SOS!

We have encountered our first (and hopefully last?!) big obstacle of the project.  We were hoping to have moved the bus to the new land last week and to have already begun construction.  We were under the impression that the place was already completely set up for electricity - all we had to do was call the utilities company and get them to reactivate the meter.  But when we went to check out the meter...

Meter? What meter?  In fact.  What wiring?!  Eeks.  So we met with our future landlord to find out more.  It turns out that there was a meter there until a few months ago.  The utilities company had been charging him rent for the meter even though no one was living there, so he decided to ask them to remove it.  What seems to have happened is that they also removed all the wiring to the main power pole along the road.  Our guess is that this set up was made oh so many years ago, and so when they came to simply get the meter, they realized that the wiring was not up to code and just ripped it out (looks rather ripped-out!)  

So now we are looking at a rather costly endeavour to get a certified electrician to prepare and set up the metering area + wiring as well as paying the utilities company to do their portion of rewiring etc.  An electrician came yesterday and his estimate for his portion is $1500 (eeks!)  The obvious conclusion is that the landlord is responsible to bear the cost of all of it since the agreement is that we are renting land with power.  However, tBOY and I are not so sure that he is ready to do that.  He did not give us the impression that he was willing to go through the trouble and the cost :(! - but perhaps we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves... we still need to meet with him again when we have more information.

We started considering a more off-grid set-up for the bus, so that we are not tied to land with power, septic etc.  I'm not sure that we are ready to go that route... but we will think about it. Sigh!!  We embarked on this project because we are tired of the lack of control re: our home and space as renters.  Yet, we will still not be land owners, which means we are still at the mercy of landlords :(!

So.  tBOY and I each slept terribly the night after we discovered this.  Home building is stressful!  Since we do not want to start construction until we know where the bus will reside, we went for a 5-hour bike ride instead of going to the big box home building store!

I felt way less stressed out afterwards :)!  Also, we went to a party in the evening and met some people who have a friend who lives nearby who may be looking to share some rented land... a possibility?  We'll keep you posted.  In the meantime, keep your fingers crossed for us!