No Electricity Bills

Our house

Early on in our marriage, my husband Jeff had a dream of building our home and making it an energy efficient passive solar house. We moved around about thirteen times for the first eight years of our marriage following jobs and looking for that right piece of land to build our dream home on.

Twelve years ago, we found a place in the mountains with trees, water, and only forest service land behind us. Perfect. We started with having to cut a road and build a small bridge before we could even get to living on our piece of property.

We have been slowly building as time and finances would permit and just moved into the house the fall of 2007. It still isn't finished. We still haul water and use a outhouse, but the view is everything we wanted. We have solar panels for all our electricity. It is a small system, so a few cloudy days can make using the computer difficult. Even with the inconveniences, we love our place and would rather be here than anywhere else.

After a lot of discussion about moving with the great job, we asked ourselves what was our original vision. It wasn't living in an apartment in a city, even though that does have it's advantages. We are actually living the way we first imagined, although I did envision plumbing! We just need a way to make money that can pay the bills and not kill the soul. In the small town that we live near, there are not a lot of options.

We have achieved half of the dream by building the house, now we would like to make it complete by earning our living as artists.

Jeff's Corner: At least she has closets...