designing our home

The more work I do designing our house, the more I realize how many problems there are with conventional homes.

 1) Indoor kitchens. STUPID IDEA. You basically pay to heat your house up and then pay to cool it back down again, in the summer time. We don't have AC in our apartment, so we can't cook unless it is very early in the morning. In this house, we will have a tiny wood burning stove for winter, which will heat our house and our food. In the summer we will cook outside under the awning (crock pots, toaster ovens, and open flames).

 2) Plumbing. It generally does not work well. Drains are always getting clogged, and are very hard to unclog without invasive measures or harsh chemicals. The kitchen sink is the most disgusting thing. Flush toilets use perfectly fine drinking water, and a lot of it. In this house, we will have a separate building nearby with a composting toilet, a grey water sink, and an outdoor grey water shower. For next winter we will build a solar-heated bath house for bathing in the winter time. We will probably have an old-fashioned chamber pot for midnight pee pees, inside the house.

 3) 2nd stories are generally poorly designed. They are a big trap for hot air. You have to pay tons of money to keep your 2nd floor cool in the summer. This house has windows which vent open at the top of the angled roof. The high ceilings also keep hot air out of the main living space in the summer time.

 4) Few windows come with most conventional homes. You have to pay for light, which is free. You have to pay for cool air to circulate through your house, which is free at night in the spring, fall, and summer. More south-facing windows would allow the winter sun to heat your home for free as well. This house will have more windows than is pictured. And not the crappy kind that are very hard to open and close! The old fashioned kind that swing open and latch shut.

5) Most conventional homes have more space than you need. This leads to people spending half of their time either cleaning or maintaining some aspect of their home. Most people work long hours to pay for a huge house they don't need. This house is 12x12x12 (local laws allow buildings this small to exist without permits).

6) Most homes are made of cheap, toxic, ugly materials. This house will be made of local, rough cut lumber, light clay slip straw walls, recycled windows, doors, and broken concrete.
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Our budget is $2000. No rent, no mortgage!!

Spring time yet again!

Since our last post, most of our chickens were killed by our neighbor's dog, and one was killed by a black snake. The last (very nervous) chicken went to live with our dear friend Sam's flock at Bull City Farm. Free range is clearly not an option for us.

We have planted plum trees and dozens of additional support plants.



Tiny plums:




We had the lovely surprise of this flush of mushrooms on our wood chip path, which is a sign of success for folks like us who are trying to turn a field into a forest!




The spring beds have been shaped into pods instead of rows this year. Some areas have been sitting under a pile of compost, while others have been cover cropped. We will see how these various techniques work this spring. All the classic spring veggies have been planted.




Here's the good ol' pear tree, still doing well.



The front lawn at my dad's house used to be grass, but due to a lack of maintenance became a patch of ugly mud for a long time. Now the forest is creeping in and making it beautiful with this bed of moss.



The river looks impressive with its increased volume after recent spring storms.



The wrong person is writing this blog post. Ash has been doing all of the work, and would be much better at describing what is going on.

I've been concentrating on designing our natural home, which we hope to build this year. Oh, and the baby, of course!

GROWTH!

The corn is very tall, and we have already harvested about 6 large ears!! The pumpkins have also spread out a lot, doing an impressive job of out-competing the weeds. The beans, unfortunately, aren't doing anything. We have NEVER been able to get beans of any kind to grow here! Any tips on bean growing?



The tomatoes were never staked, because my mom said her grandmother never staked hers and they did just fine. Well, we should have staked some for comparison, but the tomatoes do in fact seem to be doing well without stakes. It looks like a jungle, but only the very large heirloom varieties are touching the ground and rotting before we can pick them (maybe we should stake those next time). Here is a photo of the first big harvest we got... we get a colander full of tomatoes almost every day. My mom and I eat a lot of tomatoes so not a single one has gone to waste. The sun golds are especially special... they taste like candy.




The chickens are growing rapidly... they are 9 weeks old now. I still call them "babies" when I go out to feed them, which is starting to feel a bit silly. Right now we are feeding them a non-antibiotic feed, but our goal is for them to be totally fed on a pasture diet, supplemented by things like grains and seeds that we buy in bulk. I haven't ordered the moveable electric fence yet because my dad and I are still designing a moveable chicken coop.



There is even a tiny pear on one of our pear trees! I wasn't expecting these trees to do anything for at least a couple of years, so that's promising.



There is a mystery plant growing out of our compost pile... anyone know what it is? Looks like something either in the squash family or the melon family.