12 YEARS Living Off-Grid on a Sustainable Homestead in a Self-Built Cob Home

Our house is completely off the

grid

, we are not connected to the

grid

, it was important for us to build our own house because we really wanted to avoid having a mortgage, we had paid off our debt so we could get out of town and as best we could. The estimate is that it cost less than a thousand dollars to make the entire building, including all the additions. I think food production is one of the most important aspects of our lifestyle, our permaculture lifestyle, it's definitely based on sustainability, but having a food forest, having chinampas, having these systems that produce an abundance Magnificent, I think that's where the real resilience of this system comes from, we've been

living

in the house since 2009.

So originally it was me and Bryce

living

here when we

built

it and then six

years

ago we had our first daughter and then three

years

ago years and a half we had a second one, so it's our family of four, mainly the house is made of cob, which is an amalgam of clay, sand and straw dug by hand, mixed with feet and applied by hand. and then the majority of the structural components that hold up the roof are wood, in the original building it is conventional wood and then in all the subsequent additions it has been wood that we have collected from the property, we have solar panels that currently provide all the energy that we are using is enough for most of our

home

use, including a cell phone and a laptop and all that, we are just entering the phase where we can have a proper freezer with the solar energy we have.

We have a wind turbine, but unfortunately we've had problems with it and being 60 feet in the air, you're not as willing to go up and fix it when your water breaks. We have a small well in the garden that I dug several times. been on hand for several years and only has an electric pump, but I am actually in the process of digging a new well that is closer to the house and can therefore be winterized and will only be available with power solar. to make it easier but we also have rain barrels that are gravity fed for hand washing water in the various bathrooms the idea is to have a very affordable lifestyle and of course it is not free we have a cell phone and we pay for our animal food to be imported and this kind of thing, but we try to keep the cost as minimal as possible.

We do everything we can for ourselves. We produce for ourselves as much as we can before Covid. We did a lot of tourism catering in Agra so I would say that was our main niche and yes Misty and I were trained to be chefs in the city. I work on a local agricultural farm, somewhat seasonal, but it's been slow this year, but thanks to hidden cash, thanks to child benefits, it really does. comfortable not having a car and this is what many people say about it because I think that in the American mentality a car is expected.

Well, we have taxis in the local town and they are usually available in half the time. an hour we only need to go to the city once a month, so saving money on the car, you know, it was culturally a change for us in the early days, but now that we've done it, now that we've gotten used to it. and honestly, as time has gone on, society has become more cooperative between deliveries from the city and all this kind of stuff, basically, anything we need can be brought to us and, yes, generally, at a Pretty low cost too, and then, Of course, you know the house, you know our house is predominantly made of dirt, if we want to fix up our house, I usually do it with a shovel, so I go out, get some dirt, take time to stomp on it and prepare it in the right way. and then I pack it in place and my house is back to normal, a little bit of dirt cleans everything up, so yeah these are our gray clay pits, this is where we get the gray clay from, basically we just remove the top layer ground. wetland set it aside we use the topsoil for our planting it's fantastic this is clay these things are underground everywhere in Ontario if you can take your clay and mix it all together spray it and basically make a tube that holds that shape if you can do that, you can build a house and that's amazing, so these are the tests you do, you make patty patty sticks, you have good clay, I just showed you the rolling test, you make a ball, does it sit down, look that sits. it doesn't squish and finally this is your finish, you smooth it out and see what you get: do you get a nice, smooth, consistent surface or do you get a lot of sand and gravel on top.

I have just a little. of sand here so this is actually this is basically premixed cob this sand clay is ready to add a little bit of fiber to this and this is a wall we usually add a little bit more sand just because it's so much the clay tends to to crack as it comes off and dries, it breaks like that, but yeah, honestly, you can make a wall with just this, you can make a wall with a little more sand and it's amazing that when you get to a wetland. or you know, digging a series of postholes or digging a pond is also literally preparing a house for your

self

, as if each of these pockets had its own story and were the house, as if it were torn from the ground and sculpted in situ, so yes.

We are a farm, but our property is a wetland, so we don't have much acreage. We couldn't do a conventional farm in the old way of doing things, but our lifestyle is geared towards staying in place and creating value in this place. What we are trying to do is produce as much of our needs as possible on the property and then when we need to shop off the property we look for local and artisanal products and when we can't find them we go back to business as usual. commercial scope, so we still buy food at the supermarket, but we also get local deliveries from local companies of seasonal products and things like that, and every year we expand more and are able to do more with what we produce here over the years that we have made pigs. and cows for meat we don't eat much meat anymore so we don't produce it anymore now we have a small dairy herd a cow in a container for milk cheeses and yogurts and all kinds of delicious cultured products for which we raise horses mainly biomass generation but also we work with them and they help us in farming and we hope to be more

