Hitting the wall
PB and I have lived off-grid for nearly 10 years now, by Christmas this year it will be 10 years. Have you ever done something for so long that you grow tired of it? I will admit, I have hit the off-grid fatigue wall… I don’t mind living off-grid, I love having few monthly bills, I love being more independent, and I know that I am able to go longer than most at living this way. I hear the comments, usually second hand, wondering how I can stand to live like I do, I suppose they mean living in a more primitive manner, dealing with our own waste (human and otherwise), LOL if they only knew :)
Actually, when I think about it, I’m pretty satisfied with how I live, I couldn’t imagine living any other way, in spite of the fact that I occasionally hit that wall, it just makes me stop and think about just how fortunate I truly am, I am living my dream, even if that dream wakes me up from time to time to review and revise what is going on.
I know that one thing that is bothering me right now, we are in the beginnings of our rainy season. We go most of the year with minimal rain, until about mid July, then we get rain, a lot of rain, often on a daily basis. The SkyCastle is pretty well built, it’s sturdy, but since we used quite a bit of recycled (read:used) materials, some parts of it aren’t as “comfortable” as it could be, the roof is one of those things.
We leak, when we get hard rains, sideways rains, hail and the such, we have a few areas that leak inside the house. The roof is made from lots of other people’s castoff metal sheets, a neighbor would be tearing down a shed or other building, or maybe they were re-roofing their home, we would end up with the used materials, it was good for everyone involved, they didn’t have to take the scrap material to a landfill that is FAR away from here, and we got free material to build with. So there are lots of mismatched pieces of metal, different sorts of panels and all of them came with holes from previous use.
It has been something we have lived with and dealt with for many years, since we don’t get a lot of rain for most of the year, it’s pretty easy to ignore it and deal with it when we do get our rains. This year, it’s starting to bother me more. This evening, PB and I sat on the 3rd floor deck, watching the sun go down and swatting mosquitoes. I asked him to work up a plan along with cost estimates for material to re-roof the main part of the SkyCastle, that consists of the …
