🖋 How to choose the right spot?

#2 3 months of intensive investigation

Hey! ☀️

From mid-June to early September 2020, we spent almost every evening looking for the perfect piece of land. We scoured Polish real estate websites and apps (otodom.pl, nieruchomosci-online.pl, olx.pl/nieruchomosci, morizon.pl, sprzedajemy.pl/nieruchomosci), Facebook Marketplace) while keeping in mind our idyllic idea of a yurt overlooking the mountains of southern Poland.

We imagine this place every day for ourselves, our future guests and perhaps also for the arrival of a future offspring. We want this place to be simple, autonomous, far from the noise, far from the modern factories that serve us as a city, close to the singing of birds, close to a "real" nature that is still a bit wild, where the air is breathable, where cars are objects of curiosity. A place where our real existential priorities resurface, such as eating, resting, enjoying the silence, warming up in winter, marvelling, sharing, drinking a beer with friends, leaving behind the superfluous, the race to perform and against the clock. We want to find that place of disconnection, the one that will offer a real cocoon feeling in the middle of nothing.

🌳 🛖 “Beyond the Forest Lane” is a newsletter which talk about our project of Yurt x Permaculture in the forest, from scratch until the opening, at Ciężkowice in Poland 🇵🇱. We are Prisca & Guillaume. Last year, we decided to invest our energy and time to change our life. You want to learn with us? Subscribe! We will tell you all about.

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To achieve this effect, 1000m2 is clearly not enough. The first obstacle is to find a large enough plot of land that fits our budget and has enough charm to make us feel good. Already there, finding the right nugget that we both like to put our yurt, permaculture garden and part of our life on was not easy. We started looking mainly for land between 5000m2 and 1 hectare. Honestly, we scoured the whole of Poland, region by region, while imagining how we could move if we found the rare gem several hundred kilometers from Cracow, the city where we currently live. There are plenty of green fields out there. But finding the one that you are sure will not offer you a view of a construction site for houses, buildings, hotels or SPAs in several years is another matter. You definitely don't want to buy land where the sound of birds will be replaced by the sound of excavators. By projecting this additional vision, the vise tightens and the knots in the brains come. 😅

First visiting to Łącko koło Nowego Sącza

In the mountains, our favorite field, we quickly realized that it wasn't for us. It was out of our budget. 😅 The plots of land that fitted into our price range were 90% of the time building plots with little surface area, where houses grow like mushrooms, or agricultural plots with no building area, no water, no electricity, with sometimes mediocre beauty, requiring a lot of work from the start. A few weeks passed and we decided to review our script.

We refine our research by setting ourselves a distance not to cross: no more than 2 hours from Cracow (which is already not bad). Indeed, it may seem silly, but the further away it is, the more energy it takes to get there and consequently, the more petrol in the car, the more time in our respective already tight schedules, thus the more expenses and mental load. At the same time, it should be noted that we were freaked out by the evolution of the situation related to COVID. We were also afraid of having less money coming in due to unforeseen events that could occur in our jobs. This adds extra anxiety. But the vision is too strong to give up. We want to go all the way. If we're going to learn how to chop wood, it's now. 😅 We swallow our spit and fall back on less expensive terrain, taking us further away from the mountains. So we start looking at forest plots or lands near a forest.

Visiting to Gródek nad Dunajcem

Finally, why not set up our project in an area that is a bit out of the way, without much notoriety, but which deserves to be really discovered? The places that interested us at the beginning, such as Zakopane, Krynica Zdrój, Żywiec, Gródek nad Dunajcem, in the south of Poland, are very touristy and perhaps do not really correspond to the vision of our future "us". The more the weeks go by, the more our limiting thoughts fade away. By necessity, we break the lock and multiply our sources of research.

Prisca stumbles upon a pitch that pretty much matches our new criteria... on Facebook Marketplace. 🤯 We didn't think it was really possible to do business through this channel, but in fact it is. As soon as the ad was published, the appointment was immediately made. A forest glade of almost 1 hectare with half of it buildable, in an almost unknown town the size of a stretch of road, where chickens and cows outnumber humans. The land is virgin. No water, no electricity, no visual pollution as it is in a forest, only 1 hour from the mountains and some kilometers from Podkarpackie by car. The pictures published on the ad are far from being crazy but you say 'ok' without really knowing why. After a 10min walk on a forest lane leading to the site, we arrived and were pleasantly surprised. Just before we set off again, a huge dragonfly grazed us. I remembered the last dragonfly I had seen: it was a drawing I had done at primary school for my grandmother. She sadly passed away from Elzheimer's disease a few years ago. I loved her very much and I liked to interpret it as a sign of fate. Prisca, on the other hand, likes to say that it was this place that "chose" us. We'll tell you why next time. 🙂

The photo we had before the visit. 😅

Learnings: Don't rely too much on all your criteria, nor on appearances through 2/3 photos seen on social networks. There is a world of difference between a raw photo and what you can feel when you are there. Keep the vision of your future "you" in your heart, move around and just... feel the moment, follow your intuition, without looking for perfection. In a project like ours, we realized that we had to learn to really think differently. Ticking off the criteria of a plot of land like ticking off your grocery shopping list is dead way. It doesn't work like that. We also know that there will be a lot of more or less pleasant unforeseen events. In fact, they have already started to appear. 😅 We are also learning to be really patient. On the one hand you want to go fast to experience something new as quickly as possible, but on the other hand you have no choice but to be patient if you want to learn to compose the second major part of your life in an environment more in harmony with nature. A fruit tree will take a minimum of 5 years to deliver its treasures to you anyway so you need to relax a bit. 😅

Today, we have a rather complete and above all common picture of what we want to do. Our energy tends towards this same vision. And that's already a huge step. It is perhaps the most important step in the end. We don't know yet how we'll actually get there, or when we'll put up our first yurt, although we think it might happen sooner than we thought. After all, that's what's so exciting about it. It is the nature of our land that will guide all of our actions to develop it in its image and respect it as best as possible, not the other way around.

By the way, at the beginning of March, we wanted to post a newsletter every Monday to keep the rhythm. Here too we have revised our copy. We'll just write when we feel the need to do so 🙂 So it could arrive any time in your mailbox. For more regular news, there's our Instagram account. If you want to know what's going on in more depth, don't hesitate to subscribe ;) We'll be so happy! 😍 ↘️

Take care! 😘
Take back the power of your time.
And we will go there together.

Uważaj na siebie! 😘
Odzyskaj władzę nad swoim czasem.
I jedziemy tam razem.

🦊 Prisca & Guillaume 🦊

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