Offers home decorating advice; make your home look better with little money and lots of ingenuity.

Of interest for those who want to buy or rent vacationing houses, cabins, cottages, etc.

True elegance implies the use of discretion to aesthetics, and in order to decorate a house, an apartment or a cabin in the middle of a forest you don't need to invest large sums of money. Of fourse, you can do that, but in most cases it would be just a waste of a valuable resource.

When we, the explorers of Andinia, decide to visit an uncharted region, the first thing we do is to plan a network of shelters - generally made out of stone - that will eventually become our research and movement bases. In other words, we seldom use a base camp as most mountaineers know, because we always develop something better, and instead of relying in simpel tents, we build ourselves full-size cabins. Our time is valuable, and since we cannot assure our return to the same area periodically, we want to take advantage of what we have, and more space means more mobility even if the weather is bad.

Plus, having a network of cabins increases safety and survivability: we place each cabin at about half a day of march from each other. Every construction includes a metal stove or an stone oven, a deposit with emergency provisions and rations, tools and enough room for a whole expedition group, plus their equipment which is seldom left outdoors due to meteorological concerns.

Almost every material we use is biodegradable and obtained locally, and while we seldom put much interior decoration in each of these constructions, we have the landscape to compensate: indeed, when we look for a place to build a cabin, we look at practical issues such as the factibility of long term survival there, accessibility, distance and so on, but we also give the view a lot of thinking. Each one of these bases has been constructed in places which are nice, in one way or another: we have 'private' lakes, waterfalls, skking slopes and such things, all for our own use, and all completely isolated from civilisation.

And we can do all this with little money: none of the dozen or so of such constructions put our pockets back more than 500 euros each.

Shops, Auctions and Malls

Articles

Similar Sites

Related Web Pages

Books

Forum