self

sufficient in traveling because we do not own a motor vehicle we have a team of horses which we hope once we can get a suitable cart we will be our vehicle we also raise chickens and ducks for eggs and occasionally meat we grow a lot of fruits we have several trees I think food production is one of the most important aspects of our lifestyle our permaculture lifestyle is It's definitely based on sustainability, but having a food forest, having chinampas, having these systems that produce magnificent abundance, I think that's where the real resilience of the system comes from, from our food forest, it's a very small example and it's improvised in an affordable way. as we could for the last 12 years and this is many, many different plants, all planted together, they are placed on top of each other, they overlap each other but in doing so they keep each other moist, they keep each other shaded and they shade each other . a bit of protection from the wind, they help each other to grow, there is very little labor involved which means you can focus a lot more of your time on the harvest, so we will be eating from our food forest from the end of April . at the beginning of May each year and continues well into November and December in some years, I firmly believe that food forests will be the salvation of humanity, they are going to remedy many of the problems that are happening in agriculture these days, we learned about chinampas uh, years ago the term chinampas is from Mexico, they basically discovered that you could cut twigs and straw and all kinds of things, place them in the wetland space and put a straw on top and soil on top and you can grow it. in that soil, this essentially works to be a large scale hydroponic system because the roots, the taproots of all of these plants, can shoot up into the moist soil.

It is truly a remarkable technique that we also teach at

home

and it has truly been a wonderful experience. Being able to build with our kids so they can be empowered and know what it's like and Cobb is wonderfully accessible to kids. It's something they can totally do and I hope that when they're 10 or 11 they're a little bit stronger, they can build. their own building if they wanted to and then gardening and farming is really beautiful because of course it teaches them responsibility, it gives them a sense of connection with mother earth and also with other creatures and they realize compassion and then also just They have a love for plants and knowing how to eat things that just grow wild and how to be responsible for things, so that's the majority of our homeschooling.

We also know how to do math and reading and things like that, but in the kind of unschooling style that we like. letting life teach us what's important to life by doing it and that's why I like to call it life immersion school where we just immerse ourselves in real life and they learn from that experience. Well, this is our Cobb house that we have lived in. 12 years ago we started with this part of the house that was kind of a cute two-story 10 by 10 and we had our whole life in it, just the living room, the kitchen and a bedroom upstairs as a sleeping loft and it was great In addition to that, we also had a sauna bath and a separate outhouse and we found that because we are in Ontario and we have heavy winters, it was really fuel inefficient to heat the sauna separate from the house, so as we our needs grew and we were living in the house, we started adding a mud room and we added this screened in porch and the screened in porch was eventually filled with windows.

I would say 90 of the materials have been salvaged, most of these were salvaged from neighboring properties that were buildings that were going to be torn down and as the materials turned up we designed new rooms and expanded them so this evolved into our living room and then over time we started decorating it. Actually, it was originally a Cobb fireplace, so we had a fireplace in here and when I tiled it it started to look like a tree, so I carved it into a tree and I mentioned to my mother-in-law that we could put some tiles on it or something and we collaborated for some years.

In this tile, which is one of our favorite views of the house, we have wood heating and we have a wood heating device in each room and in the small rooms so we can split it up and heat only the rooms we are in . I'm going to use this one was also a rescue from someone's barn that was unwanted and I put it with a cob frame to protect against the heat, one of the things that I really love about Cobb that a lot of people don't know is basically the El same material as a fire brick, so if you want to keep the wood from overheating, you can use it as a dough and it absorbs the heat and re-radiates it at a rate of about an inch per hour, as we discovered in our first At Home , the wood stove similar to this we could heat it up for a day and then we could go out in the winter for about a day and we would come back and our water wasn't frozen so that's a really nice feature of the Cobb.

It also means it's cold an inch an hour from the outside, so the thicker the walls, the more time you have to store heat, but the more heat you'll have to put in for that heat to radiate into the house from the living room. room, this is our bathroom area, this was where we had the original shower stall, which was separate, and the original outhouse, and we connected them together and here we have a little bit of a sauna, big shower, small bathtub and a wood heater, which which is quite nice. in the winter and you can put a little water in it and it fogs up the room and then here is secretly hidden our house from the inside out, which is a composting toilet and obviously everything in this house is a work in progress, here we just we have a little mud room, this was our first addition and we have a little bit of you know, a coat rack in the boot area.

The mud room creates a sort of trom wall effect so that the winter sun can come in through these windows and hit the wall and be stored. its heat on the wall warms the mass of the wall during the night when it's colder and of course we can close the door at night and allow the heat to radiate in, so this is the original house we

built

on the 10th times 10. It is very square because we built it with wood collected from bunkies that were on the property when we bought it. It was pretty dilapidated, but it's kind of a conventional stick frame,but we fill in between the posts with cob and then you might be able to see that the walls actually taper a little bit, so they're wider at the bottom and narrower at the top, and that's for the cob to have fun with. and is built like a tree so that it can support itself.

