NEVER BEFORE SEEN FOOTAGE |10 years living OFF GRID in this TINY HOME

[Music] [Music] three [Music] oh greetings friends throughout our homesteading journey there's been a number of individuals fellow homesetters that have inspired us to motivate us to live a life more connected to the land to the animals to one another and to recapture more of the skills that we were meant to have and today we're visiting with some of those homesteaders [Music] what's up homestead homies what's up hey welcome to the homestead my name's doug and i'm stacy we live off grid on 11 acres and this is our log cabin and we're going to give you guys a full tour awesome right this way my love thank you come on in y'all now there's not much to see because it's only a 600 square foot cabin i built this cabin with wood from the forest that we had pulled out and i had serviced through a sawmill i did the notching and then i put all the logs up myself i've never built anything like this before in my life so you could do it too because i wasn't even like a carpenter kind of friendly guy so it's pretty simple it's white oak logs we cook with a wood cook stove stacey will be able to tell you guys about that yeah this is a pioneer princess wood cook stove it heats our house so it kind of is twofold and i cook on it so right now we are in the summer months it gets too hot so i'm not gonna cook in here so i put oops a little dirty that's all right it's just a metal top stainless steel top and then in the summertime we use it for storage you know counter and so yeah i just put like a little towel or afghan over it and then i can put things on top of it and it works out great it also has a water reservoir where i can get hot water in the winter months when we are cooking with it and it's great you know i can go ahead and store things on top right now i have a bunch of my ferments on top fermenting and it's wonderful it's sort of like a centerpiece of our home people come over and they love it or especially like in the winter when it's cold and you come in you can kind of stand in front of the fire because there's nothing like wood heat it's just absolutely amazing compared to like the heater it just feels so good just like you're getting a nice warm hug yeah that nice little smell that it has and everything else and this is our sink area now we don't have any public utilities we live off-grid and we use rain water exclusively okay so this is a little spigot that i had to put together because with gravity-fed water all the city appliances or appliances you can buy at the big box stores they're geared for pressurized lines so i had to actually concoct my own little spigot here so i could get the water to come out it's all gravity fed from our big barn we're going to take you up there and show you that but as you can see the water flows out and we live off of that 100 rain water so this compared to the lifestyle that you used to live back in the city oh how does this compare compare it's a total night and day difference you know what it just the the peacefulness the the sounds of nature i mean it's so wonderful because we can just go outside and the only thing you hear you don't hear of cars you don't hear honking you don't hear anything you just hear you know our roosters we hear our ducks we are turkeys you hear the birds i mean it's just so peaceful and wonderful we love it out here it's like a little piece of heaven one of the biggest differences is when you guys are in the city and you're living on grid it's just a switch away right it's just a turn away and it all comes out and then you get the bill at the end of the month right so you got a lot of abundance and you get a big bill and it's no problem you never put a thought into it where does that water come from how are they treating that water how is it delivered to the line when you turn it on how does that even work we're so far removed from the processes right so when we get to this lifestyle we have to be our own water man we have to be our own sewer guy we have to be our own heat and electric everything we have to do we do for ourselves so we have a lot more skin in the game and that's what keeps it fresh and exciting and exercises our mind so we can stay sharp and we don't have a bill coming to our house that we have to pay that's right we don't even have a mailbox out front there is no bills to come to the mailbox that's awesome that's freedom that's a real way to live yeah so stacy was having to cook with wood opposed to just plugging something up and and cooking how has that adjustment been for you at first i mean it wasn't really too bad i mean i did burn a few things because you have to learn how to adjust your temperature in the heat box um but actually it cooks my oven box is very similar to a oven that you'd have an electric oven or a gas oven and i'm glad you're looking at it now because it was dirty and i cleaned it a little while ago so it looks pretty good but uh yeah i mean it cooks i can bake bread i can cook anything that you cook you know on a regular stove and it's simple i it only took just a little bit of kind of a learning curve about the heat how to adjust the heat how to keep the heat with the wood in there and it's like no big deal it's very very simple we actually started off with a different stove than one we have now we actually started off with a baker's choice and it has a little bit of different um adjusting of the heat in the box so that took a little more getting used to but that actually prepared us for the new stove with this side temperature control it's worked a lot better and we picked up a larger oven box so everything about this stuff is a little bit better and it's a little bit easier to use so is the food just as good well another thing that i really like about it is especially if you want to cook a bunch of things i can use the whole top to cook on the good thing about the wood box is where the food is that i put on top here it would be more of a higher heat because it's closer to the you know the fire and then over here i would put something if i didn't maybe i wanted to simmer or just maybe sit especially if i'm making bone broth and it's going to go for like a whole day or so or two days then i would go ahead and put it on this side and then it's perfect so it's great i sort of have like my own little crock pot going 24 hours a day and then here's the other bonus that i love so much is the top here is like a dehydrator so i can dehydrate anything i want all i have to do is put a tray on top of here and i have things dehydrated like in an instant it's amazing and that's of course as we have