The ground is just thawed and dry enough to get in some digging on the sunnier days. I have a lot of digging ahead of me, and so I have to take advantage of all the time I can get. An addition will be put on the house, including an …

It has been a crazy winter and I have been slacking on the blog.  We have been working on game making projects, resting before we start building again. Once the build gets going, there will be plenty on the blog to check out.  No promises as to how often I …

I just can take waiting any longer.  I need to start working on my house, but we have too much snow on the ground to do anything outside yet.  How can I possibly build my house inside while waiting around…. Prepare the stained glass windows.  My current plan (subject to …

One of the most important reasons we changed our lives so drastically was that we felt living off grid out in the woods would be better for our children than living in town.  One of the ways it is better is that it provides opportunities  for children to learn hands …

Here it is, my favorite part of planning a house, the floorplans!  I coudn’t get it all in one piece.  It hasn’t been sunny enough to charge my laptop that has the photo editing software on it. Here is the quick breakdown:  We will be off grid completely.  Up is …

Building a house and living in a house both produce large amounts of waste.  Not our house!  This will be as close to a no waste as possible and our finished house will produce no where near what a conventional home might produce. Since we are using almost all natural …

Our dream home is a fairly complex natural home with lots of fun additions like an attached green house and an amazing masonry stove as the centerpiece of the home.  This house will take a lot of skills to build.  A lot of skills that we do not currently have.  …

Being energy efficient is a must for us here on the homestead.  We don’t have the time to waste energy.  This is going to be very important to keep in mind when we build our cordwood house this spring. The most important energy in our home build is heat.  We …

The last post I did was about observing and interacting with your environment and I talked a lot about finding free resources on our land to do various projects.  The greatest project so far is going to be salvaging materials to build a cordwood house.  Here’s the story of the …

An important part of taking on a project as big as a house, is to practice the building techniques you may want to use.  Our plan is to build our home out of cordwood and domes, so when we had the opportunity for the man to go help Freedom’s Phoenix …