Homesteading for the bare minimum of expenses

[AxelHeyst]

I’m very interested in this topic, planning on attempting something similar but less ambitious and just on the other side of the border (maybe we could be neighbors?).

I dont know anything about growing stuff, but I have thoughts on the rest of off-grid infrastructure. I grew up off grid in the desert, with a well and PV, and we built our house.

1. Modern homes are insanely expensive to build to code / normals standards, in my opinion. A big part of my strategy hinges on being able to not build a big awful house to code. There’s a couple ways around this: a) build an as-tiny-as-you-can home to code, get your permit signed off, and then build what you actually want. b) build pirate, if you are rural enough.

Examples of things that cost a pile of money, and their functional equivalents:

Septic tank+leach field, with plumbed running water, cistern, pumps, etc. :: a nice homemade composting toilet.

A professionally dug well, pump, electrical system (pump mi dh t not be where your house/PV is, so have to have another system or a generator or long distribution ), etc. :: rainwater capture system (roofs, impervious structures you were going to build anyway, tanks, cisterns, much smaller pumps, and filtration). Particularly if you aren’t flushing a toilet, I can’t imagine rainwater wouldn’t be sufficient anywhere in CA.

For the actual house structure, you seem to be on it with the log house. It’s often the extra stuff that people put in that makes homes expensive and laborious, like complex plumbing and electrical. Depending on your comfort level with roughing it, you can set the dial anywhere between a dope log cabin, to “broken school bus we towed on to our land and insulated”. Just note that it’s one thing to rough it with shelter if you have a Cush white collar job, another thing to be living in a weird diy thing while working your butt off in the way that horsewoman talked about. Reliable hot showers and a cozy bug and rodent free space to have your evening cry in are probably very important.

Eta: a lot of people approach housing/shelter incrementally. They put an RV, trailer, or some other smaller thing on the land so they can get started on the other stuff ASAP, and build the main house later when other things like the garden etc are cruising along. Many people find the temporary solution becomes rather long lived indeed.

[Alphaville]

1. Modern homes are insanely expensive to build to code / normals standards, in my opinion. A big part of my strategy hinges on being able to not build a big awful house to code. There’s a couple ways around this: a) build an as-tiny-as-you-can home to code, get your permit signed off, and then build what you actually want. b) build pirate, if you are rural enough.

i’d strongly recommend building up to code and going small.

codes exists for a reason, they’re not there just to protect incumbents. i’ve seen first-hand disasters from electrical fires, chimney fires, structural damage and other crap happening because people wanted to skirt the code.

not only that, but should you need professional help, insurance, eventual connection to the grid, etc., or wanting to sell the property, you’re going to need to meet code.

[basuragomi]

If I met someone saying they had a homestead in the BC interior woods or NS I would 100% assume they're growing and selling weed. So maybe consider doing that as it's probably way more effective for feeding yourself than raising chickens, at least on a labour/capital input to calorie basis.

3. The real low maintenance option is to buy a Savage Axis in .300 Win Mag and shoot moose for meat instead. Supplement with fish. Your solar setup is probably better suited for running a freezer than keeping chickens warm. For bonus Canadian points do it with a sportered Ross.

4. Electric heating from solar is simply a no-go in Canada, no matter where you are.
a) From what you're saying it sounds like you're looking in interior BC or NS. That's a maximum of 1100 kWh/kW/year solar power.
b) In Kelowna (reference location I'll be using, though good luck getting any land there for under $1M) You'll need about 3,900 heating degree days to maintain 18C.
c) Keep in mind in the depths of winter you're getting less than 50 hours of low-angle sunlight a month. If you have a 100 kW system that's at best 2,500 kWh per month for December/January, since the low-angle sunlight will screw your efficiency. And that's without considering shading problems, which you will have living in the woods in the mountains. Also, a 100 kW system would probably run you around $150,000 without storage.
d) You're looking to build an uninsulated(?) log cabin with heat loss rates of say 25,000 BTU/degree(F)-day. So that's 175.5 Million Btu = 51,434 kWh with something like half of that heating demand in December and January. So that massive $150k, 100 kW solar system will be able to supply about 20% of your winter heating needs.
e) That's about 25 cords of firewood instead. A two-car garage filled with wood. If you insulate your house (hope you have a few years to dry and season your home-milled wood first) then you can get that down to 10-15 cords. My shitty 100 sqft shack used a cord a week in the winter.

