Going underground using 2 shipping containers, sure you could just dig a hole, plop them in and backfill, but that isn’t going to last very long, but Steve Rees did things right. The only “regret” I heard them express is that next time they will use 3 shipping containers instead of 2.
He went to the local officials to get a permit, they told him they didn’t have a permit for underground containers, so he went ahead and built, seems it was no problem for anyone. Rees did hire a large excavator to dig out the space, once the 2 containers were placed, they used thick foam on the outside to help insulate and keep the moisture away. Gravel was also used next to the containers so water will run off.
I like how he finished the inside, preferring not to put any holes in the skin of the container that might start rusting, you can see how he has done all of this in the video below. https://youtu.be/Z0oFJ2jbkDI
Here is one of the tiniest tiny homes I’ve seen to date, coming in at 83 square feet, it’s 8X12 feet, but the high ceiling gives it the feel of a bigger space. Scott is a big guy as you can see in the video, even he feels like this is a roomy situation for him.
I thought he might sleep on his couch, it appears to be a futon style, but his bed is actually a Murphy style bed right above the couch, it stays folded up when not in use, but once folded down, there is plenty of room for Scott to stretch out, and those high ceilings really come in handy here, I’ve seen many tiny homes with nearly no head room when in the loft, this isn’t an issue here.
Scott has a living room space with a couch, a bed above his couch, he even has a kitchen area of sorts built in to the end of the table/desk that runs nearly the length of the front of the house. It’s clear he keeps his clothing hung up in the entryway. What he is missing in the cabin is a bathroom and running water.
Of course being a guy, I suspect he waters the trees when he feels the need, he has an outhouse and shower facility on the property to take care of his other needs.
The home looks like it still needs some finishing touches, especially on the outside, but it’s a good start, and definitely livable, kudos to you Scott for what you have built and how you live.
I seriously considered using a title that said something like “my hubby sucks”, but honestly I don’t need to hype what he does, he is a Macgyver’s Macgyver! I quit doubting the things he says he is going to do, I just listen, put aside my skepticism and wait for the magic to happen. We like to call it Bobbage :)
As you may or may not know, PB uses concrete (soilcrete) for building around here, Portland cement is inexpensive, read cheap, all he has to add is the gravel and water, we have an abundant supply of gravel that restocks itself each time we get a good rain, the problem is the location of this gravel is at the bottom of the creek bed, down at the front part of the property, and “down” is the key word here.
In the past, he has used 5 gallon buckets to haul the gravel, on occasion we have bartered with neighbors and friends to get the use of earth moving equipment, but that doesn’t happen very often, and since he’s put in the bridge, it’s near impossible to drive down into the creek to load up on gravel.
PB began working out a way he could vacuum the gravel to the upper part of the property, he used an old shop vac, a metal 55 gallon drum, the sidewall of a tire and a long piece of 3 inch black poly pipe along with some duct tape to seal things up. It’s quiet, it’s efficient, it’s quick and it works great. Here is a video, actually 4 quick videos showing the gravel vac in action, along with some pictures.
What are your skills? Everyone has something they can do and do well, something that you enjoy doing, hopefully you are making your living doing it.
If TEOTWAWKI were to happen, assuming you have your food, water, shelter and other necessities taken care of, (you do, don’t you?), if we were to go back to a life like yesteryear, what could you contribute to your society? Unfortunately, all too many are skilled in spending money, or using technologic gadgets, that just will not get it if the power were to go out for an extended amount of time.
For me, I know how to cook from scratch, I can cook on a woodstove, I am familiar with our local plantlife for medicinal purposes. I can also cut hair, it’s funny that in the olden days, barbers were also the local medicine folk, you went to the barber to get minor, and sometimes major medical help.
I am well practiced at living in more primitive ways, choosing to live this way on purpose. PB is well versed at taking junk and turning it into useful things, he has a knowledge of electricity, gas (propane and other cooking & heating gas), engine repair, welding, building, he is an all around handy man.
Between the two of us, we have the skills to survive and the things we don’t have or can’t do, we can barter our skills with other people who have skills we don’t have. You don’t have to know how to do everything, but the more skills you do have, the better off you will be, both in this life, and in a potentially radically different world.