Above and at their thickest point, the original walls were approximately 10 inches and tapered to approximately six inches on the upper floor. The upstairs is the sleeping loft, it still is, but it was our only bedroom until we built the west wing and now this is our master bedroom. kitchen, this is our main heater where we cook everything except the hottest weeks of the year so this is just a wood stove we were given, it had broken legs so we needed to convert it into a base and decided to add an oven passive on the side, so this one heats up by passing heat through here, but it can also function as a traditional stove, like a bread oven, so you can burn twigs right there and that heats up the masonry and it goes away.

There is a fireplace here, we mainly use it as a cheese cabinet because it has very good ventilation and it stays very, very dry because the wood stove keeps the cob very dry and the cob is hygroscopic and that means it always wants to equalize the humidity.de one side and the other, so if it's wet outside, it brings the moisture in, if it's wet inside, it draws the moisture out and this is a cob that has actually been plastered and dyed with charcoal and then sealed with linseed oil and I like the way the finishes come out like a wood stove, we are not rich wood burners so we can't just buy everything we need, we have to harvest it as we go and since we cook with wood all year round, There is no possibility of doing it always. have firewood stored and dried, so this was a very good strategy because the heat from the stove doesn't go down enough to set anything on fire, like it never works as a furnace, but it keeps it warm and dry here so we can collect firewood . in a storm and can be covered in ice and as long as there is enough wood to keep it burning the wood can dry out when it comes in so it is always fed from the top and these are preheated so you can get a more efficient burn so we put our main dishwashing sink here so you can have the water boiling on the hot wood stove.

It may be a cold day and you can keep warm by the fire while you wash the dishes and, in theory, you can also put water in the sink and leave it and when you come back a little later, the water will be hot and you can wash the dishes with it, but most of the time we just boil kettles and then rinse dishes, so it's really good. strong arms all the dark wood you see is stained with walnut stain we make only with black walnuts and we boil them and the liquid turns black and you can rub it it becomes that beautiful I think it looks a little old and then everything is sealed with linseed oil and if I can ever build it up enough before it gets dirty again, beeswax is also applied for a really beautiful, washable finish.

This is the west wing. This is our last edition that we call. It's the West Wing because of course it sounds fancy, but it's really not that fancy. It's actually the least elegant part we've done so far, but it has some other experiments we wanted to try while exploring natural building techniques and includes straw. bullet techniques, some wood framing and some wiggle and touch, as well as yeah, just some other experiments in living floors and other things like that coming out of the kitchen now, this is our, um, the stove that we made, this It's quite fun, it's very big.

Internal chamber that has a lot of space to store all types of firewood, so there is plenty of room inside to burn and then when the fire is lit, a nice hot surface is put in here so we can heat up kettles or cook. in it if we want and this actually heats up the oven space here we have the air flowing around and this is a smoker smoke box that will allow us to hang, you know, pieces of meat or cheeses or whatever and do a little bit of smoking at low temperature to help preserve our food, this is just someone's gifted refrigerator, so although it's not a plugged in refrigerator, we're just using it as an ice box right now.

In fact, I'm checking the neighbor's house waiting for this. freezer to get in and yes when we have ice on the property again it will be very easy. My grandfather made this stainless steel sink probably about 50 years ago, he worked in steel for many years, all the water in the west wing is just filtered gravel, so while we have a gray water processing system for the other part of the house where we actually make soaps, yeah, this one will basically be water and vegetable rinse and things like that. my staircase, I am very pleased with this, I built it myself, with my chainsaw skills, and really this is the heart of the west wing, the entire construction was built around this tree, when we first moved into the property , that's how it was. still alive and it was a big cedar and it really protected the west side of the building from the wind, so yeah, by using the tree we got a really solid base on the ground, everything that is built leans towards the tree and is resting on top of the.

Each of these boards is hand cut from cedar logs, so it was a lot of work, but basically just a chainsaw and a square. This is my daughter's room, we are very happy. about the plaster on the walls it's a continuous process, this whole wall, uh, on the whole west side of the building and up here is a straw bale wall, so this is our experiment with straw bales that we wanted to get to get the benefits of westerly wind mitigation and thermal absorption of straw bales, yes, in the process we discovered that it is a very quick way to construct a natural building because, essentially, once the building frame is up , the straw bales come in as filler and you immediately realize that the 18 inch thick walls go up super fast, you're insulated right away and yes, yes when you know how to make natural plasters, it's very easy to just plaster them and like on the wall, you're done, this is our room, so this is where we sleep, especially in the summer, but um, yeah, while during the winter it's much easier to sleep in the ten by ten rooms, it's very, very cozy, now that the girls are getting a little older.

