THE HOMESTEAD/ACCUMULATION YEARS
COUNTDOWN TO RETIREMENT:
We finished the house shell in the summer of 1991, a year and a half after we bought the land. We’d originally planned to work a little over one year after buying, but that stretched to two and a half. There was just too much to be done before we could move, including hauling a ridiculous amount of stuff over the mountains to our new place. Minimalists we were (and are) not.
Theoretically speaking, I admire people who keep few possessions and gain a sense of freedom from it. DH and I have gone pretty much the other way. Some of it is hoarding, so we’ll just skip over that and move to the justification part.
The thing is: if you want to do as much as possible for yourself and live far from stores/neighbors, you need tools and supplies. There’s no way around this unless you plan to jump in your car and drive (50 miles RT for us) to the nearest store every time something needs to be built or repaired. Even if you did this, the store would be a small-town place with limited stock and high prices. We also aren’t much for social capital because we enjoy our own company and prefer to be self-reliant where possible. I just don’t see how one could live the way we did (and do, to a lesser extent) and still be a minimalist.
A very sketchy list of things we had/have on hand all the time:
Food staples & cooking tools
Grain grinder, meat grinder, meat saw
Clothes for all activities and seasons, including things we can trash with paint or grease
Cross-country skis, snowshoes, ski boots, snow boots, hiking boots, rubber barn boots
Axes, hatchets, wedges, sledge hammers
Carpentry tools & building materials
Mechanic’s tools (a LOT)
Metalworking tools
Generators
Spare water pumps
Plumbing supplies & tools
Electrical supplies & tools
Buckets and drawers of hardware: nails, screws, nuts, bolts, propane fittings, etc.
Fencing tools and supplies
Propane, gas, diesel
Cables, chains, ropes, come-alongs, snatch blocks
Tractor & implements
Shovels, picks, rakes, bow saw, pole pruner, hand gardening tools
Chainsaws, brush cutters and tools to maintain them
Wood-fired stoves for cooking and heating; propane tankless water heater
Supplies/equipment for winemaking and a number of other DIY hobbies
All sorts of things I’ve forgotten, plus lots of junk for which there’s no justification. Many of our belongings were bought for pennies at yard sales or scavenged.
Tl;dr: we moved a lot of stuff in that final year.
One of the epic trips involved hauling our massive marine diesel generator to our new place. DH referred to this as our white elephant because we’d almost never used it (we had smaller, more practical generators for tools and solar for everyday needs), but leaving it behind wasn’t an option he’d consider. This thing was unbelievably heavy, not to mention huge; it basically filled the bed of our 64 Chevy pickup. We winched it onto the poor, abused truck with a come-along and steel rollers, then set out on a hot Memorial Day with the generator in back and two big dogs panting up a storm in the cab with us.
Three hours in, we were less than halfway there under heavy load. The last town we’d passed was 20 miles behind us and the next 40 miles ahead, so of course the alternator chose that moment to seize and snap the fan belt. We pulled over and assessed our options: no cell phone (not common then and completely foreign to us), nothing but orchards around us, overheated dogs…
Sometimes sheer ignorance can be an asset. I asked DH if the diesel generator had an alternator and fan belt we could borrow. He was dubious but willing to try, and the alternator fit reasonably well on the truck with some modification. The fan belt didn’t. DH used a piece of rope as a fan belt, and that lasted long enough to limp us to the nearest fruit stand with a house and orchard. Since orchards usually have tractors and various vehicles, we asked the owner if he possibly had a fan belt we could buy. He went back to his shop where he had about a zillion different belts hanging, picked out one that fit well enough and gave it to us. He wouldn’t take any money. A fellow hoarder saved the day!
One more quick hauling story, and then I promise to stop. Our old Massey Ferguson tractor was another hunk of iron, and we absolutely needed that in our new home. We loaded it onto our flatbed trailer, which maxed out the 10,000 lb axle capacity, so we put the implements in the truck bed. DH made this trip alone because I was picking up a relative at the airport and bringing him up to visit our new place. Everything went okay for DH until he reached the 4-mile unpaved mountain road at the very end. Our truck wasn’t a 4WD, and it just couldn’t pull the tractor up that steep grade without losing traction. DH finally parked the truck and trailer, unloaded the tractor, drove it home and then walked 4 miles back for the truck and trailer. A 4-mile walk wasn’t unreasonable, but it came at the end of a very long day. Just shows how much easier things are if you have two people working together.