Off the grid....Almost

In an effort to be more environmentally conscious, we've decided to put up a 6kW PV system on our roof. Since our home faces perfectly due South without any obstructions, we should not have any major issues with the install. The initial cost is quite high, but hopefully it will pay back in 15-20 years. More importantly, we want to do our part in reducing our independence on cruel oil. In the future, once we install the batteries, we will be able to live completely off the grid. But for now, we will have to live with net-metering.....

This is a picture of an install from the company that we will be working with. Looks great!

The Stake...

Saturday, May 9th, 2009
We staked the property and approx location of the house. It's really really long. Didn't realize it until we saw it in person.

Another worry surfaced while we were up there...ticks!!! Our land is not fenced and the area has not fully developed yet with houses, apparently deer have been grazing on the wild flowers. We noticed a tick crawling up my leg!

Living in a large city, you forget about nature from time to time. Now we have to look into deer fencing systems to control the deer population. The costs keep going up!

15 pages...

We received the finalized construction documents from Rocio Romero today. The process has taken several months. We submitted our 1st payment of 15% deposit for the kit + 1st of many $1000 design fee deposit on Dec 19th, 2008. Today is April 28th, 2009. It's taken a full 4 months, much longer than anticipated. Also costlier than expected, to date, we have paid about 10% of the kit fees just for design process.

We'll see how fast the kit can be built and shipped. At least now we can go ahead to apply for the building permit. In order to beat the winter season, we should be assembling the kit no later than August/September.

Mystery Solved...

After 2 months of waiting for our BOH approval, we finally found out the letter was mailed to our old address. Not sure how this could have happened since nothing on our application indicated the address. In any case, glad that's finally over with. The magical letter has arrived in our hands...finally.

3 Seasons

Pictures of our land from fall 2008, Winter 2008/2009, and Spring 2009.
it's been 3 out of 4 seasons since we initially saw and started this process.
only missing picture of Summer now. will post it in 2 months.

The land looks beautiful in all seasons!

Hooray! BOH Approval

After 2 months of waiting for the Ulster County Board of Health approval on our home site, we finally got word that it was approved more than a month ago! Due to some paperwork oversight, we never received the permit letter.

We hired an engineer (which also happens to be the owner who sold us the lot) to design the septic system with a pump. Our home is going to be located downhill from the septic reserve area, so a pump is required.

At least this first step is over, now onto the building permit process, which hopefully is a bit quicker. We have to start on the foundation soon, if we need to finish the roof before the winter hits.

$7,115.15 later...

The design fees are adding up really quickly. We have already paid $ 7,115.15 as of today for our "design". We thought for sure that our design fee was going to be $4000 or lower given that we pretty much designed the entire layout by ourselves before going into this whole thing. We keep getting invoices from Rocio, seems like a lot of time is being spent on our project, but we still have not seen the final product yet, which is just a bunch of drawings needed for the building permit process. We really made only 1 minor change that was suggested by Rocio from our original google sketchup layout. Seriously, this getting out of hand. Our first phone meeting with Rocio, she even said herself that with our detailed plan and layout, this project would be "very straight foward". Not sure what changed from the time of that conversation till now.

We've been comparing some old projects that people have posted up and their design fees are not nearly as much. I'm beginning to wonder if it's because Rocio is on maternity leave and due to this, a lot of delays and extra fees have been accessed. This really puts a damper on building an affordable prefab home.

We should be in the home stretch now, only expecting 1 more invoice and that's it! I hope...and with each design invoice, we have to give up on something else.