Final Plans and Hobson's Choices

Photo copyright Aji, 2016; all rights reserved.

Yes, I'm back to pushing the fundraising page for our effort to build a home. It doesn't feel at all the same now, but it's not like there's a choice. Taking a break from it was absolutely essential to my ability to get anything done right now, though. The last few weeks have been . . . difficult in the extreme, to understate it by several orders of magnitude. An absent hired hand, two lamed-up horses, three sick dogs, one badly torn-up ankle, and then our Griffin suddenly gone. [And, yes, I still have thank-you notes to write. I'm sorry for the delay. My spirit is in shreds, and interpersonal stuff has been entirely beyond me the last few weeks.]

On the plus side, as of last Monday or Tuesday (I'm beyond swamped with work, and one day runs into the next), we finally have a complete set of plans. We have calls into a number of professional types for the stages involved in breaking ground. It turns out that a threshold issue is going to be the heating system, and I don't know whether we're going to be able to do it as designed. Yes, it's drastically more energy-efficient (and therefore cost-effective in the long run), but the up-front costs may be so great as to delay the project entirely if we go with it. We need a place to live more than we need to be perfectly environmentally correct. Despite the look of the plans, we will not be going with the most expensive option (nor anything close to it) for everything; this is not one of the multimillion-dollar subdivisions on the other side of the highway.

We are, at the moment, in a bit of a holding pattern again while we wait for people to return calls and set appointments and so forth. Once we know which way we're going with the heating system, the excavation work commences. Then it's the laying of the below-ground work: plumbing; electrical; potentially, the heating system. Then comes the foundation. Then things begin to move faster. Sometime between now and that point, we are going to have to buy all of the windows (yes, now) to make sure that the walls accommodate them properly when they go up; it's not the sort of thing you can retrofit reasonably. Doing it this way is the sensible way, of course, but the front-end expense is astronomical. It's a Hobson's choice, but we can't make the mistake the donkey did.

So, once again, here's the link to our YouCaring page. Please don't share my Facebook links; please use the widgets on the fundraising page itself to share (or, failing that, copy and paste the URL). Please also copy the widget code from the button in the lower right-hand corner and spread it around; that produces this graphic, which updates automatically:

Many thanks to everyone who has helped us thus far, in every conceivable way. I'm unlikely to post this daily for now, but I'll post updates as I have news.



All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.