Finding a new place

We will be putting our condo on the market soon. Getting a condo ready with no one to watch the kids is very stressful but we are making progress and packing things to put down in storage. We still need to do deep cleaning and some fixes around the condo. Living in a small place with out a yard isn't a big deal to me. I strive to live simply and to not need a lot.  With 3 kids and a cat and a dog it is time to move on. The part that is the hardest to live with is the small kitchen. We also need an extra bedroom since we have a boy and girls so eventually they can't share a room.

I am excited about getting a place with a yard and filling my yard with raised beds, greenhouses and raising a few chickens for eggs. I am excited about having a bigger kitchen to have more room for storage, making recipes, grinding grains and canning. I hoping to get a south facing home and make it really energy efficient.

When we moved here I was hoping my next place after this condo would be a straw bale house off the grid in an eco village that we would build ourselves. We are not in a place to do that right now. Even though we won't have an eco village with a straw bale I will make my home as efficient as possible and slowly turn it into a urban homestead growing as much as we can on our land.

The Dervaes family from Pasedena who grow all their food on their land trademarked the term urban homestead and went after bloggers and facebook pages that used the term. As much as I admire what they did  on their land that is the ultimate form of green washing. You can't market sustainability. Luckily there are thousand of people banding together to stop the trademark. I can't wait to have my own urban homestead. I still will love an eco village right in a city one day and haven't given up on that but you don't need to have a strawbale on tons of land to to be sustainable. If people can eat local in Alaska you can certainly do it in the lower 48.

I am a little worried about the little extra we will be paying and the market but hopefully things will work out with that.