Dear Reader:
There is lots of bad climate news in the newspaper these days. However, I am not going to write about it because it just makes my climate anxiety worse. Therefore, I am going to try and stay positive and give you an update on renovations.
If you have read previous blogs, you know about Permaculture Incubator Programme (PIP)—like a small business incubator, only for regenerative agriculture. PIP has always been foreseen to be a residential programme. We planned to provide low-rent housing to the trainees.
The original plan was to rebuild a dilapidated barn and turn it into a barndominium. Unfortunately, that plan hit a snag. The estimated cost of building the barndominium came in at an unaffordable $1,685,000.
We made a quick pivot and purchased a four-bedroom house with sitting on 2.5 acres. Now, the plan is to lodge the trainees in the house and subdivide the two acres, into four, half-acre plots on which the trainees can put the training they receive into practice.
The person from whom we purchased the house was a heavy smoker and we had a big concern about the risk that third-hand cigarette smoke might pose to the health of the incubator programme participants.
Therefore, we are doing a complete renovation. We are repainting the whole interior using oil-based primer that seals smoke odours. It’s a big house so it is taking a lot of time. Then we are extracting all of the nasty old carpeting and replacing with synthetic wood or tile.
We will have the renovations finished long before the launch of the Incubator Program in the spring of 2024. So we will probably, AirB&B it for a year. We will start recruiting PIP trainees in the fall of 2023. We hope you will consider applying.