now, dad has a chemical engineering degree, and spent some time in the us army engineering corps, so he knows what hes doing on the construction and design side of things he becomes the general contractor, and also half of the other contractors
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we break ground in the summer of '11 the goal is to have the outer shell of the house ready by winter, so that we can continue construction without being hindered by snow a giant hole is dug rebar tying becomes a family bonding exercise
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we manage to make the outside of the house and cover it back up by snowfall we move in in august '12 now, this was a pretty weird house, if you hadnt already figured that out for starters: it was round, to better hold all the dirt on top
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one of the cool (heh) things about being underground is that the earth changes temperature real slowly so: no need for central heating or ac, because the earth will do it for us we also had a bunch of south-facing windows, so we barely needed to use electric lighting
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there was a pavilion out back, with a bunch of solar panels on it, and a tunnel leading out back which a battery rack to store the power, and a well for water the house itself was actually super nice: roomy, comfy, with character it was The place to have parties
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okay, so weve moved in now, so its all going to be peachy and wonderful and it turns out that wet ground changes temperature faster than dry ground so we spent our first winter at a toasty 60 F (and dropping) we had to get a propane space heater to not freeze in our sleep
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also, michigan winters and solar panels dont mix well the panels were angled to maximize average sunlight exposure, which meant that snow would pile up on top of them they were 10-20 feet off the ground, we had to get an extendable broom to clean them off
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also also the batteries we were using kind of sucked we had a bank of 40 batteries but one of them exploded (giving dad a nice chemical burn) and several other were faulty, refusing to hold charge and causing the circuit to have critically low voltage all the time
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we managed to smooth things out afterwards, but man that first winter was rough my sibling and i moved out for college 2 and 4 years later, my parents got a new job across the country 5 years later, and now some of my cousins are living there
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some pictures the front the inside: note the curved wall and beams and the very good boy the back tunnel, featuring some storage roomspic.twitter.com/fHK11ttVc1
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by the time i left, the garden had doubled in size and people were paying us for the right to pick our vegetables for their own use we were supplying a dozen families with fresh veggies
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the jokes were on point too "how havent you heard of <x> are you living under a rock or something" "yes" hobbit jokes: we almost put up a sign saying "party business only" lots of prepper jokes
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also it turns out that being surrounded by rebar is the same thing as being surrounded by a faraday cage, so we had to go right up to the windows to get any cell reception
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