U.S., Suburban New England, with off-grid & Permaculture features – SP0262

A place so lovely, you won’t need to get away for a vacation!  A home with resilient features, natural wooded area, and gardens that blend in with the natural setting.  Small livestock friendly!

House Construction: Wood frame house (approx. 1969), single story ranch style, concrete fiber siding, low-e windows, poured concrete foundation, walkout basement

Roof Construction: asphalt shingle over marine plywood, with hurricane clips

House-insulation: fiberglass insulation in walls and attic, concrete fiber siding provides some additional insulation

Roof-insulation: minimum 9” installed 2008

Window-construction: low-e

Window-glazing:Double glazed

Window-shutters:No

Heating-house: 2 zone oil furnace baseboard heat upstairs, with Vermont Castings Intrepid wood stove in living room

Heating-water: on-demand, oil heat

Cooking method: electric stove in kitchen, wood stove has griddle top

Electricity: grid electric

Water: private well,  submersed electric pump and manual well pump

Food-production: hardy kiwi vines (mature, productive), raspberries, a few small apple trees just starting to bear, five small haskap bushes, former vegetable gardens in back yard need weeding, but soil is very good, rhubarb, edible wild plants for foraging.  Near the house is a 4’x8’ animal shelter with attached porch (half-inch metal hardware cloth top, bottom, sides) that could house fowl.  Oxford passed a Right-to-Farm ordinance about ten years ago.

Income possibilities: good internet and phone service for remote work or e-business, land suitable for gourmet mushroom and medicinal woodland plant production. The home is located near a number of roads that make commuting to larger towns or cities convenient.  It also would make it fairly easy to transport high value products to markets.

Owners opinion on sustainable features: This property is a hybrid of modest suburban home and Permaculture homestead.  The manual well pump and wood stove assure basics (heat, cooking, water for cooking, bathing, and flushing toilets) during grid outages, and with the available windfall from the woods (at least half the lot is wooded, including dead standing ash trees) there can be some savings on heating oil and electric for cooking.

There is rich compost on the property, years in the making, potentially saving hundreds of dollars for setting up gardens.  There are many medicinal, edible, native plants on the property that also provide habitat for wildlife, including neotropical migratory birds and beneficial insects.

Other Notes: The property is within a couple of miles of over 200 acres of state forest.