Reliable? Yes. Punctual? Rarely.

As promised, here's some more pictures of the cabin.

Here's the front. It kind of looks like a giant plywood box from this angle. This is the north face and the door and windows have been framed but as the windows haven't arrived yet (and I don't have the porch up) I haven't cut out the plywood yet.

The mighty, mighty chicken coop! Or, if the ventilation slots don't do the trick, the summer chicken baker! I assembled this out of scraps we had leftover from the house. It's safe and dry and the chickens love it. Kat wants to paint it red. She has a compulsion with painting things red.

This is the "back" of the house, or the south side. It's our only entrance right now. We consider it the back and eventually I'm going to screen in a porch back here, but it's the side of the house facing the road. Trust Ernie to live with his back to the world!

If a home invader attacks, they'll be able to chop through the walls quicker than they can get through this door. In this photo I didn't have the outside handle on it or the stairs leading up to it yet. The door fits a little tight, but each time it gets opened and closed it gets a little better.

This is the ground floor and the inside. I really wanted to wait until I had furniture inside and happy kids lounging before I showed this photo, but that's taking longer than I expected. So you get the cluttered-with-tools photo for now. We're going to wall off a bathroom in that left corner but the right corner will have a woodstove and an eating area. The kitchen will be off to the left about where the saw is.

Until I get a charge controller and some solar panels up, this 6500w generator is our power system. It burns about a half-gallon of gas per hour and is noisy and smelly. However it will charge the batteries sufficiently in not too long of a time and can provide power to the RV for however long we have gasoline.

This is the rather clunky and messy battery "array". 3 deep cycle batteries provide about 345 amp hours of power. We don't need a lot of power right now, but the RV has a propane furnace for heat that has a small electric fan. Without the fan the furnace won't kick on. The battery array can keep that going through the night and only requires us to run the generator for an hour or so each day.

This is our water supply. It's a 550 gallon tank from Tractor Supply. It's set up on pallets right behind the RV. I can use a small electric pump to fill up the RV from this every 3-4 days. Until the rain catchment system is complete I won't have this tank mounted up on the tower, but at that point it will provide catchment and water supply to the entire cabin. A 3000 gallon tank will catch overflow and provide for deeper water storage.

It's somewhat of a difficult transition, as you can see, but it's getting there. With each day that passes we add some large quality of life improvement. Today we finished the nest boxes in the chicken coop, added some steps to the back door, and put a handle on both sides of the door. It just don't feel like home until you have a handle on the door.