We took a good look at our layout and we have ALL the peices of our ideal lifestyle, they just aren't in the right order. There are several folks looking for a house in our community and nothing for sale, so we can sell the house easy enough and pay off all our junk debt with cash to spare. We have about 5 acres along the creek here that paid for and I've been lucky enough to do a ton of appraisals on cool off grid cabins out here. Typical invenstment of generators, solar stuff and battery banks is 10-15K for a viable, house running setup. It would cost about 10K to get grid power to our site anyway, so we were sold. We want to build with alot of passive solar features like a big sun room with a slab, etc. Power bill will be gone...
We burn wood for heat anyway so we are good there. We sold our Celicas to start paying things off and I guess commiting to the project was the right thing to do because were were imediately blessed with a 1500+sf set of square hewn log walls for FREE! We just had to take them apart and strip the place to the foundation. This was a failed rec cabin project where the contractor split town, left his wife and a bunch of unpaid bills. They were going to pay someone to tear it down anyway...
A buddy who I do some Toyota favors for is helping us out with our foundation. We have some left over steel roofing from another project, almost enough to do the whole house. We took the money from one of the cars and bought a mill to finish up our timbers and any lumber we need with local free wood from our rancher buddy who wants land cleared. Another contractor buddy is doing a remodel on a fairly new place up at the lake and we get all the windows, which are fairly new good stuff for, that's right FREE. It's crazy and it's all just working out. We hope to be in a dry, paid for box with a wood stove buring in it by winter.
I might even get to go wheeling more often.
![beer :beer:](./images/smilies/beer.gif)