We closed!

We've been planning an energy efficient, passive solar house for about two years now, and last Friday, November 20, 2009, we closed on the mortgage/construction loan.  I can't believe I'm so excited to go into debt like this.  But hey, our construction loan rolls into a 30-year fixed rate mortgage at 4.5% and I can't very well complain about that.

Let me tell you who we are. I'm David Jackson, a professor of Physics at Dickinson College, and my wife Virginia and I are about to begin construction on an energy-efficient house in Carlisle, PA. We had no idea that this would be such a difficult endeavor, and we haven't even begun construction yet! But during the past two years, we have learned an awful lot about home construction and green building and much of it came from the web. So I thought it was only fair to return some of this knowledge to cyberspace and start this blog.

So there you have it--a blog about the construction of our energy-efficient house. It sounds a bit Narcissistic when you say it like that, but our motives are actually quite practical. In addition to being a place where family and friends can keep up on our house progress, we hope that some of what we have learned will prove useful for someone else out there who is interested in building a similar house. For if there's one thing we've learned throughout this process so far, it's that no one is looking out for us...except us.