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Progress Check

/ thanatos1369 / Leave a comment

Gaia’s Place is starting to settle in. We are mostly unpacked, even if there are still a lot of boxes to be organized and placed somewhere else. Our solar panels are installed and the final inspection is set for this Friday morning. After that, in two-four weeks, our solar panels will become active and we will be less reliant on the electric grid. I talked to a neighbor the other day, who asked me about the solar panels, as he was interested if he would be able to get them on his mother’s house. But looking at the south side of his house, there are a lot of trees that would impede the sunlight from reaching the solar panels and those trees would have to be brought down if they wanted to go solar. He asked because the previous month’s electric bill was over $500 for his house. We thought we had it bad at $350 for the two of us for the last month.

We have an appointment scheduled for an electrician to come by the house to install a 240V outlet on the backside of the house attached to a NEMA 14-50 plug, so we will be able to charge Smokey, our 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5 Plug-In Electric Utility Vehicle (PEUV). Knowing we won’t have to worry about range anxiety nearly as much as we do now thanks to there being very few DC fast chargers in our local area is going to be a relief.

I am also working on the fire pit, doing as much as I can while my back will allow me to do so. The fire pit inner ring was delivered earlier this week and I will have to wait until the ground dries a little bit so I can place the base for the fire pit. The fire pit will be multi-purpose, for social gatherings, rituals and time with the Mrs. The end design is a Pentacle with the top pointed North. Doing this by hand is no easy task but we are not able to afford a professional landscaper just yet, so a piece at a time. My goal is to have the center part of the fire pit ready for our housewarming party/open house (April 23rd, 2022). I might have a window to work on the fire pit tomorrow and Friday, but there is a lot of rain in the forecast.

First of day of the new year…first real rain

/ Ann Cohen / Leave a comment

Happy New Year! We had our first day of real extended rain today. I wanted to go outside after the rain let up and take a look around the property to see where we may have some trouble spots with water pooling. This is important for planning where things will be placed.

Turns out the area that looked good for a pond of sorts is considerably larger than first thought. There also may be a problem with the firepit / sacred space area as it was water logged as well. This also means that it cannot be swapped out to the other side of the yard space as animals we are planning on raising would go in the wet spot as well.

More thought will have to be done on the placement of things in coming weeks so that come Springtime, we will have an actionable plan to get started.

Here’s to a prosperous new year to everyone!

Northwest corner of the property after a day of rain

Our Journey Begins

/ Ann Cohen / Leave a comment

So, back at the end of June 2020…COVID19 is going strong and hitting Miami hard. We get a call that a family member is not doing well at the VA hospital in Miami for complications not related to COVID. That weekend started our push to really get going on this. Things ended in Miami before we could make it all the way down from Virginia.

We turned around in Georgia and headed to Skyland Resort at Shenandoah National Park instead. The ride was serene and the closer we got, the more relaxed we became. We enjoyed ourselves with the exquisite mountain views. On our way home after spending the night, I asked Scott what our “end game” was. He stated what I had been thinking and it was what we talked about the whole way up Shenandoah, a piece of property with a sizable amount of land we can grow our own food on, with a house disconnected from public utilities (solar power, well water, septic, etc.). In short, to be self-sufficient. This project would come to be known as Gaia’s Place.

We needed a plan – and knowledge. What do any two tech geeks do in this scenario? Google. I started researching online about properties and how to accomplish all we wanted to do with this grand dream. We came across much information along with books to start a library. Homesteading and Prepping are two categories that continually popped up which have many crossover points. So, now we have the beginnings of information, next we needed a plan…

Due to unexpected financial setbacks, we were in the middle of digging out and cleaning up finances. We started in earnest cleaning up credit reports in September and started looking at properties in January 2021.

May 2021 was when we saw the first house we wanted. However, we were nowhere near ready credit-wise. We found out what really needed to be taken care of at that point from the lender’s perspective and set out to accomplish that. In August, we renewed the lease on our apartment for only 7 months with the intent of getting a house before then. In September we hit that golden credit score that we needed and started looking in earnest.

The first house we found did not accept our offer. The second house fell through just days before closing. The water well had run dry, and another could not be drilled for a year and a half due to availability of companies to drill in the county. We found the third and fourth houses the evening we found out about the well, and scheduled appointments to view the houses the next day. Turns out the two houses are next door neighbors.

The third house was ok, needed some work, was slightly more expensive, and had less land. The fourth house – was in better shape, still needed some work (mostly cosmetic), a little cheaper, and had 2.32 acres of land. This is the house we bid on and ultimately moved into on November 19, 2021. It will forever now be known as Gaia’s Place.