Constant Evolution

One of the biggest lessons I have learned so far in our journey is this: In order to keep your sanity you must stay flexible and be open to change. There is so much planning and forethought involved in planning a homestead from start to finish that I never would have thought about. There is surely 10,000 more things that we have no clue to even consider ahead of us. Our plans to buy our property; yurt or camper; driveway plans; tied to the grid or go off-grid; do the well now or later; which way to face the house; house designs, and most recently which structure to build first, have all been on the table of the ever-changing map of the future.

The last month has been filled with many trips up to the homesite and behind the scenes planning of our house. So much has evolved and changed since then it's easy to imagine we'll be in a completely different place in another couple of months. Initially we hired a friend to help us with some design work. Kevin Ward with Southeast Ecological Designs, Inc. seemed like the perfect fit for us. He's built his own beautiful home here in Madison County, has a ton of building experience, including lots of experience with green building, permaculture design, and is the designer for the local tiny home building firm, Nanostead. The work he's done for us so far has been beautiful, but after a much needed quick weekend family vacation, we decided we really didn't know what we wanted yet. We thought it would be wise to design our much smaller guest house first ourselves instead of doing the bigger house first right out of the gate.

Beginning our homestead this way will allow us to get out of the camper faster (ideally), but also help us hone our building skills on a smaller job first, save money and help pay off some more debt as we work towards designing and building our larger space. Even in the span of a few days our design has morphed from 400-500 square feet including a loft, to even smaller. It seems the smaller we go and more feet we shave off, the better we are feeling about it all. In its current evolution we have settled and feel good about going with a simple 16' x 16' guest house with a sleeping loft. Our time together when David's not working has morphed into either design time together, or heading over to our property to stake out locations and just be there with it.

Now that our driveway is done, it gives us easy access to our homesite and a better feel for what it will be like living up on our ridge. The video below is from the first time we drove up in David's car. He didn't swivel around to the homesite view, but the video captures the amazing work the Sawyer's did for us. We are pleased as punch.

At times I'm hesitant to share where we are in our process since everything is always changing so much. But I think it's a vital part of the process to collect feedback and prompt other members of our community to share their experiences and learn from them.

Next up for us will be pulling a separate septic permit for the guest house and getting a douser out to explore water possibilities. We're also getting more and more excited as Spring temperatures are starting to creep in and we get closer to the time we can pull our camper up to actually live on our land.

So stay tuned for all the next evolutions to come. I'm sure there will be many!

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