Is your refrigerator running?

Mine is.

MY REFRIGERATOR IS RUNNING. I still haven't fully grasped the concept of owning a refrigerator. I have lived out of a cooler for about two years now, and that is over, over, over. R.I.P. It's over. I had a bad falling out with Coleman.

In the past month and a half, we have done quite a bit. The house building never seizes to stop. We installed our stove! That was exciting. If you live off grid, you can only have one brand of stove, and I love it. I bought the ridiculous huge one, and haven't regretted it yet for a second. It is a Peerless, and it uses almost NO power, just propane. It only uses 2 watts to light the flame. This is important, for people who have "limited" power. I'll get to that.

The stove has six burners, a griddle, and a gigantic amazing oven that has so far made beautiful quiches, cookies, breads, pies, and more. I am in love. But it's ugly, we're going to have it painted at an auto body shop!

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

I hate to admit that the six burners are most awesome because: You can keep so many dirty dishes on them! It came with a griddle for the middle burners which is pretty awesome. You can make six pancakes at once! So, first was the stove.. Then hell broke loose when we moved onto our next task: Power.

I'm going to try to keep this a short update. One without too many details. I've been so stressed out with solar power, wires, thousands of dollars being spent, thousands of hours being burnt out, and the never ending project we found ourselves knee deep in. This has probably been the most insane month of work we've had yet.

Now it's over. Mission accomplished. We have power. We are going to go to a museum on Friday. I swear. And maybe I'll have time to get my camera fixed this month!

We now have enough solar power to do basically what we want, when we want, and run our refrigerator off of it, too.

Phew.

We started with our panels: We installed four 240 watt Canadian Solar panels onto our roof using an Albuquerque companies "professional installation materials." This company called DPW and they are totally rad. You can go visit them, they know everything and extremely helpful. This was the easiest part of our project, getting these huge, heavy things up onto the roof. (I'm not saying that this was easy, just the easiest thing we did in the past month).

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

Each of these panels is about 50 pounds. They are about 3 x 5 feet. They have been working awesomely! They get an incredible amount of power in cloudy weather, and they are about $1.20 a watt. We bought them at Affordable Solar in Albuquerque. The people there know next too nothing, but the equipment they sell is the cheapest. Recommended only if you know what you want before you show up.

We had to build a completely enclosed structure with a completely sealed box to put our four L16 fork lift batteries. Here's the batteries before we installed them:

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

We then started digging. And building. Same old thing we do when we have to build just about anything at this point. I somehow managed to be too stressed out to document very much of this. And it really happened pretty fast. Picture nothing here, because that's what what there, and then this, our new UTILITY CLOSET!

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

An adobed structure, that will soon be decorated to resemble a rustic cottage. We built this closet to hold our solar equipment, and our water set up. Right now it's only holding the solar stuff, because, well, the water stuff has yet to be installed.

On the outside of the "cottage" cabin, drum roll please... the FRIDGE!

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

It's only been plugged in for a day, but it's amazing so far!! It uses what seems like no power at all, though it does use a some. For a fridge it's incredible! This Hotpoint (model HTH18GBC) is totally huge and quiet enough. It's ugly, as almost every fridge I've ever seen is ugly, but we'll paint it.

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

Ice cubes! What a revelation!

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

Cold food! That's not in a cooler! That's not 40 feet from the house, outside, in a blizzard!!!

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

Buying all our solar stuff, inverter, batteries, charge controller, cables, wires, etc, etc, etc, around 6k.

Making this salad for lunch without having to go to the cooler once? Priceless.

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

My operating cost? $0/year. The only thing we'll for sure have to replace is the batteries, once every 10 years or so. Knock on wood we don't have too many mechanical failures. We'll see. It'll be worth the price. I can't believe I lived so long without a refrigerator.

After a gazillion hours of research...

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

We built a little closet...

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

Put together a few crazy pieces of machinery...

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

Hooked them up to solar panels...

And feel like kings.

I wish this was over, but we still need to wire the whole house:

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

From Building the Utility Closet, solar power, Fall 2012

Wish us luck. I'll write more soon, I swear.

Homemakers galore.

Hello world,

Winter is about to be over, and I'm feeling much more inspired. Working on the house is the same: Never ending, extremely difficult, but rewarding as always. We've put up "half" our roof which is all that can go up, seeing as the other half of our house doesn't exist yet. Following? Anyway. Here's a video and some pictures. Lots of love from the good old southwest.

Here is a video of some progress! UGH: The sound didn't work on the video. Oh well, maybe I'll fix it, but maybe, I'll just make a new video instead.

A few months ago our house looked like this...

From Fall 2012

We've put up the "rest of" the roof. "Rest of" meaning that we are still building two more rooms on to the house.

From Fall 2012

And, we had some visitors! Thanks for coming guys.

From Fall 2012

Wow. This is a bad picture of everyone. Yikes.

From Fall 2012

Here is the back of our house from the road!

From Fall 2012

From Fall 2012

I will update more, eventually. ;)

Another Merry Birthday

I don't have a house update. Maybe I don't have any readers anymore. Only a life update. Heave and ho, ho, ho. Either way, I'll write.

Christmas eve we went to the San Juan Pueblo Dances. I only recorded the sound, because I thought the camera would be inappropriate. It wasn't, I guess, because lots of people were taping it. Here is a picture from the blog Speaking Loud and Saying Nothing.

Here is a sample of my field recordings: Christmas Eve Dances Sound file, click here.

