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

[Music] our house is off grid completely we have no tie to the grid it was important for us to build our own home because we really wanted to avoid having a mortgage we had paid off our debt so that we could leave the city and the best we can estimate is that it cost less than a thousand dollars to do 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 it's definitely based around sustainability but having a food forest having chinampas having these systems which produce magnificent abundance i think that is where the true resiliency of this system comes from we have been living in the home since 2009. so originally it was bryce and i living here when we built it and then six years ago we had our first daughter and then three and a half years ago we had a second so it's our family of four primarily the house is made out of cob which is an amalgam of clay and sand and straw as dug by hand and mixed by foot and applied by hand and then most of the uh structural components holding up the roof are timber in the original building it's uh conventional lumber and then in all the subsequent additions it has been timber that we've harvested uh from the property uh we have solar panels that currently provide all of the power that we're using uh it's enough for most of our household use including like a cell phone and laptop and whatnot we're just coming into the phase where we can have a proper freezer on the solar that we have we do have a wind turbine but unfortunately we've had issues with it and being 60 feet in the air you're not so inclined to go up and fix it when it's broken the water we have a small well in the yard that i dug a number of years ago by hand and it's got just an electric pump but i'm actually currently in a process of making a new well which is closer to the house and can therefore be winterized in and that will just be on tap with the solar solar power to facilitate it but we also have rain barrels that are gravity fed for the hand wash water in the various bathrooms the idea is to have a highly affordable lifestyle and of course it's not cost-free we have a cell phone and we pay for our animal feeds to be imported and these sorts of things but we try to keep it as minimal cost as possible we do as much as we possibly can for ourselves produce for ourselves as much as we can before covid we did a lot of agra tourism catering so i'd say that was our main niche and yeah misty and i were both trained to chefs in the city i work on a local agribusiness farm sort of uh seasonal but that's been slow this year but thanks to covert cash thanks to child benefits really makes it comfortable by not having a car and this is this is a lot of people comment on that because i think a car is sort of expected in the north american mentality well we have taxi cabs in the local town and they're readily available generally within half an hour we only need to go to town once a month so saving the money on the car you know it was culturally that was a shift for us in the early days but now that we've done it now that we've accustomed to it and honestly as time has gone by society has become more cooperative between the the deliveries from the city and and all these sorts of things basically anything we need can be brought to us and uh yeah generally at a fairly low cost as well uh and then of course you know the home you know our home is predominantly made of earth if we want to fix our home generally i do so with a shovel so i go out i get some earth i take the time to stomp it i prepare it into the right form and then i pack it into the place and my home is back to normal a little bit of dirt cleans up everything so yeah these are our gray clay pits this is where we get the gray clay from we basically just take the top soil off of the wetland put it aside we use the topsoil for our planting it's fantastic this is clay this stuff is under the ground everywhere in ontario if you can take your clay and mix it all together get it splushed and basically make a tube that holds that form if you can do that you can build a house and that's amazing so like these are the tests you do this you make patty patty sticks you got good clay i just showed you the roll test you do a ball does it sit up look at that it sits up it doesn't crush and then finally this one's your your finish you smooth it out and you see what you get do you get a nice smooth consistent surface or do you get a lot of sand and gravel on the top i have just a little bit of sand in here so this is actually this is basically pre-mixed cob this sand clay is just ready to go 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 uh this much clay has a tendency to crack as it peels apart as it dries it breaks like that but um yeah honestly you can make a wall with just this you can make a wall with a little bit more sand and it's amazing that just coming out to a wetland or you know digging a set of post holes or digging yourself a pond is also preparing yourself a home literally like each of these pockets has its own story and is the house it's sort of like pulled up out of the ground and sculpted in situ so yeah [Music] we homestead but our property is a wetland so we don't have very much actually arable 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 building value in this place what we're trying to do is to produce as much of our