In the beginning

Welcome to our Up-Cycle House blog. This is the beginning of a journey of sharing life together. 

The project itself began more than 10 years ago. As all dreams, this was also carried tightly in our hearts until a few years ago we got married and started to look for a place that could host this dream of ours. We don't own a car, so we bicycled and took some trains across Lombardia and Piedmont, in Northern Italy. We also looked for houses online, considering Liguria too. At the same time we started agressively saving money and make concrete plans. We are world travelling creatives with many interests and a history of doing lots of voluntary work so we didn't have big savings or career income, but we made it. After two years of our research and saving up we bought a beautiful old soap factory in Piedmont, right at the foot of the Italian Alps, in a town called Biella. Later on we will explain why we chose that place. Right now I can say that we fell inlove with the house that is big enough to share with other people and small enough to fix in two to five years time.

The reason we want to share our journey is to encourage and inspire you to keep dreaming the way you want to live. Where do you want to live? Why? Who do you want to live with? In what kind of  space do you want to live? What kind of life you want to create around you? How can your living-choice have a positive effect in the larger community? These were all questions we kept struggling with. I (Tiina) have lived over ten years in Milan in a small apartment in a very urban area with little greenery near by. I have several good friends here. We both belong to a great group of friends and are part of a wonderful spiritual community. We eat dinners with our neighbours and are good friends with our neighbourhood barista. Yet, we have never been satisfied the way we lived here. We still feel like we belong to a tighter community. We want to share our daily life with others more closely. We also are aware of the lack of sustanablity of our life-style in the city. It cannot sustain some spiritual and ecological aspects of ourselves neither of the environment. We are in a search for more...