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Fed up with huge mortgage payments, Simon Dale decided to take matters into his own hands – literally。 Armed with only a chisel, a chainsaw and a hammer, the 32-year-old moved his family to a hillside in Wales and started digging。 The result is a wooden eco-home – constructed in four months and costing just £3,000 – which would look perfectly at ease alongside the Hobbit houses in The Lord Of The Rings。 Mr Dale, who has no experience in carpentry or architecture, created his sustainable family home using scrap wood for floors, materials scavenged from skips and by diverting water from a nearby spring。 And while he was doing the building work, his wife Jasmine Saville and their two toddler children camped in the nearby countryside。 He said: "Being your own have-a-go architect is a lot of fun and allows you to create and enjoy something which is part of yourself and the land rather than, at worst, a mass-produced box designed for maximum profit and the convenience of the construction industry. Building from natural materials does away with producers’ profits and the cocktail of carcinogenic poisons that fill most modern buildings。 The family struck lucky searching for a site for their dream project. In return for looking after the area, the owner of the woods gave them their plot for free。 After digging into the hillside, Mr Dale – with the help of his father-in-law, a builder – first constructed the building’s timber frame。 | 
