Wood & Strawbale House - Phase 1: Cleaning and Boundaries.
My wife had bought 360m2 building land, in south-east Istria, 5 km from the sea, which had an old foundation on it. The land had not been used for more than 50 years, and it was quite a jungle ... and a trash disposal for villagers and the sheppards living closeby. When we arrived here, it was impossible to enter the property, we had to cut ourselves a little path towards the middle of the piece, to see what was really there.
We started with simple tools to clean up bush, cutting small trees to make a clearing in the middle, and uncover the old foundation.
After opening up the land between the old stone walls, we asked a surveyor to measure and mark the real property boundaries.
Landownership registration in Croatia is quite a complicated matter. There is the old Austro-Hungarian measurements from hundreds of years ago which use mostly natural landmarks to define lots, there is the register of aerial observations done by the Yugoslavian army, and there is a 'book of ownership' which is full of false information because people were trading pieces of land withpout telling the bureaucrats.
Nowadays, the new cadastre of Croatia is using modern equipment, to fuse all this information into a final ownership register. So during this measurement process, we came upon a rather weird situation. The agent had sold her a property that was actually partly belonging to someone else ! We ended up owning only half of the old ruin (!?) And therefore we could not just rebuild on top of the old structure, but we would have to apply and pay for a new building license. We had learned the first lesson for buying land here; alway get a surveyor to confirm the actual property boundaries before buying !
Anyway after lots of handwork and later employing a local digger, we ended up with this piece.
Slightly smaller in size than expected, but still large enough to make a small house. We bought an old army container, to have a workshop there, and a place to store tools and materials.
