A wander through an unbuilt house part 2

The bathroom is on the southern wall, so has a hybrid cob/strawbale wall - did I mention that before?  can't remember but I have now lol.  On this southern wall next to the bathroom is a door that leads to the coolstore.  Thick walls, a double door entry (one door, short hallway, second door) and on the other side of the second door, pantry heaven.  This room will hopefully mean that I don't need to have a fridge, it should stay cool enough to store fruits, vegetables and other foodstuffs that need to be kept cool.  I will also have a freezer in here to store meat and frozen vegies.  Lots of shelves to store food and bins under the shelves for bulk goods like beans, flour and rice. 
Next to this door the first kitchen bench starts.  The house curves around at this point so the kitchen window takes in views down the valley to the south and over the hills to the west (or more likely over the trees and gully).  There is my wood stove on the western wall and the bench goes all the way from the storeroom door to the stove.  There are shelves under the bench with a curtain covering them.  The sink is under a window looking down the valley - the dream would be an old fashioned farm house style sink but we'll see what pops up at the time.  There will also be shelves in the wall, probably between the sink and the stove, to store the plates, cups and saucers etc.

Next to the stove, a table and chairs for eating, under a window that looks to the west.  The northern wall has the greenhouse on it, soaking up the sun and warming the house.  Where the wall from the kitchen meets this area it drops to be half height.  This forms the back of the cob couch that runs along this wall to the doorway.  The greenhouse is behind this half wall which provides thermal mass to soak up the warmth from the sun.  The top half of the wall is a window to allow the sunlight to come in and light the house and warm the floor.  There is a vine growing over the greenhouse which shades it in summer so the house doesn't get too hot and when it loses its leaves in winter lets in the sun to warm the house. Plants in there will provide us with food and greenery hopefully all year around and I'd love to have a second bath in there to enjoy an almost outside bathing experience.  The cob bench on the inside of the house is basically a shell that has a wooden top that opens to provide extra storage space.  In front of it sits a coffee table made of black heart sassafrass. 

Furniture is minimal in my house, this is on purpose - I don't need much. 

So that is a wander through my house - the dimensions probably don't make sense and it will probably change as time goes on and I get closer to actually building, but so far I think it works.  Works as a thought experiment anyway ;)

living fridge free

So the plan is to live in my house fridge free - facilitated by use of a cool room/cellar.


Life has progressed since i started this blog.  Currently we are sharing a house with another family who have similar living ideals to us.  They own the house a long with the 10 acres that it is on which has facilitated many more ideas.  They have lived fridge free before using their fridge (switched off) as an insulated cool room and kept it cool by using freezer blocks which they rotated twice a day to keep it cold enough to store things long term.

In thinking about how I will do it a few things have come apparent.  one is that we will most likely have a house cow very soon.  This means access to fresh, raw milk relatively easily, which in turn means that we can just go day by day - no more needing to store milk for a long time.  Butter will be fine in a cool room.  Hopefully I will be making cheese from any excess milk which will also be fine stored in the cool room.  Vegetables will hopefully mostly be coming from the garden so can be picked as needed and long term storage will be (you guessed it) the cool room.
Meat will be mostly from the freezer I think.  This will also form long term storage for things like berries picked over summer and other fruits, sauces I make in big batches that involve meat and probably some vegies as well (green ones mostly which will be blanched and then frozen).
The cool store will be designed with lots of shelves to house bottled things - fruit, tomato sauces etc - and other long term storage foods - cheeses, soaps (need cool storage), bulk lots of flour, rice etc.

In slightly unrelated news, having justified spending money of fibre and related stuff by calling it skilling up for TEOTWAWKI, i have had the inkling of a thought about starting a market built on barter.  Not sure South Lumberjackistan is ready for it, but if I'm working on the premise that the monetary system is not going to last a huge amount longer then this is the way stuff will go anyway...  hmmmm.  How to start...