Here's a few questions for us to settle on:
1) What time of the year should it be? Winter would be good for the extra challenge, but for farming and the like it would need to be spring or summer.
2) Where should we live? I'm kind of partial to an apartment building or a gated community, like retirement homes, as it would work well with the need to keep us together, but would also be energy efficient enough to make sharing houses unnecessary (or at least you'd have fire places in the retirement homes).
3) Where should we meet? I'm thinking a Super Walmart, as it has most of what you'd need.