needs as possible on the property and then when we need to purchase outside of the property we look for local and artisanal and when we can't find that then we move into the normal commercial realm so we still purchase groceries from the grocery store but we also get local deliveries from local businesses from in season produce and things like that and every year we expand more and can do more with what we produce here over the years we have done pigs and cows for meat we don't eat very much meat anymore so we don't produce them anymore we now keep a small dairy herd a cow in a bowl for milk cheeses and yogurts and all kinds of lovely cultured products we keep horses mostly for the biomass generation but also we work with them and they help us in the farming and we do hope to be more self-sufficient in travel because we don't own a motorized vehicle we have a team of horses that we hope once we can get a proper cart we'll be our vehicle we also keep chickens and ducks for eggs and occasionally meat we grow a lot of fruit we have a number of trees i think food production is one of the most important aspects of our lifestyle our permaculture lifestyle it's it's definitely based around sustainability but having a food forest having chinampas having these systems which produce magnificent abundance i think that is where the true resiliency of the system comes from our food forest it's a it's a very small example and it's sort of cobbled together as affordably as we possibly could for the last 12 years and this is just many many different plants all planted together they they stand over top of each other they overlap each other but in doing so they keep each other moist they keep each other shaded they give each other a little bit of protection from the wind they help each other to to grow up there's very little labor involved so it means that you get to focus a lot more of your time on harvest so we are eating from our food forest as early as late april early may every year that continues on well into november and december in some years i firmly believe that food forests are going to be the salvation of mankind they're going to remedy many of the problems that are going on in agriculture these days we learned about chinampas uh years ago the term chinampas is from mexico they basically found that you could cut down twigs and straw and all sorts of things lay it down in wetland space and put a straw on top of that and soil on top of that and you can grow in that soil this essentially just works to be a massive scale hydroponic system because the roots the taproots of all of these plants can shoot way way down into the wet earth it's really a remarkable technique [Music] we also home school and it's been really a wonderful experience to be able to do building with our children so that they can be empowered and know what it's like and cobb is wonderfully accessible to children it's something that they can totally do and i expect when they're 10 or 11 a little bit stronger they could build their own building if they wanted to and then the gardening and the farming comes in really beautifully because of course it teaches responsibility it gives them a sense of connection with mother earth and also with other creatures and realizing compassion and then also just having a love for plants and knowing how to feed yourself from things that just grow wild and how to be responsible for things so that is the majority of our homeschooling we also you know do math and reading and stuff like that but uh in the sort of unschooling style we like to let life teach us what is important to life by doing it and so i like to call it life immersion schooling where we just immerse ourselves in real living and they learn from that experience well this is our cobb house we've lived in it for 12 years now we started with this part of the house which was a two-story 10 by 10 sort of a monkey and we had our whole life in it just living room kitchen and a bedroom above as a sleeping loft and that was great we had beside that we also had a sauna shower room and a separate outhouse and we found just because we're in ontario and we have a substantial winters that it was really inefficient in fuel to heat the sauna separate from the house so as our needs grew and we lived in the house we started to add a mud room on and added this covered porch and the covered porch eventually got filled in 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 appeared we designed new rooms and expanded on it so this one evolved into our living room and then over time we began to decorate it this was actually originally a cobb fireplace here so we had a chimney in here and it when i cobbed it over it started to kind of look like a tree so i sculpted it into a tree and i mentioned to my mother-in-law that we might put some tiles or something in and we for a few years collaborated on this mosaic which is kind of one of our favorite viewpoints of the house we have uh wood heating and we have a wood uh heating device in every single room and small rooms so that we can divide it up and only heat the rooms that we are going to be using this one was also a salvage from somebody's barn that was unwanted and i put it in with a cob surround for um uh heat shielding one of the things i really love about cobb that a lot of people are not aware it's basically the same material as a fire brick so if you want to