I have a new project in the works and thought I would share it with the world and take advantage of your accumulated wisdom and experience.
After nine months living the Riot life and being a part-time academic in the urban northeast of the US, I’m moving back to Virginia, where I will probably still be a part-time academic but will also be helping to run a very ambitious community garden designed for serious production.
One reason I can do this is I have been offered very low cost, minimal shelter. This past winter I started looking around Pennsylvania College Town for a more-or-less bare, dry space with electricity and running water that I could outfit to accommodate my new, Riot-based lifestyle. Nobody wanted to rent me anything in the area I wanted to live in (with public transport and wi-fi).
But my friends in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, who were already looking after my gardening equipment, worm colonies, hoophouse, and furniture, had the almost-perfect space: a large, dry, clean room in an uninsulated cinderblock building with windows. It is set on a hilltop and surrounded by deciduous trees, so there’s some heat gain in the winter but not too much in the summer. The prevailing winds are from the northwest. The four windows of my room face north and east. To the south of my room is another large room, used as a garage and workshop, and below me is yet another garage. (Place used to be owned by a truck driver who did a lot of automotive projects. So there are two stories, three big spaces, two of them garages, on the top and north side of a hill. I will live behind one garage and over the other.) My room has a plywood floor, roof trusses that are only about 6′4″ above that floor, and electricity, but no running water, no ceiling. There is a wood stove in the garage room to the south of me and I have permission to put a woodstove in my space, tapping into the same chimney.
My plan is to build a design-for-disassembly (collapsible), well-insulated, small room modeled after a Vardo, or gypsy wagon — about 6 x 10 — right in the middle of that space, probably from SIPs (structural insulated panels). In the dead of winter, that space will allow me to do some very minimal cooking in a warm space and provide a cozy place to read, work, and sleep. In the more moderate seasons, I will live a little more large in the bigger space. Composting toilet, rainwater catchment, some wood heat, eventually perhaps some wind or solar power driving RV or boat-type appliances. (I already bought the freezer/refrigerator, a little chest model.)To start out, I will just be using the same low-wattage electrical appliances and butane burner I use for my all-electric studio apartment here in PA College Town. I managed to get down to about 60 kwh a month here, sometimes lower, plus an 8-ounce canister of butane.
Even though the property feels private and rural once the trees leaf out and hide the developments nearby, I will be on a city bus line (important since I sold the car a couple of years ago) and will have internet access. According to the architect I talked to I am not breaking any zoning rules or laws because the space doesn’t qualify as a dwelling. If Cousin Martha wants to sleep in the garage, apparently that level of eccentricity is not yet illegal where I am going.
It will be like living out of a modest-sized RV situated in a rather nice garage where I also happen to be storing all of my furniture.
OK! That’s a long setup for my first question about systems! I want to build about a six-foot counter with everything I need to wash food and dishes. It should have separate dispensers for potable water and water for washing. I need to be able to drain the water tidily into a five-gallon or so bucket. I don’t mind spending a modest amount of money but want to look first at repurposed and recycled. Rather than use a lot of rinsewater, I picture dipping a sponge into soapy water, scrubbing the dishes, and placing them in a rack where they are then rinsed with a hand-held sprayer.
Any thoughts on this topic would be helpful, also anyone who has experience using a woodstove in an uninsulated building — how well does that work? I will have a pretty good supply of free wood. I don’t plan to try to get it very warm, but it would be nice to prevent things from freezing. Temps will occasionally get into the low teens in this location, and in the winter go below freezing on a pretty regular basis. But it rarely stays very cold for very long. Heat and humidity are actually a bigger issue.
