Point of departure

Home sweet home. It was until a friend of mine gave me a book called 'The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight' which shifted my focus rather. At the end of the book it tells you to purchase 10 copies and give these to your friends and that's what he did and that's why I randomly read a book that I would not normally. I haven't done the 10 copy thing, but I have convinced at least 10 people to go out and get a copy for themselves. Now I'm thought of as a nut, something that I'm definitely not - but then all nuts would say that.

The book quite simply explains how we are busy burning our way through a non-renewable resource. It also explains how we are about to run out of cheap energy and most things that we can exploit using cheap energy. It's a big difference - running out of oil and running out of cheap oil. And oil = energy. So does gas & coal = energy and they are all bundled into the same equation. The reality is that this is likely to happen in my lifetime (possibly within the next decade) and if not, it will definitely happen in my daughters lifetime. To be sure, I did a whole lot of research to prove or disprove what the book predicted. Now I am convinced and this triggered a fairly radical realignment of my outlook on life. And my home did not look so sweet after all.

So I decided to revisit my home and see how I could change it to fit in with a low energy world. Well it turned out to be rather distressing. Not that the change is distressing, but I had just spent 8 months gutting the place and then renovating it to become what every consumer would want. I now had newly laid floors with underfloor heating, new geysers, new windows, new plumbing, new electrics, new everything and it was a rough position to be in where everything that had just been installed was very wrong for this new way of life. And then I began to fantasize about starting from new. I drew up a list of priorities that I would want in a piece of land and it started with location - near school and near town, north facing (I live in the Southern Hemisphere), lots of water etc. And that's when things took on a life of their own.

I had accepted an offer to purchase my house within days of making that list and shortly thereafter I found a piece of land that fitted the bill. It might have been coincidental but it happened far too easily to be entirely so. Now I'm on the road to making this happen with a few critical things that must take place first. For instance I want the money in the bank from the sale of my current house and I need the vacant land title in my name. But that should all happen within the next six weeks and as soon as is practical thereafter, we will start on turning this green road trip into reality. And this blog will be about the steps we take on that journey.