prevent wood from getting overheated you can use it as a mass and it drinks in the heat and it re-radiates it at a rate of about an inch an hour so we found in our first home the wood stove similar to this one we could heat it for a day and then we could go out in the winter time for about a day and we would come back and our water wasn't frozen so that's a really nice feature of cobb that also means that it is chilling by an inch an hour from the outside so the thicker your walls are the longer you get heat storage but the more heat you have to put into it in order for that heat to be radiating in the house from the living room this is our bathroom area this was where we had the original shower house which was separate and the original outhouse and we connected them and in here we have a little bit of a sauna large shower small bathtub and a wood heater here which is quite nice in the winter and you can put some water on it and it steams up the room and then here's secretly hidden away is our inside out house which is a composting toilet bathroom and obviously everything in this house is a work in progress here we've just got a little mud room this was our first addition and we have a little bit of you know a boot area coat rack the mud room creates kind of a trom wall effect so the winter sun can come through these windows and it hits the wall and stores its heat in the wall which heats up the mass of the wall for the night time when it gets cooler and we can of course close the door at night and allow the heat to radiate inward so this is the original house that we built the 10 by 10. it's very square because we built it with lumber that was harvested from bunkie that was on the property when we purchased it it was quite dilapidated but it's kind of a conventional stick frame but we filled in between the uh studs with cob and then you might be able to see that the walls actually taper a little bit so they're wider at the base and they go up narrower at the top and that's for the sporting of the cob and sort of built like a tree so that it can hold itself up and at its thickest the original walls were about 10 inches tapering up to about six inches in the upper story the upstairs is the sleeping loft it still is but it was our only bedroom up until we built the west wing and this is now our main kitchen this is our main heater where we do all of our cooking except in the hottest weeks of the year so this is just a wood stove that was given to us it had broken legs so we needed to make it a base we decided to add a passive oven on the side of it so this one it's heated from this putting heat through here but it can also work like a traditional stick stove like a bread oven so you can actually burn twigs right in there and that heats the masonry of it and goes out a chimney here mostly we use it for a cheese cabinet because it's got really good ventilation and it stays really really dry because the wood stove keeps the cob very dry and cob is hygroscopic and that means that it always wants to equalize the moisture on one side and the other so if it's humid outside it brings the moisture in if it's humid inside it pulls the moisture out and this is cob that's been plastered and stained with coal actually and then sealed with linseed oil and i i like the way that the finishes come out kind of like a wood stove we're not affluent wood burners so we can't just buy in everything that we need we have to harvest it as we go and because we cook on wood all year round there's no possibility of always having wood stored and dried so this was a really good strategy because the heat from the stove comes down not enough to light anything on fire like it just would never work as an oven but it keeps it hot and dry down here so we can collect wood in a in a storm and it can be covered in ice and as long as there's enough wood to keep this burning the wood can dry out by the time it goes in so you always feed from the top and these ones are preheated so that you get a more efficient burn so we put our main dishwashing sink over here so that you can have your water boiling on the hot wood stove it can be a cold day and you can stay warm by the fire while you're doing your dishes and then theoretically also you can put water into the sink and leave it and by the time you come back a little bit later the water will be hot and you can do your dishes from it but mostly we just boil kettles and then rinse dishes thusly it makes for really strong arms all of the dark wood that you see is stained with walnut dye that we make from just black walnuts and we boil them up and the liquid turns black and you can rub it on it turns this beautiful i think it looks kind of antique and then everything is just sealed with linseed oil and if i can ever build it up enough before it gets dirty again beeswax as well on top of that to make a really lovely and washable finish this is the west wing um this is our latest edition we call it the west wing because of course it sounds fancy but it's not really that fancy it's actually the least fancy part we've made so far but it has few other experiments that we wanted to try as we were exploring natural building techniques and includes the straw bale techniques some timber framing and some waddle and dab as well as yeah just a few 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 one's quite fun it's a great big internal chamber which