50 years off-grid: architect-maker paradise amid NorCal redwoods

I owned 400 acres you know as a young person coming on the land I could not believe that nobody wanted this we came on the land and there was no water no roads no bridges there was nothing but there were trees right here was a tree I cut the tree and I made it fall I created stresses into what's called the hinge here and it went perfect boom the top broke and that tree went down halfway down on that ledge I said oh we're in trouble there's no way in the world gonna lift this thing up I tied a chain up on the tree up there and I have this world work to winch as is okay Fenner a you and I will get on here get one two three jump and we jump so then we just cranked it up and we built our bridge on top of the log it's been there like 40 years everything on this farm that you'll see there was nothing here we never hired help you got to remember we came on the land well yet absolutely no money this costs eighty five hundred dollars to build and so even doorknobs see we made our own doorknobs the size of the house dependent on the trees there's no outside we integrate the whole thing I had no choice I wanted to tuck it in and I got the house I could I couldn't decide on how big the house was I didn't make that decision I just tucked there right into the and that way it becomes a part of it you know we made the doors now we cut the lumber everything but all of the wood here's Redwood right off the farm we never hired out we poured the concrete build the windows we did the whole works and you know limitations are not necessarily bad they actually inspire creation because if you can go to store and buy it it's too easy to just buy it if you can't buy it then you have to make it so this is sort of a personal expression of an artistic form and we did it for us to live in now this is a third house we first built the little cabin and we did that in 5 1/2 days we got a cab because my wife was five months pregnant $2,800 built this that got us through for 15 years children grew up and they were there then we went to a three-bedroom house the trees grew up around us and we didn't have much sky so one day I sat down here and I says this is where I want to build the house yeah I had absolutely no idea of what I was going to do and I looked up there and I said oh there's the sky there's the trees I want that point of reference to be the beginning of the house so I said okay I want this curve because orientation and everything is perfect and so then boom in one second that's established so then I get up and I look up here and I said oh I don't want that ceiling to be that high and coming this way so I said let's bring it down to human scale then I turn around I say oh I want to look uphill 20 seconds the whole house was designed but see what's interesting about this kind of thing is that we had the sawmill we had the lumber all this we harvested then our and I were the laborers within the kind that was every element required to come from start to finish we were able to do the whole house without help without contractors without anybody so what happens when you go from concept to completion without external elements there's a personal sort of expression that you will not get if you have to have other people involved okay you okay you know it's real pretty looking up there when it's raining it looks like the rains are gonna come right on your head and you're there you kind of duck a bit red go down there so nice this is so cool you know you're sitting here it's so different but you know what's interesting I've had two or three people over 20 years that cannot stand this house too much glass don't drapes so you know I'm looking at it I'm thinking you know what's the problem spiderwebs you know and you know they're beautiful now these boards the full of knots and cracks and it doesn't matter because the wood is not being used in tension in compression it's being used as stretching and pushing so the wood is doing this and it has 10 times more strength going this way and being trying to pull it apart than it is to try to bend it the boards are not the same thickness the same width they don't have to match up so this is four layers there's no beams four layers of boards that make up this diaphragm and you know the the parabolic forms are so fantastic in terms of structure they're so strong because the curved form is what gives it the strength an egg is very strong because of the shape a boat oh yeah or a car on automobiles all these curved shapes they're intentional they're to give it strength because they have a thin material and they're getting the strength through the curvature so it buildings the economical you know the Romans were doing this it goes back to Mesopotamia they did arches way back I mean here for the individual in the woods like this you could build a little arch and you could actually fill it with ten feet of dirt and you could make a underground house quite easy without a lot of structure to hold it together see again I got the ground coming up right here and I like to hide the toilet so I'm back here on the toilet and it's kind of back and see even though it's all open you feel a sense of privacy and then I like the mirror so basically extends the space double so even in the bathroom you didn't worry about privacy no what do you got you some deer scene you have you come on this is the kitchen now I always like to have the kitchen where the ground comes up to the kitchen though we have pet deer that come and lie down right here they love to watch us a little fun we'll jump over and he'd be here and we're washing dishes and she's right there with her face and I always like to bring the ground up to the kitchen