The joy of having and experiencing life in our greenhouse/sunroom is so present and multidimensional. I can keep talking about the joyful aspect of having one but it would be good to talk a bit about the technical aspect of it. I am a builder after all, not a writer. How it works and what it means as a way of reducing our ever increasing consumption of finite energy just to be comfortable and happy?
From the beginning I had a small problem with happiness derived from just having things. Well, I still do that: I draw quite a bit of happiness from having and playing my guitars or having those fancy tools, but I am working on that. I am trying to tone down on those and move my focus on the life around which, first of all is the subject of what I want to sing or write about.
Anyhow, getting back to the building aspect of it: now that the greenhouse/sunroom is almost done and the sun is up and shiny, we are experiencing for the first time in many, many years, the joy of starting our garden again from the seeds. The joy of having our hands back in the blessed dirt while the snow outside is still there is almost impossible to describe.
For me, its like the craving for the sun after being deprived of it for the long winter times. We are so ready and longing for it. My hands are so happy to be back in the thing, feeling the texture of the soil, the healing property of it. The joy of opening every new pack of seeds, the delicate handling of each and everyone of them, the filling of the little paper containers and planting that little seed that will come into being in almost no-time, the joy of watching them grow to the ceremony of watering them. Al that water in the blue barrels that served as a heat storage over the winter, now is served as food for them its magic to me.
The point of all this is that such a building allows all this to happen. Not only that because of it we no longer worry if we are gonna have enough of fire wood; (it actually cut the fire wood consumption by about half), that with every sunny day we open the windows and doors toward the sunroom now, that we already sunbathed quite a few times etc, etc, the point is that because of it we closed an essential loop with life. With this we have let the life in. The home is now a integral part of the garden, it’s a sanctuary now where life begins, an observatory toward the open “wild” outside, it’s a meditation place and so many other things.
With such an addition we succeeded to create the multi use dimension that was almost missing before.
Now we have to work on how to achieve the off-the-grid part. All the steel roof that now serves as a rainwater collection system, will house the hot water and PV solar panels.