As I do, in my thinking of our progress, motivation and enjoyment of this owner-building adventure, I got to re-examining our priorities.

This little graphic is the ‘building triangle’ explained to us by Richard, our building supervisor, way back when we were just starting to talk about how to owner-build a strawbale house.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Actually, Richard drew it point up - I prefer it this way because it makes more sense to me – and those who have read The da Vinci Code might note the potential symbology of both orientations ;-).

But, I digress. 

The ‘builder’s triangle’ shows you the three ultimate goals of building – most of us want all three of these to be in our favour – but experience shows, you can only have two!  They can be any two, so you just rotate the triangle to illustrate your own priorities.

Richard’s builder’s triangle was a very worthwhile lesson for us to decide which two were going to work for us and which one is the compromise.  The way I have labelled this is the priorities we decided on way back – we wanted the money and quality to be the things we had most control over, and therefore we accepted that sometimes, the timing had to accommodate that. 

And I found it a very worthwhile process to re-examine the triangle and take note of the priorities I have felt in these latter stages – they were actually different to what I thought I was feeling!  In the last few weeks, I had thought I wanted the time factor to be the priority (we want to move into this house!), but when I spent the time to really examine my feelings, it actually wasn’t, and that triangle is still looking the same to us…