level sink I also like to keep the silk I like to bring it right down the sink and now you're you're like a child you see the ground as a child sees it when a grown up you're always looking down it's nice to look parallel and see the tree and see the ground and see the leaves as a child like you know so these are all made this is a this is a dowel and this is a piece of copper pipe so I made the handle that way and the drawer has got a slider on it and you just the drawers open up and you know these then try to use the lighters in the corner I made a door that was connected rather than door half-and-half I made most of the houses I made my own redwood all red wood by the way this is redwood I really like wood cutting boards built-in so basically you go from water chop chop down to the stove but here I did the pizza oven and it's preheated so this is a with stones but it has Vince from the stove from the outside to preheat it I put in this wall a chimney so I had no money to buy a stove so I have a junkyard down there with a bunch of steel I needed a stove so what I do is I go down to junkyard and I'm looking at him stove stove stove oh yeah I saw this pipe it was like 30 feet long and I said there's my stove so this is a greenhouse in the fall winter and spring and this extends a garden now this broccoli plant is three years old and I just picked a cluster of broccoli off of it see these are snap beans delicious well the thing is it's so nice you just walk down like this morning I came down and I got some cryptic zucchini yeah right here there's another one out to harvest and then I got some bell pepper I got some broccoli and then went out and I made an omelet for us to have breakfast right and so you just take it here so also it's sunken in the ground so from the house we don't see it well yeah well in a winger being sunk in the ground and never freezes in here so I've had Tomatoes year-round so your idea was to get out here and be self-sufficient right food-wise yeah you know we went three months without ever shopping see the sustainability that I envision the climate here such with the greenhouses you could do a 75% for sure I think that we need to think in those terms of becoming self-sustaining in food production in energy and financially we get those three elements in place and we could have a good life but you have to have some money and you have to have energy so solar hears about there would be a potential of doing hydraulic from from the river there'd be a power in it without hurting anything but the laws long allowed now those are solar panels they heat up the hot water for showers and hot water for the house through solar hot water this is twenty five why it's a closed system so it doesn't take a whole lot of power and so I'm circulating the water here to a water tank on the roof no no solar we went 25 years without refrigeration 17 years without a telephone or even more we had to put our own phone line for two and a half miles from the nearest neighbor and we had a sitting on the ground and we had mice and bear chill in the line and I had to service it myself this is the first house we built here it was beautiful it's kind of had it today this whole thing in five half days we built the whole thing with five people $2800 built this we did 15 years here the children who grew up in here you know we didn't have disposable diapers we had caught diapers so she had a little basin the kids would bathe there by the window wash the diapers we had a wringer washer machine to wash I built a rack right here and hang the clothes in the winter on the clothesline and then each of us would grab the rope and we'd lift the clothes up there and they'd ride up there no big deal we had nineteen years we had a composting toilet in the barn this was very very comfortable it had a 50 gallon drum for a stove here and he had a ladder going up and there's a big room up there why did you decide to do this shape well it was the easiest and most of that lease expand this four by eight module these frames these frames were built one on top of the other there's 10 of them here's one frame that's complete now it's got a it's got two beams going across here to bolt it here and that's got two below that are bolted across and then it's got one on top four foot module basically so there's no waste of lumber so what happened we built these one on top of the other all bolted so see this is four foot and eight foot is right here from here down so that's four you bought a man already with the white on it so we didn't have to paint it it's just fiber board it's insulated board I don't know well lumberyard then we with these guys here and they're four by eight so they do movement within I don't know a half a day we had all the sides up and then these two by threes went on over that and then insulation went down just sheets were rolled down whoo and then the tin was put over the top of that and we had a wall complete and the roof same thing I mean it was so easy I'd never built a house that was so easy to build as this a half-day's five people we had all the frames up then we had to come in with a glass now like I told you I don't design I follow logic so I had to brace this wall from tipping so the first thing without knowing what I'm gonna do I put a brace in room now I got it brace then I wanted a door because I wanted to walk out here so I determined the door so the door I picked this size two doors and so then that determined the vertical here well I got this vertically here it was logical to go from here this corner that so I got that corner then this pain was too big for the glass I decided to cut it in half so I put this here and that there so then that that duplicated and that's the