Now to be clear: having moved in by no means means the house is done! You may be able to see in the pictures that the drywall has no mud or paint on it. And the downstairs drywall is still mostly sitting stacked and waiting to be hung up among moving boxes waiting to be smiled upon.
Erica and I are sleeping up in the attic, the kids are sleeping in the dance room where we also eat and spend most of our indoor time. One of the bathrooms has been turned into a temporary kitchen, and the other has a toilet (yesssss) and some more boxes.
So far we've been getting all of our water from the creek, and filtering our drinking water through a countertop filter. It's a romantic notion to haul your water up from a wild stream, but the romance is tested as you walk up the hill. I've been taking strength thinking of people in dryer, poorer parts of the world. There is a video series at our library called Families of the World, which shows a day in the life of a child in all different kinds of places, and one of the things that strikes me about these videos is how many people haul water as a major part of every day, sometimes for miles. What happens when they get sick? Retire?...
The pink insulation in the foreground here surrounds our water source, a spring box. By this I mean it taps into the water flowing just a few feet beneath the surface. There's a line buried that runs up to the house, along side it lies an electrical line. Because the water is so close to the surface, we'll still run it through a filter to keep out bacteria and whatever weird stuff might be running off of our house and vehicles. But what an exciting thought to be able to wash hands and dishes in flowing water! And once we connect gas to the house, we'll be able to choose cold or hot! So far the only water outlet going is the kitchen sink.
The house has been keeping pretty warm, but it gets a little hard to heat when it gets down around 0ยบ. It'll probably be a lot easier when we set up more permanent, efficient wood burners.
Idgy has been coming to visit a few times a day now. I think you can see why.
The goal for 2012 is to finish the downstairs enough to move into it and also build the porches. We plan to have a deck-building party sometime late this summer, maybe Labor Day.
So far we don't have a very good phone connection, but please text anytime, or use a texting website like txtdrop.com. Otherwise stop on by!
