There were two really bad decisions we had made before we even started. The first was that our house was huge. Twelve hundred square feet for two, maybe three people? The second was the location. Minnesota. Land of 10,000 lakes and sub-zero winter temperatures.
We wrote these two obstacles into our plans and decided to deal with them as best we could and then just improve on them as we needed. In retrospect, my husband Joey and I should have started from scratch to save money, but tearing down a house in the middle of suburb wasn't our best way to garner support from our neighbors.
"Sarah's place always smells like caramel corn..." I caught our neighbor saying one day. They had forgotten we don't close our windows in the summer because don't have air-conditioning. I actually took the time to explain it to them too. We had fired up our corn stove early summer because that night it was supposed to get below freezing and we couldn't risk bursting any water pipes. It was also nice to have really hot water that morning.
If you hadn't gathered it yet. My husband and I converted our suburban cookie-cutter house into a self-sufficient energy producing home. We are completely "off the grid." We haven't paid an energy bill in years and we don't ever plan to. But it wasn't easy to get to this point.
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notes: This is going to be a side-story to the petro wars. The narration format doesn't really leave a lot space for lexicon, or prose, but I think it might be a great mix-up to be able to switch styles during the writing and reading....
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