A neighbor and friend up the street is versed in leathercraft, another friend is a plumber, yet another is an EMT so can take care of medical issues, our small community is far ahead of many other towns because of the diverse knowledge and we all know each other.
As I asked in the title, is it too late? If you are reading this and you are still upright & breathing, it’s not too late, figure out what you are good at, what you enjoy doing, and learn more about it, get some practical experience, figure out what sorts of things that might be handy to know and do it.
The last couple of weeks, PB has been watching lots of track wheel vehicle videos on YouTube, I just thought he was on another rabbit trail, he travels those quite often, and sometimes something really interesting comes of it.
Let me backtrack just a bit, about 3 years ago, we were gifted an old (but still working) Craftsman lawn tractor, a very small tractor with 4 wheels, it has been sitting in our shed waiting to become useful.
PB wants to turn it into a half-track to make it easier to get up and down the hill and do as little damage to the land as possible. Here is a mock up of what he plans to do. More to come :)
I love the idea of cooking low and slow, but being off-grid means I don’t have the electricity to spare to run an electric crock pot, nor do I want to cook on my propane stove for hours and hours even on a low flame, I do use a pressure cooker to make things such as soup, stew and the such.
Today I ran across this video showing how you can use tea lights (small candles) to create an off-grid crock pot or slow cooker. I was intrigued and watched, I can see how it can be a really good thing, I can also see where some improvements can be made to make it safer, I would use metal to line where the candles touch the base, that way there would be little chance of the wood there getting hot enough to combust and if the candle wax were to escape, it would be less likely to catch anything on fire. I would perhaps want to line the entire thing with metal to keep things safer.
He said the meal took about 2 hours to cook, different tea lights last different amounts of time, from 2 hours up to 4 hours, you would have to check it as time went by to know if you would need to add fresh tea lights.
If your wood burning stove could talk, what would it say to you? Is it happy with the way you load it? Is it happy with the amount and type of wood you use?
Most off-gridders are using wood to heat our homes, open fireplaces are pretty to look at, but aren’t efficient. We prefer to use a wood burning stove, a metal box that contains the wood and fire, they use much less wood and give off much more heat.
I found this video with lots of tips and tricks to help you use your wood stove more efficiently, the biggest tip I got from this video is to learn your wood stove, they each have their own personality and burn differently, some like being filled, others prefer less wood more often, experiment and learn what your stove likes best and what works best.
It used to be that big storms caught us by surprise, now it seems that more and more we have several days up to a week’s warning, but even with these longer lead times, it’s still a good idea to have a backup plan, a way to survive, at least for the short term while the emergency plays itself out.
It has to be very disheartening to be greeted with empty shelves at the stores when weather emergencies happen, whether local or regional or even statewide. Most, if not all grocery stores have, on average, a 3 day supply of food & stock, that is if there isn’t a run on food, when that happens, the shelves will be stripped in hours, not days.
If you were stuck in your home right now, if you couldn’t leave, how long would you be able to survive with the food you have in your home now? How many days before you are in real trouble? Most of us are living paycheck to paycheck, some of us live in small apartments with not much storage space for extra food.
It’s possible to put up extra food on even the tightest of budgets, you might have to give up some “extras” for a while, but it’s possible to have some extra money to spend on buying foods for emergency backup. What do you do that costs money you don’t have to spend? Maybe downgrade your entertainment bills, things like your TV (cable & satellite), your internet, save that money you would spend on eating out or going to Starbucks… Drop your gym membership for a couple of months and sock that money into extra food to put back.
Curtail your driving, that is money you are putting into the gas tank, only drive when you absolutely have to, combine trips and stop joyriding, carpool to work if you can.
Now that you have a few extra dollars put aside, what kinds of food should you get? That all depends on what you will eat, there is no point in buying cans of baked beans if you hate baked beans. Buy what you will eat, but make sure it’s food that will last, especially without refrigeration, a freezer full of food is of no use if the power goes out. Buy dry foods, canned foods, you can get those foil packs of food like tuna, rice, chicken, even milk that doesn’t need refrigeration.
