Going Green and saving energy!

Blue Stone "tumbled" rock (tumble means they made the edges rough, not a true square rock, makes it look warn)


A ton of blue stone rock and then my 2 inch flat cherry marbled blue stone hearth rock

I don't think you can see the cherry marble in the rock, because it is still dirty but it will show up more when he gets it laid and I can take pictures.

A closer look at the tumbled rock

This is the wall we will be building the rock wall and hearth.

This is somewhat an example of stacked natural rock. Not the greatest example, but it will give you an idea. I don't think these rocks are tumbled, which makes a big difference in the look!

Greg and I have decided that we need to update our ability to control the outcome of our living conditions when a storm comes through during the summer or winter. For the past year, I have been working on reducing the use of energy and more reliance on self sufficiency. Yes, I do think I was born a century to late, but there are things I like in both worlds! Every year, we experience the loss of our electricity, averaging 2-4 days. In the winter, it is hard, because we have no heat, the nights are dark and cold and after 2 days of this, the cold is to the bones and you can not get warm. So we have to pack up and go to my parents house to stay. I know they do not care, but you just feel like you are barging in on them. In the summer, the freezers that I have full of beef, pork and chicken plus the corn and other frozen veggies I put up will be thawed out in a day or two with extreme heat. I now have 3 freezers which are full so this would be detrimental to our food source if these all thawed out!

We've had a generator that we purchased 3-4 years ago for our horse trailer that stayed in the back of my truck. So we knew that generator was definitely large enough to run the house, just not the central heat/air. We had our friend John come over and drop a line out the back of our house to plug into our generator. Since we did have a recent storm knock us out of electricity for 2 days, we were able to experience the great use of our generator and found that it would run 11 hours on a tank of gas. IT was GREAT.....The fans in the house kept us cool! Next we are building and installing a Hearth and rock wall to install our wood burning stove for heat in the winter. We feel that it would reduce energy use, plus save us $ on our electric bill.

I went and picked out my rocks for the layer to install. I am so excited. I thought I had in mind what I wanted to purchase, but when I reached the site, they had examples of different rocks. I was going back and forth on what I wanted and decided if I have to look at this everyday, I am gong to install what I like so I can live with it. I choose the blue stone rock (tumbled) and the wall will be 'stacked' rock (meaning it will look loose and stacked) and then the cherry marbled blue stone for the hearth. I will post pictures as we get under way with the project. I am losing a wall and some seating, but we feel this is important at this time. I can purchase bean bags for the grandchildren to throw around to lay on when they are over!