Simon Culverhouse
I’m Simon and with my french wife Florence I have been living in Brittany, France since the turn of the century.
We relocated to France after buying a run-down farmhouse with an acre of land in 1999. The intention was to renovate the property ourselves and also to produce as much of our own food as possible.
With this website I would like to share some of the ideas and projects that I have completed.
In the My Projects section you will find all sorts of projects that I have made in order to fulfill a need. For instance I built the chicken plucker to speed up and simplify the processing of our homegrown poultry. I try to use reclaimed parts and materials as possible to keep costs down.My Website
This is the third incarnation of my website. When I first decided to build a website I went for Wordpress and a cheap hosting company, but found that after putting hours into building the site it was incredibly slow. To avoid the need for a complete rebuild of the site I decided to try switching hosting company. I chose WPMU DEV which at 49€ per month was quite expensive for me, but an excellent hosting. Their support is also excellent and they helped me a lot with the transfer and set up. My website was finally useable!
However, after a few months, I found that performance was reduced again. This was my fault, the problem was that I tended to continue to ‘improve’ the site with the addition of extra plugins and more styling. In the end the site had become over complicated and slow (although still faster than the original).
In June 2020 I decided on a complete change, myprojectcorner.com is now a static website built using the Hugo static website builder and hosted on Google Firebase.
To arrive at this point has been a huge learning curve, but now my site is lightning fast and I feel I have more control over the layout. I must say I think Hugo is awesome, as is the community that surrounds it.