We don’t have a lot of folks yet, but here is a recent post from Insurgent American’s forums that suggests the value of these practical exchange threads:

On retirement, my husband and I gave long consideration… what we believed about retirement when we were saving the money isn’t what we believe today. Outside events have changed our thinking: The Iraq war ramifications, Peak Oil, and the US twin deficits seeping out from the Bush/Greenspan years, for instance. And it was frightening to change.

We have three children and three grandchildren who have pretty well lived on our acreage in North Central Texas, the hell-hole of the climate world (which, I’m convinced, was never meant to be inhabited.)

To… consternation… we made the decision not to leave our money in its present IRA form, or even in the portfolio. We’ve taken the tax hit and redeemed our IRAs, purchased 30 acres a bit farther south, cleared some of the land, dug a large lake, allocated land for garden ground reclamation and begun one of the most massive projects of our life. (Smack-dab as we hit 70.)

We’re building a very large multi-family straw-bale dwelling. We began by digging
twenty holes that go twenty feet deep. Into those holes we coiled PEK tubing — through which water can move down, exchange the heat and return up to circulate through the floor and back again — a small science. The tiny bronze pumps that move the water require very little energy and will actually work off a solar panel or gel battery. In our part of Texas the heat exchange will keep the floor approximately 72 degrees year round (no central air-conditioning.) Each hole is worth roughly one ton of air conditioning.

The straw-bale walls have very high ceilings with a heavily insulated metal roof, plus extra insulation above the sheetrock ceilings. The walls are also coated with something akin to adobe which has extremely high insulating value and is fireproof. Windows and doors are low-E, the best we could afford. When it’s done (one half is almost ready to be inhabited) we will do gray water, rain capture, some wind energy, some solar, etc. and get fairly well off the electrical grid.

This is an extremely labor-intensive process. You need to be physically strong, and you require a sort of jack-of-all-trades skill set. But we have that, though we can only work half a day, rather than 8 hours. Some in our family are quite clever at making old machines come to life and do wonderful work.

Our project will take several years to fully complete, but we asked ourselves what we wanted to do with the rest of our lives — play golf, watch TV? Our offspring would have just spent the money, and now they will have this wonderful dwelling that will do them in good stead through the difficult years ahead.

Aside from the construction which we do six days a week, we continue to make compost, pile everything onto our gardening allocation, learn some animal husbandry, get ready to do earthworm cultivation, learn which food preservation techniques work and those that don’t.

Putting a seed in the ground isn’t enough. Each area has its own particular pests that must be dealt with without poison. Just keeping potatoes fresh until the next growing season is a major issue. The making of compost is almost a full-time job.

We’re constantly studying better ways. There are some very smart techniques that have been developed along the years by clever inventors who were abused and stymied by this society. The Internet has found them, or they have found the Internet. We thank them for their creativity. And we thank everyone who makes sites like this one, to keep people thinking and motivated and informed.

We’re making friends with the old-time residents who live on the meandering gravel roads where we’ve moved to. The little community is agog at our structure going up, and they pause to see how the neglected land has cleaned up and all the promise it shows. “What is this Peak Oil you talk about?” they ask.

Posted by stan in Site