Welcome to Kits and Mortar!

Now that our wedding is over, Kevin and I need to figure out a few things about our future together. One of those things is to decide where, and how, we live. Right now, ‘home’ is a small one-bedroom flat in north London, a flat so small that even the gas boiler repair man felt the need to pass comment on it. We’ve been here two years, and the place has filled up to capacity with stuff, even though most of my worldly possessions are in my parents’ loft, and Kevin’s are all in a lock-up in Maryland. We have no idea where we are going to put our wedding presents.

At some point, we want our own house: A place that’s not only our refuge from the world, but also a canvas for us to paint as we will. We are prohibited from changing this flat in any way (technically, we’re not even allowed to move the furniture), which means no art on the walls, no changing the decor from its current pale yellow, no repainting the grubby woodwork. But we want somewhere we can make our own, where we can change what we want, however we want it.

I have dreamed of building my own house for years and years now, spurred on by programmes like Grand Designs, where the lovely Kevin McCloud follows people who have decided to build their own house. The series started in 1999 and is now on its eighth run, and I’m as avid a watcher as ever. Kevin too would like to self-build, and as we can’t help but comment on the Grand Design builds, talk about what we want, and discuss what we’d do differently, we figured that we might as well start a blog as a place to gather all our ideas and thoughts.

There are two organising principles to both house and blog:

1. The house we want to build must be green. Not just token green, but as green as we can feasibly make it. That means looking not just as things like energy efficiency, but also the environmental impact of the very materials we intend to use. There will be limits to our budget, so we’ll need to ensure that we make the the best decisions we can for us, for the house, and for the environment. It means thinking innovatively, drawing in ideas from wherever we find them, and thinking about how our decisions will change the character of the house itself.

2. The house must be cat-friendly. We’re both love cats, but there are many places in America where it’s just not all that safe for kitties to be let outside. Kev’s brother has lost many cats - coyotes, eagles, and snakes are all a danger - so we want to build a house that’s not just good for us to live in, but good for our cats too. What does cat-friendly design mean? To be honest, we have no idea. But we’ll have fun finding out.

So that’s why the blog is called Kits and Mortar - not because we’re going to build a kit house (although never say never!), but because our house is going to be designed to keep our kits happy. It’s also going to be a commercial venture, so there’ll be advertising here soon to help pay for hosting and maybe even provide a little extra to go into our house fund.

Now, you might be asking, where are we going to build? That’s a very good question. We don’t have a plot of land. We don’t even know which country we’re going to build in - the US or the UK. All that’s up for grabs. We don’t even know what we want to build. We just know that we need to start the process now, we need spend some time - maybe even some years - working it all out.

And who knows, maybe we’ll even make some of those decisions right here, on our blog.