I would like to start branching out and have single beds and what have you, the headboard is a good example of swagger. It's actually an artistic swagger and Misty, uh, did it herself, just as a kind of tribute to the process, but all the walls behind it. They are made in the same process, we essentially put up vertical posts and then we get weavers and we weave them together and pack them all together, make sure the whole wall is framed, then you take the casts and basically just spread them on. and pack the whole wall like this, this is all just filler, so it doesn't need to be structural or anything like that, and I think it's pretty wonderful that the potential of just scissors and mud to live in and we have the habitable roof just right outside the window here this is a new addition this summer it has cooled down the temperature of the roof surface and of course it is beautiful and cool and a breeze blows through it and we know that as the moisture is absorbed and evaporates Causes an evaporative cooling effect on the house, so it will cool the house in the summer.

It will help insulate the house in the winter. Most of the wood frame construction was done with chainsaw tongue and groove, which for the most part essentially involved cutting notches. into the standing timber and then making sure that the beam that was going in would fit into that notch so that it rested underneath that it had plenty of anchorage to fit inside and at the same time was very, very easy to attach to the main structure. So this is our dining room when we first planned it, we weren't entirely sure what we wanted to do, we knew kids were coming, but we're planning to do some major upgrades in this corner, some built-ins, plan some shelving. and things like that, this is actually going to be the homeschool corner so the girls have the opportunity to use it as a desk in a quiet place, so this in the bathroom is a rocket type mass heater, uh, water heater, currently we only have one pot here it's still waiting for its plumbing but outside there are rain barrels that are up high so they can be gravity fed here and then to the tub from there and you light the fire there and it goes up to a chamber double, so the flame licks up here, hits a bucket, comes back down and then the chimney goes in that direction to heat this mass and superheat the top here, which heats the water in a really efficient way, once plus we have a different composting toilet.

The best we can estimate is that it cost less than a thousand dollars to make the entire building, including all the additions. The original building cost us around four. hundred dollars and then from there all we've bought is new wood for the floors and the roof and nails and that's obviously substantially less than a conventional construction, but the windows and the roof and the things that we couldn't harvest in the nature has everything comes from reclaimed recycled things, mainly from buildings that we help other people tear down, but also when you start exploring a natural building, people with barns love to hear about it and they want you to come and clean their barns, so that this is a beautiful tapestry of many of our neighbors and friends who have just contributed things they didn't want and have come into our house which is really nice for about 10 years there was no challenge we had very good feedback from our community and everyone.

He would just come and find us here and see it and think, how cool, but a couple of years ago I wrote an article about our house and that subsequently caught the attention of our municipality and they took issue with the fact that it was not allowed and that that was the only problem, but the biggest challenge was that there was a really strong barrier to communication between the government and us and that is a challenge for me because I really appreciate the openness and we have done a lot of research and we have a lot of very good things. informed positions on this and we would really like it to be an open conversation so that the people who want to do this, which is a lot of people, have an avenue to do it, so I think some provision for a building could be written into the building code craft or a building that is intended solely for domestic use and not for resale and things of that nature and I also think there are many more opportunities for education because building is not difficult, I think it has been puzzled during making a profit, but it is not difficult and our ancestors have always done it and all over the world people continue to do it all the time and it's important, yeah, there are definitely challenges in this lifestyle, there's no two ways to do it, like, everything you do, you do. yourself, so I have to milk that cow twice a day, I can't take any time off, it has to be done, I have to make sure the horses are fed three times a day, I can't overlook those other real negatives , I mean the lack of convenience, I mean, I admit it. that there are many things and many comforts that our culture, society and science have created over the years.

That we don't have a washing machine, for example, is a spectacular example of a very convenient device that we don't have and that we have to dance around. on our clothes and actually wring them out, so I mean most of the complaints I have are along these lines, it's like it takes time to do things, but at the same time you have time through permaculture and you know there is plenty of time to think and consider the ramifications we have discovered that a

sustainable

lifestyle is absolutely possible for a human being a free lifestyle based on the earth is not a crazy fantasy, it is something very real the earth is so abundant that all you have to do is take care of your land and put seeds in it and you will be rewarded, so I am very hopeful, I am very optimistic that we have reached this era of technology and of sharing information and enlightenment that we can really begin, You know, expressing these ideas, there is more. and more people are waking up to the idea of ​​permaculture every day, more and more urban gardens and gorilla gardens and gangster gardeners, like so many people simply becoming caretakers of the land and sharing that food with their neighborhoods, this It is what will really bring poverty reduction. and the real systems that will make people live in abundance will not come from the government that we have waited for years, but we can put the seeds in the ground and we can make it happen now, please share this video if you also liked it,Be sure to subscribe to explore alternatives and check out our playlists for more stories like this, thanks for watching.