Moving Again

     With every bucket of dirt dumped into the tire wall, I look at the mountain of dirt that still needs moved by hand before we finish the walls. Some people take 5-10 years to build their Earthship but I don't want to wait that long! Even if we make excellent progress, 2 years will be a minimum length of time until it's done. But I don't want to continue renting where we are and not be living on the farm for that long. It's too hard to have animals in two separate places, especially when there is no running water at one of those places. I'm ready to be living on our own property far removed from a two-lane road. That leaves us only a few options: (1) move our family of 4 into the tiny camper we bought this spring, (2) buy a larger mobile home to put beside the build site to live in, or (3) fix up the dilapidated house that is already there to stay in.

     As much as I love camping, the camper is just too small to move our family into for that long. Buying a mobile home would be fine as we could resell it after our Earthship is done, except it would tie up all of our funds and not leave any money to actually build the house. Which leaves the option of moving in the old farmhouse. If you've followed the blog, you'll recall that we bought the property intent on restoring the old home. But the failing foundation, outdated electrical, lack of insulation, nonexistent heat source, and water damage made it unsalvageable. We found out that the cost to fix these problems (mainly the foundation) would be more than the cost of new construction. And even with a $16,000 foundation repair, there could still be future foundation issues since that cost only included putting the house back on the limestone blocks and not building a new foundation. In my disappointment over not being able to salvage the house, I didn't realize that it could still be made livable with some minor improvements. So we've decided to put a little bit of money and a lot of work into making the house livable while we build. Unfortunately, this will put the Earthship build on hold while we run new electrical and water lines and fix some of the major issues. So this may be the 50th time we've changed our minds about our living arrangements, but I think this will put us on the right path towards sustainability.

     Living in the farmhouse will afford us more time to work on the Earthship and allow us to take better care of the property. Instead of caring for the animals here in their temporary shelters, we can build their permanent coops and cages there with better features like automatic waterers and exterior access to the nest boxes for egg collection. I know the house is a little rough and some people wouldn't even consider moving into it but we don't mind a little "character" and it will help us take another big step toward our dream of living a debt-free life and creating our own utopia. Let's just hope we all don't develop a lean from living in our crooked house!

Much Love,

Jennyerin