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About Us

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My wife and I looked at each other and realized what we had to do.

We started with the planet. Literally. Quickly we ruled out everything but Canada and the United States because of the prevalence of smoking and poorly maintained vehicles. Then we ruled out Canada because it's so cold there. We don't like snow, and growing our own fruits and vegetables is too important to us to live up there. That left us with the United States and we started to look around. Having lived in earthquake territory for many years, we decided we wanted to avoid that in our move. For that fact, we wanted to avoid just about any natural disaster we could. So that eliminated places with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, blizzards, etc. We also wanted to avoid airports and military air bases, nuclear plants and nuclear waste disposal sites.

Since the air was so important, we figured that the west coast would be better than anything east because the prevailing winds in this country go from west to east. The west coast has the best air and it gets progressively worse as you go east since the air picks up all the pollution in Relief map of the State of Oregonits path.

We ended up with Oregon and Washington, and opted for the warmer, dryer weather of southern rural Oregon.

We took a one-week reconnaissance trip to the Medford area, and felt we could make a go of it. So we returned to California, got ready to sell the house and divest of lots of "stuff."This link to another web site opens in a new window. The privacy policies and terms of service may be different from ours.

In just under two months, we sold the house. It never got listed; a client of a colleague came over to see the place and said, in this order, "I'll take it. How much?" So we had to scramble to find out what we should sell it for, got a realtor to do the paperwork for a small amount since he did not have to market the house, and got packing.

We came up to southern Oregon once more to find a rental, and finally landed in Talent, Oregon in March of 2005. We used it as a "base camp" to go and search for a place to buy.

We now live in a very rural area where I can breathe freely. Not being able to find a house that I could live in, we decided to build. Construction started on our very customized home in January of 2007. EVERYTHING in the house was specially chosen for its positive contribution to indoor air quality (IAQ) and energy conservation. You can learn more about the construction project by using the links on the left side of the page.

BTW, when I go to Medford, the nearest "big city" (it's still half the population of where we lived in California) I still have to wear a respirator and I imagine I will have to do so for some time to come. However, I do know that I'm getting better now that I'm breathing good air on a regular basis.