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Hello Faithful Readers!
It has been nearly six months since I shared anything here or on my Facebook page. As usual, it has been a busy time. 🙂  I thought I’d pop in very quickly and share the latest news.
We’ve been working on the cabin. You can expect that any time I pop in for an update you’ll see these words. Someone asked me today when we expect to have the cabin completed. I said “about 20 years.” I know she thought I was kidding…
Here is what’s been completed.
Our little cabin has a very basic solar system!
It’s a 24 volt system and will run 110 items. It will be great for me to be able to work from home and will have a little more ‘juice’ for the basics.
Eventually we’ll be digging a well. At that time we’ll either have to beef up our system to accommodate for the well pump or use an alternate method to operate the well pump.
Until the well is in, this will be one of our main sources of water. We have a tank on either side of the house. Each hold 275 gallons. We also have a tank on our small shed that is 60 gallons. Right now we use this for cleaning and haul our drinking/cooking water in 5 gallon containers. This harvested water will mainly be for the animals and gardens once we live up here full time. Â We’re having a thousand gallon underground cistern installed that we’ll fill from the water station in the nearby town for drinking/cooking water. Once the well is in it will fill the cistern. We’ll also be adding more water harvesting systems as we build additional outbuildings. The plan is for each full height building (or close to full height building) to have a capturing system.
Fun fact: for every 100 square feet of roof you can expect to collect about 60 gallons of water from one inch of rain. We’ve had people stop and tell us how exciting it has been to watch our rain barrels fill up. Most are shocked at how much we are collecting. The current barrels still need to have an overflow system installed.
In the picture above you can also see our septic pipe. Our county requires a septic system to be installed. There are many other options for off-grid systems in other areas. We plan to use either captured water or grey water to flush to help conserve resources.
We’ve been working on the inside. I hope have more pictures to share with you soon — maybe sooner than six months. 🙂
In other news, my youngest girl graduated from high school in June and will be starting college near the end of August.  Later this month my second child is getting married. She’s having a “Destination Wedding” to Lake Tahoe. Right after they return from their honeymoon, they are closing on a home purchase. It’s a lovely 3 bedroom. My oldest girl and her husband are also buying a home. It’s also an adorable place. My #3 girl is planning to buy our current home once she finishes college. Our little guy will start his official school career this year. We’ll continue homeschooling but because of his age need to make it official with the school district.
My husband has ‘retired’ from his job. At least we call it retiring. He’s focusing on farming and starting a second business once we get settled in our new place. Right now he is staying plenty busy with cabin work, packing and chicken farming. He raised 50 pastured meat birds to sell this spring. We kept a couple for ourselves and they were super yummy. We plan to expand the operation once we have 20 acres instead of 2.
Those are the highlights from recent months. Thanks for stopping by!
