First of all, getting home insurance has been a huge hassle.
It’s not like we have any expensive antiques or fancy jewelry, but if we lose
what we’ve built so far, then we lose everything we have. So we need home
insurance.
Here’s what we found out: innovation is not looked upon
kindly by insurance companies. We keep hearing what a great thing it is that we’re
doing – building our home ourselves, figuring out how to do things, recycling
when we can – but we were turned down by several of the big companies because
we weren’t using a general contractor or following a traditional plan for
building.
So praise God for Germania! We are now insured as a homestead/small farm. The representative who came out to assess BaHa Ranch was very interested in our project and loved the idea of a container home. He said that we were paving the way for insurance companies to come up with some type of standard for insuring homes like ours, because more and more people will be building this way in the future.
Secondly, it’s not easy being green because of these little
guys:
I don’t particularly want scorpions in the house, nor does
BA. Outside, they’re fine. We moved into their territory, after all. However,
cohabitation with these little creatures is just not going to work out. If
anyone knows of a chemical-free way to keep them out of the house, please let
me know! We found three scorpions inside Box 1 and launched an all-out chemical
attack with some kind of pest spray inside and some kind of granules outside
around the perimeter.
Third, it’s not easy being green because of the lack of information on how to do the projects that we need to do. We asked for advice once at the help desk at Home Depot – advice on how to combine two used windows into one space and mount them in wood on a metal box – and the Home Depot guy said “Oh, we’re not allowed to give advice on anything weird like that.” Now, to be fair, this was a Home Depot in Dallas that we went to prior to moving. The help we’ve received at the Home Depot in Dripping Springs has been absolutely wonderful, but the point is, everyone is just guessing with us because no one has any experience on how to build a container home. But hey, at least in Hill Country, they try to help us out.
Fourth (and here’s the biggest conundrum of all), we want to
help the planet heal by cutting way down on the amount of natural resources
that we consume, and moving to the country has been a big, big part of that,
but now that we’re in the country, we have to use more gas to get
anywhere! In Dallas, we could walk to
several places, and a short drive gave us plenty of choices for shopping,
entertainment, etc. Now, we have to drive everywhere. We’re trying to conserve
gas by combining errands, shopping at local farmers’ markets, and planning
routes in advance, but I still feel guilty every time I start the car.
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| Peaches from local farm |
So no, it’s not easy being green, but it’s worth the effort.
Some things are getting easier as we get used to them, like conserving water to
a fanatical degree, using the least amount of electricity possible (our electricity
bill was $33 this month - and most of that was from tools we were using for construction), holding my nose when I empty the greywater tank,
filling the solar water tank for our showers, taking all the lights outside
daily to charge – it just becomes routine.
And we’ve settled into a routine now that is perfectly
doable. We have everything we need, for the moment, and we’re done spending
money for a while. The only other projects that we’d like to get done by the
end of this summer are:
1.
A septic
tank (because the RV toilet is a routine that we just can’t tolerate for much
longer)
2.
A large water tank and pump (because right now
we have to take our five-gallon water containers to town and fill them up about
once a week)
3.
Paint for the ceiling (which is the only thing, cosmetically,
that isn’t finished yet on the inside)
And hopefully that will be it for a while!
