Armed with my terrible BAL assessment, and with the contract deadlines looming, I did the vaguely sensible thing and ran to an expert.
I’d gone visiting houses for Sustainable House Day back in September, and one of them was an awesome two-story strawbale house in Doubleview, built and owned by two architects Christian and Deepti. I cold-called Christian, explained my predicament and begged for some of his time – if nothing else, just to see if I was at all sane, or if I should run away and start again.
Had a great meeting with the two of them, where they not only convinced me I was somewhat sane, but Deepti got rather enthusiastic and started sketching changes to J’s design. I left them to play with it for a while, and signed off on the contract conditions.