whole design was it designed itself by following a logical sequence and doing what was necessary for Charcot integrity simplicity simply is difficult it's easy to make things complex in but doing simple and and you know inexpensive not necessarily see what we just chopped it off cuz all the heat goes up by chopping it off yeah this is affordable this is the most space for the least expense that I ever have done to the volume if there wasn't that much the heat and then the most wonderful thing for us here we had my gas light we never had electricity and my wife and I we'd be here and the boys would sit there and books reading that was our entertainment they learned to read when they're like 3 to 4 years old now the stove is a interesting stove very inexpensive probably the cheapest thing of goodbye top loaded and it has vents on the side so you put your wood in and tubes go down that's kind of like a rocket so and the wood was put in and so we got the chimney going out and that's what kept us warm we actually cooked on here and dried made toast and whatnot gas stove and now we did 52 loaves of bread a month baked all our bread but anyway so you know we slip up after school well when we say homeschooled and we did the 3 R's they didn't do much more than we did some geography we did calligraphy we thought calligraphy was important you know the people don't have color anymore yeah there you go we taught him how to read early and so then that was and then they went out to milk goats at five years old they took over all the chores they were out at seven o'clock in the morning with a lantern there was a goat shed and each one had a goat to milk their schooling was ninety percent out of doors well yeah four hundred acres you know how much I own to the top of the mountain here I go about a mile that way top of the mountain there and halfway up the mountain behind me that's huge did you buy the land from there's a whole story there it starts with Union Lumber Company they owned or the whole forest for hundreds of miles around here and back in 1906 they had logged a lot of the old-growth up north and TL Johnson was second generation or something so he owned this and he found a market for the old-growth timber so every one of these clusters has or had a series of trees who are like five six foot diameter and so he come in and he cut every one of them see where we talk about the logging the original logging so what this is a railroad grade so they hauled all the trees out by train so they had tracks as a railroad track went down here tried to cross and the trees they took them down from the mountain they rolled what they did is they caught up and they rolled them down the hill the whole tree like that blow blow over the trees like this they rolled them down from the top to get him down you know what they did all of these trees went for a railroad ties for Chile and Argentina to make railroads all the big redwoods and these trees were like 10 11 feet and they're huge and then the the train with they were able to do rigging where they could pick up these logs and put them on the train but they they they did horrible damage to the forest what they did man tries to make the most profit for the least amount of work so they cut the trees in the spring all the needles and the branches have dried during the summer and then they set the hotel forests on fire and they did this like 810 years in a row because they wanted to burn the leaves and the branches so it make it easier for them to get the trees out and they completely change the ecology of the forest by doing that process that was the trees they cut in 1960 nineteen there were two here but the original tree might have been something back there this like say these are clones these are these are fairy rings Azhar called all of these trees are feeding off of the original and they're all clones the original trees were this stump here and that stump there and there's a couple behind they cut those and then out sprout regeneration of redwoods there's two ways from seed and also from sucker growth you see all these little babies here have a potential become a giant tree so nature there's a little space here to get a little light because I cut some branches womb it's trying to build and this is incredible growth this is like one year from here to here because it's feeding off the old Trump now that tree is probably not much more than a hundred years old and if we were to release some of the competition around it in 50 years it would be like this it would be like twice the size of that so anyway these are growing while this would be saved this would be saved you take one to those two out and you take two more out and by doing that to get photosynthesis you have to have growth and by thinning you're gonna get more photosynthesis carbon oxygen exchange you're gonna get more of it by cutting trees out then if you don't cut up so people say oh you cut redwoods well your could be cutting them detrimental E or you could be cutting embed efficiently for the ecology of for the force so there's extremes human beings go to extremes in whatever they do the redwood tree you got the environmentalists needle like cutting any trees and then you had the industry that cuts the ball and they're cutting trees they shouldn't cut there's the original tree was in this space we're talking probably 20,000 years ago ten thousand years ago and it rotted so these are clones this is a second third generation the second or third generation and this probably third or fourth generation so it's happening the conditions for growing redwoods nature is enhancing and so the trees are getting bigger and bigger and better than they were before humankind when we manage things we