Learning patience, the slow, hard way...

Or is there any other way?

We started with the planning and construction of a modest residence comprising of three rooms, a common kitchen and toilet, and a shed for cows and goats - almost a year ago. And how are we learning patience? Well, these buildings are STILL not yet complete.

Here are some pics along the way, with a timeline :-)

May 2015

We had finally found stonecutters to stay at our site and cut stones at the site.

At the same time, we were also hopeful of making our own bricks, experimenting with quantity, size, composition, and so on...

June 2015
The basement of the residence building had been laid. You will notice that the filling was made with the red soil from the site.

August, 2015
Having realized that we simply had to move to the farm, we had finally managed to buy two army tents from a company in Dehra Dun, lugged the heavy shipment to the site, and had set it up.

September, 2015
We managed to find several sets of old wooden doors and windows, had some basic reconditioning done, and the door frames were set in the building which had just risen above the basement level.

November, 2015
That's right, October is missing in the chronology because almost no work happened with the workers taking off in different directions. A chance meeting with a friend who visited us in September finally led the way to a good soul sending us a new set of masons and helpers, and after a long pause the building was growing skywards again.

December, 2015
Apart from the steady progress with the building, we also managed to have the basic biogas plant built, with the connections to be built a month later. A big thanks to ESAF (http://esafindia.org/) for getting this done.

So, thats how 2015 closed.

How did we fare in 2016? Read the next post to find out....