Green Modern House Kit Construction Continues, Day 7

Well, the elation of seeing our gorgeous off grid house construction progress was tempered with the anger that sometime yesterday, on Thanksgiving, people felt they could saunter onto private property and enjoy our house kit, eating and discarding snack food bags and soda cans in our environmentally friendly home. I know it was none of our neighbors, all whom have farms and homesteads and respect and care for each other. I suspect it was the deer hunters in the hunt club that are leasing property behind us, who travel over 2 hours to this pristine area then loose their dogs and run amok regardless of people's legal boundaries. Our neighbor across the street has already had confrontations with these men, one of them berating their teenage daughter when she boldly started writing down trespassers' license plates... Obviously whomever littered and lingered in our future home had no regard for family or private property, no matter how many "no hunting" signs you post. It is something we, as a community and neighbors, will have to aggressively address to protect our privacy and ensure there are no unknown bands of rifle-toting trespassers about thinking any movement might be deer. (Yes we wear blaze orange. But stupid people who feel they can loiter on land that's not theirs certainly don't have the brain to distinguish between a fleeing buck or a playing child.) Anyway, while I stew on this, here's a new 360 picture of the interior... if you can't see it then you can see the full posthere on my blog. (FYI you can arrow up and down and all around... have fun!) [Still thinking about the fact that trespassers littered and loitered in our future home. Stupid landless poacher deer hunters...] Ok, fine, on to gorgeous house kit environmentally friendly passive solar design! (Heh heh... believe me... I will be much better equipped to deal with trespassers by next week... love my scouting cameras and er, some other tricks up my sleeve!) Honestly, aside from the initial shock (but really, not a big surprise especially as our neighbors had just been telling us what a problem non-neighbors were during deer season), it was a lovely day. I asked Ron for his guest blogger comments, but he smiled and said there were no surprises. We took an old friend out with us, and I am looking forward (hint, hint Tony!) to hearing his thoughts and sharing them. He loved the house kit, loved the placement of the house on the site, the window/lighting... and had some great ideas of what to do in landscaping along the north side that borders the field... To actually walk around the interior... these photos do not do it justice. Natural light, high ceilings, the flow, the views while maintaining privacy... it all seems so much *more* than a small footprint home would seem to feel. I would have taken some videos but the Amish were working and I didn't want to worry them about a camera (we took all these pictures after they had left for the day, hence the dusk feel of the light). Speaking of the Amish, it was really nice to meet the crew- and one of them I knew! We both smiled when we saw each other: For years, we stop right outside the town at "The Amish Children's Stand." There, various siblings man a booth where they sell jams, relishes, bread, cookies, and vegetables in season... Anyway, there's always a older child or two, maybe 2 middle children, and one young child there. It turns out that one of the eldest is now old enough to start doing some more kinds of work... like being on the crew of building a modern off grid house kit! It was a funny moment. By the time we would pull up to that Amish childrens' stand we would have been traveling with 2 (very young back then) whiny children, two wild dogs (one who was usually on my lap)... and we'd tumble out to get our bread, etc. for the weekend and this same child would gape at us... I'd explain we had traveled far to be there, that we were camping, had no shelter, but hoped to one day have a home, how much we loved the area and community... And here he was, now all grown up, building my home. : ) "Well," I said to him, "Now you know where the Crazy Family lives!" And he laughed. : )