deplete the resource and we don't put back what we take out these are all children these are genetically the same tree all this whole bunch here and that one there is a child of this one here and look at how much eat uh photosynthesis this tree it saves so much carbon right and look there's a tree now growing on top of the rotten stump so now it's feeding that's an oak tree that's growing on top pretty awesome now here again we're not going to touch these but if you were to cut that one and that one and that one within 50 years these trees would be enormous they'd be like that I did what's called a non industrial timber management plan so every fifth acre every tree was measured for the - the diameter and so that an inventory was gained and so by the inventory you can get the growth rate so now you know how many board feet a year per acre is gained with the growth rate I planted 40,000 trees in the forest and 40,000 see I earn my living with Christmas trees so there were 40,000 trees that we harvested a thousand six-hundred every year over nineteen years this is the one it only tree that I've ever seen and grown that grew from seed naturally I found it under a redwood and this is three years old and this is a growth this year that it put on just from spring - now now this genetically because it's one of a million that has grown from seed would be a fantastic seed if you wanted to clone now the way I clone redwoods and I've done thousands of them I've done cloning ferp to another system so I take a little thing like this and I stripped these needles off and I get a knife I found out there was better to cut it at a slant so it's like a wedge and then I dip it into a septic so it doesn't rot and then I have a mix of perlite and peat moss for a medium that I stick it in I dip it into a hormone and na stick it and within six weeks I got a wart and then within 12 weeks you got roots and within two years you have a tree that's twice as big than grown from seed I was getting 85 90 percent success and to get that kind of rate of success you have to be do the process that I just described but now this is a conifer and it's Douglas fir and I did 2,000 clones of this for my own use this is a one tree out of 40,000 that made the best Christmas tree and when I took the cutting I'm taking this and I'm trying to make a career out of this the genetic characteristic of this thing is a branch right I took it off of a race well this thing the top wants to be a bridge that is thinking 20 years to get it into a tree it's finally recognizing that it needs to straighten itself out and now it's starting to create a leader so the tree can't figure out where's the main stem and and if Keith wanted to be a branch this whole thing is you Christmas trees yeah I did forty thousand that's how we earned a living we sold a thousand six hundred a year I'm mom and pop we made sixty five thousand bucks in 1993 out of Christmas tree lot that's how he paid the farm is through Christmas trees so you can love the trees but also use them to make a living here we got bare land it's got no trees on it we plant four thousand trees per acre so now we got trees growing so all of these trees are actually doing an official for the environment you have to understand the ecology and what's good for the ecology and let decision based on environmental factors rather than profitability the short-term gains are not good for forest management you have to look at a horizon of about 75 to 100 years you can't look for the quarterly dividend on their stock see that cluster of trees there there's probably 10,000 dollars worth of timber but you take an old-growth tree there were 250 to 300 thousands per tree and that was that was like 40 years ago so they see that's why people that you know why does the man that owned a piece of land have a right to something that's 2,500 years old that should belong to the people I always say it's very unfortunate that that when Teddy Roosevelt Muir Woods when they were saving Yosemite and all did they need to make a proclamation and say every redwood tree that's so big or so tall or so old is a historical monument take them out of the public domain see it would be wonderful to have a thousand trees like this and this property could do that and then what a park it would make now I'm trying to create a way to create an income for the people that will take on this operation after I am deceased and in order to do that lamping or camping is allowed can you imagine coming out of urban life working all day on a computer with a thousand people and noise and what have you spend a weekend here privacy no noise there's logging operations going all around me and you don't even know it I mean this is absolutely I thought the logging industry was going to be a problem but it certainly isn't see this is some furniture I'm doing it's a redwood tree that sliced see this tree had a fire so the tree is trying to kill so these things came up around this dead core until they met and then the rings are going in a circle so it healed so this will always be here but the tree itself is not affected by this injury it healed itself well here again these are Redwood grounds see the log got cut and I sliced them can then laid them out but this little stone why you like to sit where where you're feeling embraced so I'm introducing landscaping of native plants I got rhododendron i got rhododendron there and this is a beautiful tree now this is old cand then there's bay laurel there so in the evening you've got the sound of the water and you got the fragrance of the bay laurel this is going to be the bath house there's a me composting toilet there's gonna be a on demand hot water system a wash basin a little deck come up on