It's been a busy first week back in Vermont, but we're laying the foundations for a productive year ahead.
We built a DIY monitoring system using Wyze cameras, cellular modem, Raspberry Pi and Home Assistant to keep an eye on our RV this winter.
Did you miss us? It's been a little while, and a lot has happened. Not least we're now thousands of miles away from Vermont in Europe! Let's catch you up.
We've been excitedly waiting for the time when our electrical service would be installed and we'd finally have power - this was the week.
Kicking off our series on installing electrical service, we walk through service sizing, transformer location and primary transmission line placement.
As we're building our dream home in Vermont, there's one big question we have to answer: should we connect to power or go off-grid?
Before we can drink from our well, we need to test the water to make sure it's safe. After a nervous wait, here's what we discovered.
How do you run a well pump manually using power from a generator? We create a temporary setup to do just that and fill our RV tank.
After six months in one spot, it was finally time to hookup the RV again, but this time our journey was a little shorter than usual!
After renting our shipping container for 12 months, it was time to make a decision - should we buy it or keep on renting?
You might think installing a well pump is a job for the professionals, but we did it ourselves and added some very cool extra capability!
We were so nervous about drilling a well. Would we hit water? How deep would we have to go? How much would it cost? There's only one way to find out....
Before we build the house, we're constructing a utility building - far from a shed, this high-efficiency building is a critical part of out infrastructure.
We've well and truly broken ground now, hitting some major milestones but also breaking some things along the way.
After a couple of hectic weeks of final preparation, this week we had our first glimpse of what lies beneath the surface on our property.
After a lot of consideration, we decided to part ways with our architects. Since then, everything has been turned upside down...in a good way!
We visited the Rockler store in Salem, NH to pick up some exciting new tools - a Sawstop Jobsite Table Saw and Dewalt DW735X planer.
We built a 4x8ft log cabin-esque raised garden bed from nothing but spruce logs - perfect for starting our Hügelkultur garden!
Our projected final frost date is fast approaching so we've been planning this year's gardening projects and getting things ready to plant.
I built this simple but effective elevated planter so we can grow fresh herbs this summer - plus we can easily move it with our tractor if we want!