has got plenty of room to just pack with all kinds of firewood so lots and lots of space on the inside to burn um and then when the fire is going puts a nice hot surface up here so we can heat kettles or or cook on it if we want to and this actually heats up the oven space here we've got the air flows around and this is a smoker smoke box this will allow us to hang you know chunks of meat or cheeses or what have you and do some low temperature smoking to uh to help preserve our food um this one is it's just somebody's giveaway fridge so though it's not a plugged in fridge we just use it as an ice box right now i'm actually going over the neighbor's place all waiting for this freezer to come in and yeah when we've got the ice on property again it's going to be really easy my grandfather made this stainless steel sink top probably 50 odd years ago he was a steel worker for for many many years all of the water from the west wing that's all all just gravel filtered so while we do have a grey water processing system for the other part of the house where we actually do soaps yeah this one is basically just going to be water and rinsing vegetables and things like that i have my staircase i'm very pleased with this built this myself uh with my chainsaw skills and really this is the the heart of the west wing all of the um the construction was built around this tree uh when we first moved on to the property it was still alive and it was a big cedar tree and really sheltered the the west side of the building from the wind so um yeah by using the tree we actually get a really solid in the ground foundation everything that's built gets to sort of lean towards onto the tree and is is sort of resting on top of it each of these boards are hand cut from cedar logs so it was a it was a lot of work but basically just a chainsaw and a set square this is my daughter's room we're very pleased about the plaster on the walls is a ongoing 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 in straw bale we wanted to to get the benefits of the mitigation of the west wind and the um the thermal absorption of the straw bale yeah in the process we found it was it's a really fast way to put up a natural building because you can essentially once the building frame is up the straw bale goes in as an infill and it's you immediately get you know 18 inch thick walls they go up super fast you're insulated right away and uh yeah if when you're you know good at doing natural plasters it's really easy to just plaster them over and like wall you're done this is our bedroom so this is where we we sleep especially in the summertime but um yeah while over the winter it's much easier to sleep in the ten by tens it's very very cozy uh now that the girls are getting a little bit older we'd like to start branching out and having individual beds and what have you the headboard is a fine example of waddle this is actually an artistic waddle and misty's uh did this herself just a sort of a tribute to the process but all of the walls behind this are made in the same process essentially we put in vertical posts and then we get weavers and we weave between them and we pack them all down make sure the whole wall is is framed up then you take your plasters and you basically just like smear them on and pack the whole wall up like that this is all just infill so it's not needed to be structural or anything like that and i think it's quite quite wonderful that the potential of just clippers and mud for for dwelling and we have the living roof just outside of the window here this is a new addition this summer it has cooled down the surface temperature of the roof and of course it's beautiful and it's cool and a breeze blows through it and and we know that uh as the moisture absorbs in it and evaporates off it causes an evaporative cooling effect to the house so it will cool the house in the summertime it will help insulate the house in the winter time the majority of the timber frame construction was done chainsaw tongue and groove which for the most part involved essentially cutting notches into the standing wood and then making sure that the beam that would come in would fit into that notch so that it was supported underneath had a lot of anchorage to fit inside and then at the same time was very very easy to affix to the main structure so this is our dining room when we were first planning it we weren't entirely sure what we wanted to do we knew we had kids coming but we we are planning to do some serious upgrades to this corner uh some built-ins plan some shelving and things like that this is actually going to be the homeschool nook so that the girls will have the opportunity to use this as a desk in sort of a quiet place so this in the bathroom is a rocket mass heater uh water heater presently we just have a stock pot here it's still waiting for its plumbing but there's rain barrels outside that are up high so that can be gravity fed into here and then into the tub from there and you light the fire in there and it comes up into a double chamber so the flame licks up here it hits a bucket goes back down and then the chimney goes that way so that it heats this mass up and super heats the top here which heats up the water in a really efficient way once again we have a composting toilet different setup here where it's just a separate compost bin with a hatch that can go out to the compost pile [Music] the best we can estimate is that it cost less than a thousand dollars to do the entire building including all the additions the original building cost us about four hundred dollars and then from there all we've purchased is new uh lumber for the floors and the roof and nails and that obviously is substantially less than a conventional build but the windows and the roofing and things that we could not harvest from the wild have all been from reclaimed recycled things mostly from buildings that we helped other people take down but also as you begin to explore a natural building people with barns love to hear about that and they want you to come and clean their barns out so this is a beautiful tapestry of many of our neighbors and friends who have just contributed things that they didn't want and have gone into our home which is really nice for uh about 10 years there were no challenges at all we had really good feedback from our community and everyone would just come and find us here and see it and think oh how cool but a couple years ago i wrote an article about our house and that subsequently brought attention from our municipality and they took issue with the fact that it was unpermitted and that was the only issue but the biggest challenge was that there was a really strong barrier to communication between the government and ourselves and that is a challenge for me because i really appreciate openness and we've done a lot of research and we have a lot of very well informed positions on this and we really would like it to be a conversation that's held in the open so that people who are wanting to do this which is a lot of people have an avenue to do so so i think that there could be written into the building code some provision for an artisanal building or a building that is exclusively intended for home use and not for resale and things of that nature and i also think that there's a lot more opportunity for education because building is not hard it's been mystified i think for profit but it isn't hard and our ancestors have always done it and around the world people continue to do it all the time and it's important yeah there are definitely challenges to this lifestyle there's no two ways about that like uh everything you do you do yourself so like i have to milk that cow twice a day i cannot take any time off must be done have to make sure the horses get fed three times a day i cannot miss that other real negatives i mean the lack of convenience i mean i acknowledge that there are many things many conveniences that our culture and society and science have come up with over the years that we do not have a laundry machine for example is a spectacular example of a very convenient device we don't have that we have to dance in our laundry and actually wring it out so i mean most of the complaints that i have are along these lines it's sort of like it takes time to do things but at the same time you have the time through permaculture and you know lots of time to think and consider the ramifications we have discovered that a sustainable lifestyle is absolutely 100 possible for a human being a free lifestyle based on the earth is not this crazy fantasy it's a very real thing the earth is so abundant all you have to do is care for her soil and put seeds in it and you shall be rewarded so i'm very hopeful i'm very optimistic that we've come to this era of technology and sharing information and enlightenment that we can actually start you know expressing these ideas there's more and more people catching on to the permaculture idea every day more and more urban gardens and gorilla gardens and and gangster gardeners like so many people just becoming tenders of the earth and sharing that food with their neighborhoods this is what's actually going to bring the poverty reduction and the actual systems that will make people live in abundance it's not going to come trickling down from the government we've waited for that for years but we can put the seeds in the ground and we can make it happen now [Music] please share this video if you liked it also be sure to subscribe to exploring alternatives and check out our playlists for more stories like this thanks for watching

Channel: Exploring Alternatives

Views: 2,567,914

Rating: 4.9380455 out of 5

Keywords: homesteading, homestead, living, lifestyle, land, food, production, permaculture, grow, growing, farm, self, sufficient, sufficiency, how to, documentary, interview, experience, challenges, sustainable, green, building, home, house, solar, natural, materials, timber, frame, cob, clay, sand, straw, mud, earth, construction, build, DIY, built, eco, panels, heat, plaster, walls, roof, tour, interior, rocket, stove, wood, low, impact, cost, budget, affordable, homeschool, unschool, chinampa, forest, livestock, wattle, daub, bale, floor, simple, mortgage, free

Id: J94TqEEPp1I

Length: 28min 22sec (1702 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 12 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/c_renfrow524]

Thank you for posting! Very interesting!

[u/tgWaldoPepper]

Awesome.

[u/PanicAtPUBG]

Loved this!

[u/Ok-You-163]

Homesteading is difficult but so rewarding. Ice storm just hit two days ago. Everybody was freaking out and scrambling to get supplies ready. We laughed, made chili from shelf stables, checked the battery, and watched Jericho. Off grid homesteading rocks sometimes, LoL.