There is NO electricity on our property (there is at the road/entrance to our land), there is no house or structure in place yet, and there is no septic or well either. Basically it is a beautiful, clean slate for whatever we want!!
There is approximately a 2 mile gravel road that we live on before we get to the main road. We are ~35-45 minutes away from the nearest anything.
The plan:
We are building in phases with the goal of not having a mortgage. Our initial home is going to be 20'x28' with 10' ceilings and the main space having a living room, bathroom, kitchen and closet. There will be a loft above the bathroom and kitchen where our bedroom will be.
Energy efficiency is an absolute must in our plans. One of the things I hate most is having bills - gas bills, electric bills, mortgage, etc. The more we can do now to save $$ for the future is the plan. Some of the things we're looking into:
- Insulating the house not only on the inside (1/3 of it) but also on the outside too. The Cold Climate Housing Research Center (http://www.cchrc.org/) has an instructional video on YouTube that Scott found that basically shows you how to better insulate a home for cold weather. The basics of it: you insulate 1/3 on the inside and 2/3rds on the outside of the house to maintain a temperature above the dew point so no mold can grow in the walls.
- We will not be heating the house with a furnace or cooling the house with central air. Personally, in our Ohio house, it was a huge waste of money. We rarely used 2 of the 3 bedrooms and only 1 room of the basement. Why heat/cool the entire house? In our Ohio house, we used window air conditioners during the summer and only occasionally were they turned on. In the winter, I hated using the furnace (mostly because I am cheap) so we'd never get above 65-67 degrees and mostly stayed around 62-63 degrees. I would turn the on the furnace in the morning only to get the house up to 67 degrees, then during the day we'd heat only the rooms we were in using infrared electric heaters. We will be bringing these heaters with us to WY but will also be adding a wood burning stoves too which will be our main source of heat.
- We have all energy efficient appliance that we plan to bring with us to WY.
We have lots and lots of planning to do and as we determine what we're doing, I'll be including pictures and details of the process.
The most interesting part of this - we are physically building our home all ourselves! Just the 2 of us.
One of the most frequent questions we get asked is "Where will you be living while you build?"
We are taking a 16'x7' cargo trailer with us. We will sleep in part of the trailer and also use the trailer to haul building materials in as well as storage for tools and supplies too. There is no running water, electricity, a toilet or shower. So we're going to be creative:) We have 4 cats and as a result LOTS of empty cat litter tubs. These will be our portable 'toilets' and for showers we will either sponge bath with heated water over the propane mini camping stove, use lots of wet wipes, or, when we can, we'll hit up a local campground to use the showers. I believe the term 'roughing it' is appropriate here! Luckily we do have a neighbor about a mile away that has kindly told us that we can get water from his house.
Some of the things on our to-do list before we head out (we're hoping to head out in April to start building, weather permitting):
- In January we are submitting all applications to the state - septic and well
- Scheduling our Well Digger guy as that will determine where we will be building
- Scheduling our septic guy who we will also have dig the foundation
- Creating our final building plans down to the specific details. Note: we are not using pre-purchased blue-prints or designs. We are creating our own design to fit our needs and our style.
- We need to finish packing all our belongings, selling what we aren't taking with us, and purchase more tools/supplies we need while in WY.
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