Bought The Farm

Transitions are tough

Because Albert is a teacher, our lives are particularly bound up in the school calendar.  Summer is over, and now we have to move back home and resume our "normal" lives.  I took a few days to drive my daughter to start her Freshman year of college.  Not nearly as tearful as I thought - it seems I've done most of my mourning prospectively over the past two years.  Our son is starting 11th grade, the toughest school year of a modern child's life.  And Albert must throw himself back into the fray of 4 sections of Chemistry, coaching crew and regular dorm duty.

Against all this, how can we keep our dream alive and moving in the right direction?  It's starting to feel more like pressure than like fun.  I think it's hard for Albert to have to back away.  He was so intensively involved on location in construction for the past month, while I was mostly travelling here and there.  He'd like to see it all go forward, but he just can't be an equal partner any more.  It's like stopping to switch places on a long cross-country drive, only I'm going to have to get us from Ohio to Nevada without relief.

Our near-term goals haven't changed...yet.  Building 1 completed (enough) by November 15th, land prepped for planting one acre of apples next spring, and  everything in place to start making our first trial batch of ice cider this winter.  That means the following -

1. We need our alcohol production permits from the Feds and Vermont
2. We need the right equipment on hand and installed
3. We need apples - the right ones at the right time
4. We need to install a fence
5. We need to prepare the ground
6. We need to make all those millions of decisions quickly and in the right order to keep construction on track
7. We need to control the budget so we don't go broke getting numbers 1 - 6 done

I can do this.  I've been part of start-ups before.  I know you just keep doing what you have to do to get it done.  Somehow I'll figure it out, or at some point we'll just adjust the plan and lower our ambitions, and our expected returns. 

It isn't the time table or volume of tasks that stresses me out.  Doing it without Albert's close partnership is the bummer.  I worry that he will feel disenfranchised - that the whole project will become "my baby" and his role will be marginalized.  I don't want him to feel unimportant or irrelevant.  The main point is to have something we've built together.  And it will be that, it's just that we'll be taking turns some of the time.  I remember a speech once by the founder of Catalyst about women wanting to have it all.  "You can have it all..." she said, "...it's just very hard to have it all *at once*."  I hope I can help Albert see the longer term.  We will have built this together, 50/50, over time.  It's just that at some points in time one of us will be 80 while the other will be 20.

I try to keep up the spirit of partnership by being sure to tell him at the end of the day what's been happening; people I've contacted, what I've learned.  Last weekend we looked at our business plan together and made the joint call to buy the press outright rather than lease it (8.5% interest rates being ridiculously high in our opinion).  So that felt good.  But sometimes I think keeping him up to date just makes him feel guilty that he's not as involved, or depressed, or something.  It's not an easy transition, and I don't know how to make it easier.

Trying to build "green"

While we've renovated houses and apartments before, we've never built a building from scratch.  I'm excited to start with a clean slate - "We can do just what we want!"  But this feeling of boundless freedom is rapidly tempered by the realities of having to make trade-offs in relation to cost and time.  We *have* to have the building operational by Thanksgiving.  We *have* to make sure we have some money left over to actually build the business.

And then there's the sense of responsibility I feel with regard to the environment.  All the information about global warming, Al Gore's peace prize...I look at my teenage children and I feel I must do my part to build responsibly.  I don't want to feel guilty that I've contributed to hastening environmental disasters that they will have to deal with, no matter how small the individual impact of my actions.

Besides, with all the talk of new environmentally friendly materials and technologies I think it must be possible today to build a really green house.  I'm willing to spend money on that.  Let's do it!

So what's a green building?  There's a bunch of decisions you make about the building materials you use, then there's power, then there are the things that use power.  See my Boston renovator friend's blog "Green Moms" (link at right) for more information and dilemmas on these issues. 

My vision on all the power-related stuff is, we get everything in the house to run on electricity, and then we find a way to self-generate most of our electricity, with grid tie-in for surplus/deficit management. No fossil fuels!  This should be possible, right?

I take a look at the wind map for the State of Vermont, and quickly learn that despite my feeling that there is always a good breeze on our little ridge, we are in the 0 - 7% range for wind power - e.g. forget it.  Then I look into solar panels.  I get a quote from Vermont Solar.  The system they propose will only cover 25 - 40% of our total power needs. They estimate it will save us an average of just $25 on our electric bill each month.  And it will cost...wait for it...forty *thousand* smackeroos. 

