Thanks for all the well wishes! We now have a signed contract on the land!! The plan, once we close, is to get out there immediately and start building. Toby is going to go part time at work and we will build a 12 x 16 temporary structure to live in. It will have a loft and a big covered (possibly screened-in) porch for a kitchen and all in all be ~ 300 sq ft inside with ~190 feet outside. This will be practice for us since neither of us have much building experience at all. It will later be my herb shack/office. We have all that material from the house that Toby helped take down back in Sept. and we hope to use mostly local or recycled materials to build. At first, there will be no electricity, running water and just a bucket to poop in. But, I think it will be a lot of fun for all of us to experience that for a while. In the main house that we build, we hope to have water (from the welll, or catchment system maybe), solar electricity and a composting toilet.

One other possibility is that Toby’s mom really loves Deltec homes and we may help her build a little one of those on our land first, that will give us some building experience and a place to live while we build our main house.

The garden will probably wait until next year. It would just be too much to build a house and start a big garden all at the same time. I will probably throw out some field peas, oats and vetch just to cover the large muddy area, bring some nitrogen to the soil, and I love the taste of the pea shoots! And we will still probably do a few tomatoes and stuff, but noting like the big circle garden of last year, at least not yet!