There is a reason almost everyone in rural Canada uses propane, wood and oil for heating. It is the cheapest, most reliable and most effective way to heat air and water. Is harvesting, hauling, splitting, and drying enough firewood to fill a garage every year minimal maintenance to you?

A C$600k portfolio at 3-4% return would give you a very nice life anywhere else in Canada. You can live permanently in downtown Toronto with that much, heat and water included!

[7Wannabe5]

Three books I would recommend:

“Mortgage Free: Innovative Strategies for Debt-Free Home Ownership”- Rob Roy

“The Resilient Gardener:Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times”- Carol Deppe

“Possum Living: How to Live Well Without a Job and With (Almost) No Money” -Dolly Freed

The reason I recommend these books is I think the practical advice they offer combined would define the minimum requirements towards your goal as you described it.

[AxelHeyst]

i’d strongly recommend building up to code and going small. ...

@alphaville's correct on all that, of course. I need to explain my view a little bit.

My context is I'm coming from a place where you need to buy a piece of paper for $10,000 if you want to stick a shovel in the ground, and many kinds of affordable building practices are de facto illegal. It's literally illegal to live on your own land in an RV for more than 2 weeks in many places, forcing you to live elsewhere while having your whole situation built. Many places have code restrictions on the minimum area you can build, making anything under 1,000sf (92sm) literally illegal to build. Further, many (most?) jurisdictions are prescriptive, meaning you are allowed to build A B or C style only, you *will not* get permission to build D through Z styles, even though they may be functionally superior in all relevant aspects to A/B/C and might also be far cheaper. These are the negative aspects of "to code" building that I seek to find creative solutions around.

I am *not* recommending you skirt codes in the actual construction of anything. Particularly when it comes to structural, framing, electrical, and anything involving fire, build to code! Whether you have a piece of paper saying you did or not, the codes exist to keep people from dying horribly in their homes and should be followed. Best case scenario if you slap something together with no knowledge of good building practices, it leaks, slowly collapses, and turns in to a pile of mouldering expired dreams.

I'm very familiar with to-code building practices and often forget about the contingent of people who thinks codes are purely a conspiracy by The Man to get people to spend more money on useless stuff. I'm very interested in "creative" approaches to shelter, most of which are at best in some grey zone of legality because they haven't been stamped by an engineer and incorporated in to the building code. If one isn't as interested in creative shelter as I am, it's probably not worth the hassle to figure out how to pull it off safely.

[saving-10-years]

@anesde asked

how long does it take you to spin/dye/weave the wool? How do you wash it prior to working it? We tried it once but the effort and end result didn’t make any financial sense vs. purchasing spools, or for that matter even clothes. Both of those are very cheap here, though perhaps not the case for the OP in Canada.

If you compare the cost of raw fleece with the cost of 100% virgin knitting wool (i.e. not recycled wool) then its quite a difference. Especially as in farming communities its not uncommon to be given fleeces for free. But its a lot of time and also time to get skilled. So its a matter of personal satisfaction - like @Jacob making a broom from scratch. Plus in my case spinning, weaving and dyeing are hobbies. The costs are fairly low (equipment I buy can usually be resold for more than I paid if I buy second hand and selectively). Its the source of desirable gifts to friends for special occasions. At one stage everyone who retired who I worked closely with had a handspun/handknit hat from me on leaving work and I know some still wear them six years on. (If you knew how bad my spinning was 6 years ago you would marvel at that).

So my costs of raw material are £0. I reuse the water I soak or wash the fleece in on the garden and dry in mesh hanging racks from the washing line. So I am adding dilute manure to the garden during the summer (you skirt or remove daggs and dirty fleece before you start washing but the water still gets quite dirty. The discarded wool will compost and retain mositure so again into the garden).

