Realizing a Dream: A Journey Through My Eyes. Living in Ottawa in the 70s, in a nice neighbourhood with great neighbours, we were thinking of building a passive solar house as the oil prices kept inching up and up. This meant the house would have to basically face south, with most of the windows facing that way, too. We had fallen in love with the Ottawa River by canoeing it from Matawa to Montreal, so our first choice of a property...