One Year Later

It has been a year (and nearly four months) since my previous blog post.

A lot happened.

We had a baby. We tried to buy a house. We ended up being deceived ("swindled" is a good term) by the seller's real estate agent. I got laid off. It's a long long story--just trust me that you would be appalled, outraged, and very sad for us. There, I just saved us both a lot of time.

Things were going so very wrong for us that we decided maybe we weren't going in the wrong direction, maybe we were not headed down the right path, maybe our trajectory was wrong. The last time things went so spectacularly wrong for me, I needed to literally turn around, surrender, and let myself be moved by the Flow of the Universe. What is the opposite direction of buying a house and settling down with a mortgage and need for steady employment?

Why, packing up (again), loading everything into a UHaul, and moving to the family farm in Flathead Valley, Montana...to build an earth berm shelter (of course!).

Both my husband and I had stopped doing earth berm planning because it seemed that was a far off dream and we needed to focus on the present. Then suddenly we were building the house now with no time to waste. We moved in with my in-laws (bless their generous hearts) and my husband and father-in-law got to work on a model and quickly moved on to the actual house. We didn't have time to do a thorough plan and we didn't have the time and knowledge needed to create a budget. We just started doing it, using Rob Roy's Earth-Sheltered Houses as our main guide.

We basically started at Summer Solstice 2014 and are now nearly 5 months into the project (though we lost close to a month at the start waiting for permits and legalities). The budget is $50K ($20K would have gotten us the well, septic, and maybe foundation) and there is no wiggle room there--once we hit $50K, we stop because we are out of money. We are hopeful that we will be moving in to the shell before Winter Solstice 2014 and then we will work on the inside for the next...decades...

In some ways, this story sounds crazy and in many ways it totally makes sense for us. I will post some of the specifics of this process soon(ish) and you can check out pictures on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tinyabundantlife?ref=aymt_homepage_panel