the deck and you've got a view of the river from the potty you know the idea is to try to make it so that your senses are kind of pleasing I think it would be fantastic for a weekend getaway there are so many elements that are contrary to the future of people having a productive healthy life now alone corn will not pollinate so what I do with that kind of get this pollen on my palm and I come over here and I hand pollinate I kind of touch the silk like that you take the food production because there's so many people it's become industrialized to where the soils have no minerals the minerals in the food you bite they're full of chemicals this is a blueberry raspberry and boysenberries I have about ten pounds of frozen blueberries you see you just can't buy stuff with the same flavor we were canning our record for applesauce 157 quarts in one morning we can a hundred gallons of apple juice in one day and we made the machines to do it with I would see you can't do this without machinery the first thing I bought when I had no money was a backhoe and because that made the difference of 20 30 40 people so rather than being in a commune with a hundred people I've got back Oh Cindy seven cats and dumb and so then I had the skills I had the background and so the equipment made the difference he didn't remember again she and I built all this just the wife and I van array and I built this by ourselves this whole building and these buildings here there was nothing here but yeah it is I bought the frame the metal and then these are all works in progress potential projects here for coffee tables and even jewelry I've got here a little scraps that could be kind of this has character that could be something so all of this stuff is is wood that's growing look at this stuff it's beautiful this is going to be kind of a side table all these these are potential projects there's sculptors all over the place and I don't sell anything and then these the drawers are all full of extra things and these are saw blades and these are used spark plugs this is a motor pump that actually is pumping water out of the river it's a backup motor I always like to have one or two of everything in case something goes wrong I'm not going to run out of water we made 157 quarts of apple sauce one morning by using this machine to make the apples to chop them up these chairs I'm kind of modifying them generators it's propane and then this is a for manufacturing there's a machines to cut steel and iron and welding and so I can do anything I want in steel copper brass wood concrete so I can build buildings out of concrete and so I have the skills for all of that you know what happens a young man comes out of education in education they sort of emphasize artistic beauty and all that you get out in the real world and architects is nothing but a bookkeeper you don't get to really express yourself and then here I could take it from the tree cut the lumber to sighs to mill it to what I wanted right to the finish and I could have control all the way and that was cool so these chairs kind of made this so they're easy you got handles what's interesting is they're made out same board you get one board and cut it up in different ways than you make a chair the legs are 14 inches the seats 14 the backs 14 12 screws put the chair together they're real easy to build and then this is a growth ring this is in the winter where it grows very slow and hard and the summer grows fast and soft I build a lot of these I build maybe 15 of them some of them are 30 40 years old steel Holly yeah depends some people you know they like to get in a chair and they like to go this you know they're leaning back and I'm thinking this is sort of lived this life expectancy just ready to come down it was built to last for as a temporary building and it's been here 51 years so well depends you could make it less or a thousand years but you could make it all so that it Liz 10 years they don't you know they you can choose I started doing this maybe 10 years ago I did one sculpture the very first sculpture was this one over here and I thought well that's pretty cool so then I started doing more pretty soon I've got like 20 30 40 of these and I just said well you know I need a place to put them and then I built the gallery to have a place to put them I take pieces of wood that already have character and I don't really I'm not really a creator I'm an improviser here's a piece of wood laying on the ground it looks like a rotten piece of wood I thought well I'm gonna throw that in the fire yeah well since I'm throwing a fire what the hell get the chase on I'm starting carving it and then these are chainsaw marks now this one here it took me like two years and I'd walk around it and one day I said oh yeah it would because I didn't want to do any harm so I said okay it'd be good to cut this little piece off here six months later I'd cut a little piece and oh yeah okay this table is a root the trunk is right here I found it in a river and I told it out and it set out there for like ten years in the rain then when we built the house it was perfect so what I did I sliced it and then these parts all come off see the glass is one piece and that the parts just come off so it was very difficult in sight this is getting big how big you got to make it manageable to be able to take it off and these are getting small the glass keeps that the effect of water almost well yeah it looks like a pond with Islands one of the greatest teachers in the world is nature let's look at it a seashell let's look at the hyperbolic paraboloid mathematical equations look like the bees and the construction of the honeycomb nature if we think of and look at nature nature smart nature does