Green building: Getting started

Builiding (or re-building) as green as can be

A year and a half ago, my partner and I bought some land in Tennessee with the long term goal of building and/or refurbishing a 100 year old barn as the main house of a small community of folks.

Our first task was to clear some space around the barn and set up our solar system. Since we didn’t have a place on the land to live, we were working on weekends. Once we had electricity and water, we would be able to “live” on the land, work on a more full-time basis, and use power tools!

For better or worse, we’re using gas-powered chainsaws. I personally have a desire to be greener and either use a hand-tool, or figure out a diesel-powered solution. Since we don’t have much money, we’re going with the tools we have. However, a good friend of mine (who I’ll probably write about later) is keen on converting diesel engines to run veggie, and recently has been looking at running gas engines on alcohol, of at least E-50. When and if I get a still running, I’ll start using E-50 in the chainsaws.

This part of the process - the clearing and preparing - took a lot longer than I might have liked. We weren’t living on the land, so we ended up coming up one or two days a weekend. That doesn’t give you much time to work

That’s it for this post. In a couple days, I’ll post pictures of the Yome we built, and describe its terrible fate.

~ Ribbon ~