It was out of control amazing. A beautiful culmination of a bastardized Spanish Catholicism and magical ancient pueblo rituals. I will assume that the dance would have been even more spectacular if the Catholic Zuccetto and Mitre headgear didn't make an appearance, not to mention their religion. Regardless, it was an incredible event that I didn't know was so open to the public. The Puebloans made my holiday and were a yet another heavy reminder of how lucky I am to be able to be here.

Christmas festivities and gift giving don't seize to exist out here, off the grid. Even the yard was decorated by Dain and his old hair dye water. And I can't figure out if Dain gave me the Julia Child Mastering the Art of French Cooking first and second volumes, or if he gave them to himself. As I will be cooking from them, for him. But they are beautiful, and I love them already. The first dish I cooked from them was a whooper. Crepe de Gateau aux Florentine: A 24 layered Crepe dish with alternating layers of filling: Spinach and cream, and mushroom and cheese. I didn't have spinach, so I used tilapia and brussel sprouts and cream. You also top this ridiculousness with a white butter and cheese sauce. It was a little out control and only fit for a king. Recommended only as a suicidal heart attack inducing delicacy. It barely fit in our small oven. The cat liked it. Dain did too. I made Dain a really insane clock. The elephants at the bottom spin around. And for my birthday, we went to some beautiful hot springs a few hours drive away. And had a hotel party. This was in Las Vegas, New Mexico. I can't recommend them more. Also, if you want to go to the weirdest little place, this might be it! It was great. We even saw a yard full of dinosaurs! I don't know what could have rapped up this explosion of fun better than this:

Rolling out of the bedroom and into the kitchen.

We moved out of our old room, and into our new room! Here is the latest video: (Full quality, pretty big file) (Low quality, loads faster, looks worse) Old room vacated until we get the roof on top of it! Here is it: Out with the old, in with the new. The new room is incredible. It's almost as big as our tiny Chicago coach house! Hooray. And in a few months we'll be able to live in both, and also, we'll be able to start some finishing work! But first, we need to put the rest of the roof up. Eventually, this will be THE KITCHEN. ONLY. THE. KITCHEN. Not for some time though. We're also going to start to working less, now that we're at this phase. WORK LESS. LIVE MORE: 2012.

Cold Cat Falling Off the Hot Tin Roof

OUCH!

This morning WWII, the legendary, lionized, calico cat, decided to break her tail. Decided to walk on our stapled up vapor barrier, which appeared to be a cat floor. It broke, it was only temporarily stapled up. She fell. Her tail suffered. We think it's broken. We don't know what we're doing yet. Pray for the poor tail and it's cat.

On another note: same as always: I haven't updated because we've been insanely busy and we've gotten a lot done. Etc. Etc. Here goes.

We got half our roof up. It's the roof over the kitchen. We're moving out of the room we're in, and into the kitchen in a FEW DAYS. Then we will start working on the next roof, over the other room we were in: GOOD BYE PLASTIC ROOF FOREVER.

We are finished closing in the wall to this room. These pictures are taken over the last few weeks. The brick is where the sink will be on the other side, and the planter on this (greenhouse) side. The glass with stuff in it is bathroom wall. There is minimal visibility into it, but it still gets some sunlight.

All hail ET. From the "Bathroom" looking in. From the "Kitchen" looking out.

This is the back of our house, Dain standing in the attic. We'll put that door up tomorrow (and the insulation in, and than MOVE IN (this room is much bigger))!

Two days ago, I woke up to an early snow fall. It's all melted now. It was pretty. If we had our cistern hooked up we would have got at least 100 gallons of water from this 1/2 in and this 1/4 of a roof we have! \

More to come, after we move in. Wish my cat well.

God bless this mess.

The Sangre De Cristo Mountains have been capped with snow! It seems early to me, but I don't think it is. It's getting chilly, which is putting us into warp speed for building and construction.

As we wait for our wood order to come in from the local saw mill, we are putting together the front wall of our kitchen. Only half of this will be glass. The other half is going to be the sink, and some of our bathroom wall. These pictures may be a little confusing. Bear with me, I'll try to explain.

This is from early in the week. We started framing the door and windows on the left side of the room.

From Kitchen, Greenhouse & Roof (Late Summer/Fall 2011)

Our roof showed up on Wednesday. But, like I said, the lumber from the sawmill hasn't. We have our horse, but no carriage. So, on with wall building! We need to build this wall to enclose this room anyway. But man! Not having a plastic roof right about now sure sounds like a grand idea to me. So, here is more wall. The can wall will be plastered over, and hold the beginning of our planter. The other side of it will be our kitchen sink. Notice the white PVC pipe in the middle of it. That will drain our gray water into the planter. We're going make the top of this wall out of bricks or stones, we're still deciding. That will be merely for aesthetics. The rest of it will be covered in dirt, because, like I said it's a planter. I want to put citrus trees in front of the kitchen. Lemon and Limes! That wont be for at least a year, though. Above this wall is the beautiful triangle window frames that Dain built yesterday while I was tending to the wild herds of teenagers at work.

From Kitchen, Greenhouse & Roof (Late Summer/Fall 2011)

Before work we hung the kitchen door! (before work, work) The blue is not our choice, that will be painted over. It's a recycled door, as always. We even have got some glass in! This is getting exciting/close to enclosed.

From Kitchen, Greenhouse & Roof (Late Summer/Fall 2011)

God bless this mess. This is a view from the inside. That can wall needs to be extended up. Then our kitchen sink and some counter will be put in front of it. There will also be counters on the right and left of the room. I can't wait. I'm a little nervous though, because we don't know how to make counter tops. We will find out, as we always do.

From Kitchen, Greenhouse & Roof (Late Summer/Fall 2011)

I pray that the next post is of our roof.