Well, the time of year we need the most power here in Vermont is the time of year we have the least sun - that would be winter.  Kind of a major barrier, and not one we humans can influence much.  We don't need air-conditioning, but we sure need heat.  And it sure isn't going to be coming from solar panels any time soon.

Our last ditch effort was Geo-Thermal, until we learned we would have to re-drill the well another 200 feet deeper, and drain off a significant portion of the water going through the heating system and just pour it out into the woods.  So...put a constant drain on our aquifer, still use some electricity from the grid to run it, *and* it costs twenty-three thousand smackeroos, not including the actual heating system in the house.

I give up!  What's the point!  Here I am really interested in being green, and willing to spend maybe 25-50% more on systems to do it.  But 2-4 times???

The most organized support, at least in Vermont, comes from Efficiency Vermont.  This group is a non-profit agency supported, by regulation, by the electrical power industry in Vermont.  They have practical solutions, but at the end of the day, their sole purpose is to reduce the demand for electricity so they don't have to build more power plants.  If fossil fuels are more energy effective, they are all for them.

Their overall perspectives for new homes are -
- Make sure the house is completely insulated, and then properly ventilated
- Use energy star HVAC and appliances
- Use compact flourescent lighting for at least 10 fixtures in the house

For following their guidelines and getting inspected and certified, they offer some pretty major financial incentives.

And the single criteria that makes the biggest difference?  Don't build a house bigger than you really need.  We're pretty down with that.

So, we're giving in and following this system, even though it means we will be running a bunch of stuff on propane gas.  If ever alternative energy systems become truly cost realistic, we will just retrofit.

Some other decisions that are 'green':
- baseboard hot water heat instead of radiant floors - more adjustable, especially for a seasonal home when we won't be there all the time.
- tankless hot water heaters - again, why heat water all the time when we are only there on weekends/summer.  This is "instant" hot for the whole house - actually it's "almost" instant, since the heater is located in the basement and the water has to travel up to the faucets.
- High-efficiency wood burning "fireplace insert" instead of an open fireplace. No bad particulates, very efficient, will further reduce our need for gas-powered heat

Albert dreams of manning one of those external wood-burning furnaces for heat once we are retired and living up there.  You have to feed it every day, but we certainly have plenty of dead wood around. I dream of bio-diesel, cheap photo-voltaic panels, putting a mini-hydro-dam on the beaver pond. But meanwhile we at least have made decisions so we can move forward and get the house built by Thanksgiving!

A weekend together

I've been going up to Eden (as I like to say) pretty much once a week.  I write checks to the contractors, answer their questions, make decisions, and just make sure things are on track.  This is what Albert is missing.

But on one beautiful fall October weekend, he doesn't have Saturday classes, and we drive up together, two objectives in mind -
- See if we can dig holes for the fence posts that will surround the first tree planting we will make next spring
- Pack up the trailer to be picked up on Monday morning

Albert is delighted with the progress on the house.  We are pretty much closed in.  The steel roof is mostly on.  The trim work on the dormers and the eaves is beautiful, classic New England moldings.  We are very grateful for Dan our contractor.

My husband is sooooo excited to be using his cute orange tractor - and trying out one of the nifty attachments too!  The post-hole digger ;)  In the oil industry, this activity would be called 'Makin' Hole'. 'Nuff said.

We spend breakfast in the trailer devising our plan.  This is lots of fun because we figure things out together, puzzling through the dimensions of the task - how far apart should the holes be, how to keep the holes in a straight line, what to do when the terrain dips.  We feel very smart for having a plan, but also very stupid.  Anybody who grew up on a farm would know how to do this.  We are guilty of over-engineering, and find great amusement in how reality alters our carefully crafted process in a heart-beat.  Nonetheless, we get 38 holes drilled in a vaguely trapezoidal outline on the smaller field with the broken-down "witch" tree.  This is where, next spring, we will plant our trees, our dreams, our dollars.

We pack up the trailer, putting things that we will use in the basement of the new house, and things to go home to New Hampshire in the car.  It's been a very effective get-away home, office, and love-nest.  I would definitely do it again :)

One interesting update - it turns out Amanda from the trailer rental place is no longer with the trailer rental place.  In fact, it seems she left soon after she so deftly delivered our trailer back in June.  I'm dying to know where she went - she was like a female McGuyver.  Where is she now, and where is she headed - managing environmental clean-up projects? working as a test pilot for NASA? Anyone who can handle power and waste disposal mechanics like that young woman will do amazing things I'm sure of it.