Your ability to cook may be curtailed because of the power going out, if you are really thinking ahead, you will have alternative ways to cook, propane is good for that. You can get food that doesn’t need to be cooked or needs very little in the way of cooking. Recently I saw quick cooking dry rice in the dollar store, it’s precooked and only needs to have water added to it, …
I’m sure I’m not the only person who ever wondered how it would be to build a greenhouse around your house, these folk in Stockholm Sweden did just that. It looks quite ingenious, and even pretty. I love the plants they have growing, the fig tree for example, there is no way they could grow that without it being inside a greenhouse, and the tomatoes look fabulous! Most people don’t know this, but tomatoes can be an perennial plant if the weather is mild enough in the winter.
The area where they live is normally just a summer getaway for most, but with the greenhouse around their home, they can stay there year round in comfort. I imagine it was not a cheap venture, but the money they save on heating in the winter will eventually pay for itself, and the fact that they are more self sufficient with growing food (plants) year round, it must all add up.
The original reality show, filmed in 1978, 12 adults and 3 children were chosen from around 1000 volunteers to live in the “iron age”, they lived this way for 1 year, fully immersed and living the life.
The nice thing is they weren’t in competition with each other, no one was “voted” off, they lived and worked together as if it were the iron age. It also interviewed the people some 30 years later and how it affected their lives.
As I watched this video, listening to Karen and Bob describing their life in the home they built themselves, the one phrase that really jumped out at me was “no debt”. That was their main motivation. I know (from personal experience building our own place) that they did most if not all of the work themselves, which is one of the biggest money eating parts of building, you would have to buy the materials anyhow, but doing the work yourself means YOU know what is in your place, no one else has cut corners unknown to you, I think it’s great!
I love the look and style of their home, it is warm and inviting. Watch and enjoy.
(ADDED Jan 21, 2016)
I received a message from Karen, it’s in the comments below, but I thought it best to add it here: How cool our video got shared to this great channel! feel free to share our email and phone number if people want some more info. karenk@usa.com 520-366-1984 We are also open to visitors. There is a off-grid,alternative building get together the first sunday of every month from about 10:30 am to1pm at a friend of ours who did and earthbag dome. for directions email m_m_gibbons@yahoo.com all are welcome!!!!
A great deal of the USA went through a major deep freeze, we were not spared here in far west Texas. We got dumped on with snow, it snowed as far south as Presidio, an area where one rarely needs more than a light jacket in winter. There were road closures from highway 10 all the way down to Presdio. Fortunately it happened over a weekend, and a holiday weekend as well. We had plenty of notice, and for me it was a payday weekend, I was able to stock up on some comfort food (soups, chili and the such), we were also able to stock up on some extra fire wood, we went through a LOT of firewood over those icy, snowy days and nights.
It’s funny because the Friday and Saturday before, the temps were getting up into the 70s F, T-shirt weather, but halfway through the day on Saturday, the wind changed direction and the temps dropped like a rock. PB and I were out by the road talking to a friend when the first few snow drops fell, yes I said drops, not flakes. These were marble sized, rounded snow drops, heavy, wet and hitting hard. The rest of the night and the following day, it snowed pretty much non-stop, we ended up with 6-8 inches of heavy, wet snow.
Normally our snow out here is powdery, dry and light, not this time. But all in all, it wasn’t a bad long weekend. My boss, who lives in Lubbock and got nearly a foot of snow, emailed everyone in the district to let us know we shouldn’t try to go out on the roads if it wasn’t safe, I didn’t even try to venture out until Tuesday afternoon. By then, the snow had pretty much melted off the roads and our dirt roads were dry enough to drive on without slipping and sliding.
Today, over a week later, there are still some patches of snow in the protected nooks and crannies out here, I am a little disappointed that I didn’t venture out and snap some pictures, but it was just too cold for me, too cold and too wet, I much prefer the powdery stuff that doesn’t stick to you and taps off of your boots. Yes, I’m getting to be a bit of a wimp, but with PB keeping the SkyCastle warm, the good food I cooked and warm dogs to snuggle with, I really had no interest in going outside during this snow event.