The only exceptional expense are some buckets and troughs (used for other gardening tasks at other times), mesh bags to hold fleece in and a spin dryer (old style so <£20). If you cold soak for at least a few hours in mesh bags this loosens surface dirt. Spin the water out. Soak in very hot water with dishwasher soap to open up scales in the wool and remove further dirt and grease. Spin the water out while wool is still warm (once cold scales will close and grab onto the dirt again). Then rinse in warm water and spin again. Hang to dry. If its an exceptionally dirty fleece I would do extra soaks but unless its a very special fleece a dirty one gets into the compostable pile with maybe only a handful of the best stuff washed. It took a lot of trial and error to come up with this system and its very efficient and inexpensive and uses no special products.

I can skirt a fleece and wash/dry and prep 1.5 kilos worth or so ready to spin in around 2 days (around other tasks - its very little hands on time, maybe 3 hours including watering the garden at intervals). Yield would be around 1 kilo of spun yarn. Would cost approx £20 to buy 1kg of prepped fibre ready to spin, but the breeds I use are not usually available so its hard to compare. (I have some specialist tools for prepping so I can do this at scale, cost of use of these is £0 - I usually profit on resale so have traded up considerably and am now unusually well equipped). I can normally spin 1kg in around a 10 hours but bear in mind I only spin while doing other stuff - chatting, watching TV or reading/watching online so by end of a week (I am a fast spinner) I could have a sweater quantity to knit or weave with at a cost of c£0 instead of buying this at £60+ (mill spun yarn undyed - handspun would be nearer £100). Almost all the time is hands-off or enjoyable hobby while doing something else. Weaving is a whole other peice of string as it depends how complex a pattern and size of loom. Dyeing costs are similarly low - I have bought dyes in quantity from hobbists who decided it was not for them - lots of that about. They are also the source of most of my looms - abandonned expensive kit finds its way into my barn and I love playing with all this. If you have specific questions please DM as I don't think many here will want this sort of detail?

[reepicheep]

@saving-10-years, perhaps a new thread? I'm also into fiber arts. Card weaving is my latest trick.

[saving-10-years]

@reepicheep - following your suggestion I have set up a thread for those into fiber arts (or as I spell it 'fibre arts'). Its here viewtopic.php?p=222065

Interested in card weaving myself, but not yet tried it. DH made me a floor standing/foldable band weaving loom entirely from spare parts we had lying around. I think I can card weave on that. But this is a discussion for another thread? See you over there.

[Gilberto de Piento]

I will pile on in support of wood heat if you have enough trees on your land to support it.

Harvesting wood can range from very efficient if you are cutting large individual trees that are easily accessible by vehicle (imagine a lone oak between fields) to a nightmare (imagine trees entangled in a steep, brushy, wet ravine).

The type of wood, the stove, the house, and the desired temperature all impact how much work you will need to do. I used to heat a small ranch house with wood in a place where 0f in the winter was common. I never tracked my time but it didn't seem like a huge burden, maybe five long days per year with a chainsaw, truck, and gas wood splitter for two workers. Even if it isn't the main source of heat having a stove and wood ready to go is cheap insurance.

I haven't used one but the outdoor boilers are supposed to be nice. The heat can be even throughout the house and you may be able to avoid some splitting as they will accept much bigger logs than an indoor woodstove.

[7Wannabe5]

I knew a 70 year old man with one arm who heated his house with wood. Would recommend simply on basis of physique maintenance.

[Alphaville]

splitting wood with a maul is a blast and a great endorphin rush. i think einstein used to recommend it, i would second. there is some risk involved and it requires good technique which has a learning curve, but once you get the swing of it (literally) it’s super fun. then again you could split your foot in 2 and then different story

[jennypenny]

GTOO heats his house with wood.

[Alphaville]

GTOO heats his house with wood.

who?

[jennypenny]

George the Original One

[Alphaville]

George the Original One

oh! right. i think of him as “george the OG”

good poster.

[iopsi]

Or you could work another 4 to 5 years and have a 1 million+ bucks portfolio and live life on easy mode.

Don't want to be a naysayer but it will be insanely difficult to reach that level of self sufficiency. It will take years to complete the project for sure.

Do it if you really want to, but financially it's definitely not the optimal path.