The title was supposed to me ‘Life’…but I am trying to learn to type on a new keyboard and I keep hitting the wrong keys…so, instead of life, we have ‘kufe’. I like it.

Well, it looks like our plans to build an addition are being put on hold. We finally got an estimate from our contractor and he thinks it will cost twice what we were prepared to pay!! I don’t understand why a big hallway and empty room should cost soooo much!! Plus, our original plan was to use recycled materials and build as much of it as we could ourselves. But, getting building permits for alternative building structures is hard to do and our contractor kept pushing for doing it the ‘normal’ way. And with me starting school next week and both Toby and I already feeling stretched thin, I really doubt we could put in much sweat equity. We don’t plan on staying here for more than 3-5 years, so investing a big chunk of money to make this house passive solar wouldn’t pay off in that amount of time. If we know where we were going once I get out of school we could buy some land to build on. But, we’re not sure…any ideas on where we should invest in the meantime? As for heating the house passively, we will probably put some water barrels in the south facing windows to hold the suns heat and make some heavy duty shades to keep the warmth in during the winter nights. I’m not sure what we will do about growing food indoors. Our original plan was to have the solar hallway full of planting beds to grow food all year long…maybe we will build some planter beds on top of the water barrels??? We’ll see….