We dropped Sarah off at her first summer camp. Philip and Thomas are both there helping with odd jobs, and Nicole is a counselor this week. That leaves Juergen, Jessica and I home for one wonderful and quite week. We already painted the hallway in the basement, and began putting stucco on the stairwell walls. We also decide to buy a gas furnace and solar panels. We will also replace a few windows, insulate the attic and have a giant wood oven put in the front hallway. After months of researching options (and there are many different options) we are going for what can be paid off in the fastest time. Pellets would have made us more independent, but the over all investment would have taken 20 years to pay off. Solar and gas together will be paid off in 5 to 7 years. And if we add a good wood oven, we will save even more money. The generators that give you electricity are also pretty cool, but they are pretty expensive to maintain. The sterling motors are easier to maintain, but don't come in models large enough to heat our house. We learned that there is no "best answer" or "one size fits all" to heating a house. We took months to come up with this answer. I hope now we can just do it. Life has too many other things to consider. Right now we are studying for a seminar we will be teaching on the "end times". It will be 4 teachings at our church in October. I have actually taught at our church for years. I'm happy to have this opportunity. And it's cool to be digging into something like this with Juergen. I guess not many people would want to spend a quite week of vacation doing home renovation and studying the end times. But we feel desperate to get things off our to do list. And teaching is also a personal passion. So I’m looking forward to this week.
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