things in a very important way and we are not smarter than nature we often think we are but we're not and so that's your schools look at these shapes look at the negative the background look at the foreground and see how all the variations again.we variations and repetition create a music and and whether it's art or architecture and I can explain it in this law these there's a repetition of these elements going down then we go around the wall and we started out looking you know they don't leave its boom boom boom for the knock on the door so boom boom boom - see I got I've got one two three one two three four senility now here's a pair you know boom boom this is kind of like the drums beating this is a beautiful little thing I mean we rated here you know I developed a system of stone creat this is structural then array and I from this wall here to the fireplace over here we did it in two days half one day and half the next day what happens with stone walls normally we have what's called masonry and you have a mortar that's made out of sand and lime and cement the mortar in an earthquake rattles and falls apart this is a stone-faced concrete wall and this is structural this actually takes the lateral loads meaning when an earthquake loads are being taken through the diaphragm this roof is a diaphragm and all the forces are spread out among this curvilinear form you know I develop my own philosophies and my own ways through trial and error and through experience and so then you know I have my own way oh look what's interesting see that tank over there is a reserve tank and waters bubbling over it so the solar pump is now pushing too much water out of an extra I've got five different reserve tanks I got a solar pump that's pumping out of the river and that's for irrigation and then I have drinking water coming out of the mountain up there two separate system wonderful water for drinking coming right out of the mountain up there I done to cave into the mountain I have the water pipe from there and goes down here goes up the mountain up there I did this in one day by myself my wife had leukemia and I was the only one she put water in the mixer this whole wall including the benches were done in one day by myself that's how efficient this can be I can't believe what we did just the two of us without having any professional help or anybody you got to remember we were doing dawn-to-dusk for 43 years seven days a week how many people are prepared to do that and yet it was fun so this is a second glamping site I did all by him you wouldn't believe what I was doing here by myself the kitchen's gonna be below got water coming around this hose I'm thinking of putting a sink here and you wash and then you take this bolt and you go out and dump it on a fern so you're not dumping it in the river and so and then there'll be a burner and then I had to bring stones down and build this little wall you see in order to avoid a tunnel effect I could have brought this all the way out there but it would have spook you from up there looking down the river so I've kept that back and then I created this frame for a composition you're not in a cave you're out here and you can feel the openness and the softness of change from inside to outside this was so much fun working here look at the maple just sort of waving I love the textures here you got the thimble berries that are wide leaf and then you have the tiny texture you got a Fivefinger ferns then you got the horse growing on the I think this is awesome you see basically these houses don't need any kind of adornment [Applause] this is a bonsai it's it's 51 years old and then some it was here when we came on the land last year it was a beautiful bonsai see last year it had a root right here and at that torn off this thing was up it was kind of like this so he got wiped out with the high water the root there's a link still anchored there and that's Hayling nest together so I couldn't it a little bit and trying to get the bonsai back there used to be hundreds of little tiny fries and fingerlings right in here there's a seven-year cycle between the egg and there's three thousand eggs that are hatched three out of three thousand survived and come back to spawn there's a cycle of birth' roll decline and dying there's no big deal people make a big deal we're all going through that cycle I'm actually okay if I were to pass away tomorrow because I've done what I wanted to do I put this little shelf in here and here it is you know maybe 35 years and still here here it is under water and and I didn't think it would last [Applause] I got to do things here that I couldn't have done so basically this is a very good thing for me so for my own satisfaction and look from nothing no money we are able to accumulate on less over a lifetime that's too bad that I can't start all over again and go from here I thought could go 50 years from here forward oh man I just can't dream of what this could be like but I can't I just don't have I could I could save trees for a thousand years by putting them in a legal form but I can't live that long but you know what in my mind I can see what it could look like so I start a process that I can enjoy because I can see what the potential is so now every one of these tags see that team tag there that tree can never be cut it doesn't belong to the land anymore belong so the nonprofit that was there I have a thousand of those the light tips are all this year's growth now the trees that have that strucker's points are the ones that are growing the fastest the ones are more roundish or slower growing I could go on and tell you so much about we could be here till midnight [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 6,034,757

