entire walls painted with chalkboard or dry wipe boarding to be ever changing canvasses or do we keep planning regulations and crofting federation housing grants uppermost in our minds and jump through the right hoops accordingly?

A luxury holiday cottage is not really the right place to have this sort of discussion, possibly neither was a leaky campervan either. I’ve been all adrift without a Proper Plan – something to work towards, measure myself against and keep everyone focussed on. Ady has been stressing about money – imaging all my Dad’s doomsaying coming true and us ending up sitting in a half build house with leaky roof and no money. This has generally degenerated into petty squabbles about lack of confidence in selves and ‘you know nothing’ type mutterings when one person thinks we should be working out our budget for buying tools and the other thinks we should be finding out what happens when there is no alcohol left on the whole island and no ferry is coming for 3 days! 😆

Which got me thinking, and then sharing my words of wisdom with the other three, and coming up with an idea while I was talking. I was reminding everyone about how we all felt at the beginning of last year – scared of the unknown, lacking in confidence at our abilities – to cope, to survive, to last the year, to make it all the way round, to live with so little stuff, money and space. Worried about what the people we would meet would be like, whether they would like us, whether we’d live up to their expectations of work in exchange for food and a bed. We talked about the times when things did indeed go wrong and what happened to get them back on track again. The parts of the year that inspired us and made us feel as though we were the luckiest people in the world living the most amazing adventure, because really, that was how most of the year felt.

The thread running through all of that was two fold really – firstly that we are amazing. That we can do anything we put our hearts and minds into doing. That we can come through fitter, healthier, stronger, more skilled, closer, happier, braver, hungry and thirsty for yet more adventures. That all those things a nasty little voice inside might have tried to tell us were out of our reach and we were not capable of were totally within our grasp and we did all of them. That not only were we worthy of our hosts hospitality pretty much every single one invited us back any time, has stayed in touch and are interested in hearing what happens to us next and helping us if they can. Secondly that what made this year work was people. Not money, not possessions, not qualifications or even previous experience. It was the dreamers, the crazies, the hippies, the feel the fear and do it anyways.

We stayed with people who lived in trees on protest sites in the 80s and 90s and got tired of fighting, of only expending negative energy and went off to live together in the woodland, building their homes out of reclaimed, recycled, scavanged materials, taking nothing from the system and seeing beauty all around them. We stayed with people who had chosen to withdraw from society altogether, who had no need for material possessions but could write a library full of books containing their wisdom and knowledge. We stayed with people who lived in the glare of the lights from the 24 hour Tesco next door but managed to build a community of like minded people around them, barter their produce and brew their own wine. We lived with people who were on their fourth bash at building their own home, having started with wooden poles and canvas and graduated to mud and straw. We stayed with doctors, teachers, musicians, artists, builders, authors, writers, educators. We stayed with people.

Where am I going with this? I’m looking at our potential problems from a different perspective and remembering what I learnt during this last year not what I’d learnt in the 37 years before that. I’m remembering that we lived a virtually moneyless life last year – certainly we didn’t work for money and in the main we didn’t really spent much. (I worked out today that about £15000 went in and out our bank account last year, about a quarter of what went through it the previous year. Almost all of that went on paying the mortgage, paying our debts, covering various insurances and a fair bit went on petrol. A tiny, tiny percentage went on food, accomodation, clothes, shoes.) I am recalling that we probably worked harder last year than we have ever worked before and yet we claimed no payment for that other than our basic needs being met and a huge amount of learning in exchange.

And then I’m remembering that there is a whole, growing, army of us out there. There are currently nearly 6000 WWOOFers in the UK, many of whom are skilled or experienced. We have a large collection of contacts from all over the country who are behind us and our dreams and could – and would – help us with various aspects of it.

There is Rum, a community of 30 people who all know precisely how stuff works on the small isles, specifically Rum, and have machinery and tools and if Vikki is to be believed are desperate for something to galvanise them into action and into becomming a real pulling together group. There is SNH who have all the cash and manpower and an investment in helping Rum become independant. There is WWOOF uk – always happy to get behind big projects and help promote them with their newsletter, website, online presence, press contacts etc. There is my own contacts in journalism, on blogs, twitter etc.

So the challenge has shifted, instead of how much should we set aside for builders and chucking at big companies we are now looking at how we set ourselves up to accommodate working parties – what facilities we need and what the village could help provide, I’d rather spent a couple of thousand pounds on feeding an army of helpers and putting them up in tents, camping pods (and I know just the woman to provide them 😉 ), even hiring the hostel at the castle and making the set up of the croft an event in everything we have done and learnt and been inspired by this last year.

Very much a work in progress, and of course we still have an interview to get through 😉 but I’m buzzing with ideas of how this could work and have that same amazing excited, Christmas Eve type feeling that I had leading up to heading off WWOOFing last year. Bring on the people – we’re the ones that can make anything happen!