Rating: 4.949913 out of 5

Keywords: off-grid house, offgrid home, offgrid, self sufficiency, self reliance, photovoltaics, solar panels, PV, solar hot water, solar thermal, underground greenhouse, earth sheltered garden, passive solar, mendocino county, offgrid ranch, redwood preservation, old growth redwood, charles bello, homeschooling, a-frame home, organic home, parabolic home, owner built home, maker paradise, homestead, rural homestead, christmas tree farm, redwoods, tree cloning, tree planting

Id: 2qcsWajivnI

Length: 47min 28sec (2848 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 26 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Thirsty_Comment88]

Wasn't expecting it to be this interesting. But I can't stop watching it. I wish he was my grandpa.

[u/dude_fil_a]

Probably late to the game but I've had the opportunity to stay in this house! Charles lives off in a house to the side and allows people to come and stay on his property. The entire property is gorgeous, filled with his art, hiking trails, swimming hole and endless amounts of nature. If you live in the Bay I would highly recommend taking the opportunity to drive up the one and stay a weekend out in the glass house.

[u/[deleted]]

How much did the 400 acres cost?

[u/Imreallythatguy]

Oh now this is interesting. Apparently there are some people that have taken him up on his offer to go out there and help. It appears like there is more to things than meets the eye as their posts on Yelp are far from flattering. I suggest reading them for yourselves.

https://www.yelp.com/biz/redwood-forest-institute-willits

I agree with Jim S. about the value of putting out this warning to others based on our own unfortunate experiences straying down the path of Charlie Bello's RFI vision and offer.

We too were invited to Charlie's homestead in the Mendocino Forest, along with our friends, another couple, but in short order we & they were wedged out. Not sure if it's just a deeply ingrained behavior pattern with him or if he has a more manipulative ulterior motive behind this revolving door agenda?

The four of us, and for two days an additional two others, provided him nine days of intense labor completing some of his project goals; for that Charlie gave our friends $100 as compensation.

When Charlie asked me directly how I saw myself fitting into RFI I told him I wanted to help bring his goals and vision as outlined on his website to fruition, he told me in no uncertain terms, he doesn't care about all that now. None of the reason for RFI existing seemed to matter to him anymore. He confided that he really liked the idea of us coming up as two couples who knew each other and got along and worked well together. But at the same time he played favorites.

On the one hand he would dangle out the allure of building of our own house after a year's time there, permaculture and sustainability, preservation of the redwoods, keeping the place open to the public into the future, building a dormitory for hosting conferences, cabin rentals, etc. But on the other hand, nothing was ever good enough, every choice, behavior and achievement was scrutinized and found lacking. He would tell us everything distilled out to money, sort of the common root of all evil and that we would need to find a way to make money out there. But then he said he didn't work for money anymore. I don't know, perhaps the RFI vision and alluring promises of building a house was all just hokum for some other goal of his to bring new people out there? Charlie said he has two sons and grandchildren, but none of whom seemed to be included in his vision for the place which I also thought was odd. Suffice to say, anyone else responding to his ad should be forewarned about this man's eccentric behavior, grandiose promises and disingenuous representation of the RFI vision and goals so beautifully stated on the website.

Here's another one.

Charles (RFI) puts ads in Workingcouples.com falsely stating that he is looking to create community.

It cost us a considerable amount in both time and money to move to this property at Charles' behest wIth the promise of community and a stipend. However, Charles is not looking for community, he is looking for slaves to help with his artistic, impractical and dangerous projects; and he did not pay the stipend. He treats people very poorly. He would cut off our electricity without notice making it impossible for us to work.

The cabin he provides looks great but is totally impractical for every day living - it is cold and impossible to heat. Maintenance is left to the couples he moves in - so we spent time and money making the place livable. All in all, a horrible experience in a beautiful setting!

[u/aqua7]

Wonderful video, thanks for posting.

[u/GoldenJoel]

After watching another Front Page video, I'm thinking this guy is DB Cooper.

[u/breefield]

I love this channel, one of my favorite follows.

[u/tacoslave420]

Close your eyes with this playing and tell me you don't hear Winnie the Pooh.

[u/[deleted]]

Did I miss something, where did he get all that glass from? That in itself would be very expensive... wouldn't it?