the fire going on the box right now there is no fire so we use those extra shelves like she said earlier so we lay our ferments out here we can see how they're doing and stuff like that so the stove serves as a dual purpose for you in the cooler seasons it heats your cooks your food as well as warms your house in here right everything that we try to buy for our homestead and hopefully you guys are taking notes of this we always try to get multiple use things right we never want to buy one thing for one purpose we always try to find one thing that does multiple purposes so that way we get the most bang for our buck so you cook here and looks like you have a dining room table over here yeah that's way over here yeah all right so this is our kitchen area where all the magic happens i'm a guy that has to have breakfast in the morning before i can get out the door and start my homestead stuff i take care of the animals real quick but ones i'm responsible for stacy takes care of hers and then i like to have my breakfast i can't eat lunch before i have my breakfast and this is where it all happens this is actually a handmade table that we picked up from a place where we bought alpacas from if you guys are ever followed our channel off-grid with doug and stacy we actually had 20 yes 20 alpacas i think even up to like 26 yeah yeah we had a few and the folks that we got the alpacas from were in the middle of a move and we were able to pick up this handmade table uh from them and it's really cool it's a mexican cedar is that what it is mexican theater yeah it was handmade and it's worked out really nice for our place so and this here is handmade too a little spinner from the amish handmade amish thing what we like to do definitely is employ people that we know that are in our neighborhood and we like to deal with artisan people like this cantaloupe right here we have an artisan make this for us and because we live off-grid we don't have any lights or anything we actually use oil lamps and candles so and we love guineas here i love guineas they're like my absolute favorite oh yeah and a friend of mine their native of africa yeah and a friend of mine had gone to africa and brought me back this cool little thing with the little guineas on it isn't it cute that's pretty neat i like getting steve and you briefly mentioned the basket they are being made from the amish and uh you have a whole amish look on there so what what's that about all right so if you guys are hearing me talk i like to employ people that live around my neighborhood okay and when we got up here i was already kind of i had the beard going um i don't like the mustache a lot of people don't know why i shave my lips i just don't like the mustache i don't like having it in my food i don't like trimming it off my lip i don't like the way it feels and my wife doesn't like the way it kisses her so i don't have a mustache only for that reason no other reason whatsoever now the clothes i like because they're super universal i can use them they're aguarian style lifestyle clothes these are clothes that the pioneers wore the amish just simply didn't go to walmart to get their clothes they kept hand making them so they passed the clothes down down down really are not amish clothes these are just clothes that the pioneers wore that they've maintained on their persons so i employ local people my neighbors to make my clothes instead of going to walmart and buying made in china or anything else and that works good for me i feel good about it it allows her to stay home and take care of her family and everyone wins off of it and i'm past the stage you know i don't care anymore about levi's and polos and abercrombie and izod and all that stuff that i used to be really hung up on so now einstein said if you have the same clothes three shirts the same color and three pants the same color you use a lot of brain energy trying to pick out your outfits and i could use that energy on other things there we go and you know what else the thing is we also do a lot of bartering for his clothes sure so i will go ahead and you know help maybe some of the ladies sell their eggs or i give them rides um you know we do things with seeds and plants and so we barter a lot and then that way you know i'll supply them with the material and then they sew the clothes up and it doesn't cost me hardly anything so it works out really good stacey doesn't even sew buttons i'm almost 40 and can't grow a beard i don't know if it's happening but what do you think should i get rid of the mustache i wish i could grow right here it just doesn't matter this this all right here almost a little bit of chops tell us about the living room over here i mean there's not much to it it's way over here let me uh tone down this lighting for y'all we got all this exclusive lighting up in our living room you can make it romantic when you need to right yeah um again back to the amish we've had them made a couple of rockers for us we have ones out on the front porch we have this one here it's just a little sitting area where we can hang out you know spend some time together entertain guests and stacy might want to tell you about her couch yes let's look at my couch right over here so we raise our own animals here and we you know like to use our animals from tip to tail and use the whole animal so we had a cow a grass-fed cow and i wanted to use the hide because the height is just beautiful isn't it look at this and so we soft hand it and we thought it would be a beautiful addition to our home we waited a really long time for it and it finally got here and we just love it it's so soft and it's real cozy when we sit down here and we've used our whole cow we didn't waste one bit of it so cool yeah go ahead sit down there see how it feels i'm sure i like it well you know i like i like stuff that feels soft so oh and so you know how they say it relaxes you to have a pet and yeah you know no we got like a dog i sit here and you just it totally makes your nervous system relax and it's wonderful i just love it your pet couch yeah my pet house there you go so this is the main floor and uh where do you guys sleep at uh in our horse and buggy yeah we sleep upstairs here we have uh i put in a little ladder run we have a loft because it's only 600 square feet and we have our sleeping rings upstairs i'll be glad to show you [Music] a lot of people always ask us what are you gonna do when you get older how are you gonna climb up the stairs you guys are more worried about us i'm going to show you how we're going to go up it so welcome to our sleeping area so we do sleep upstairs and a lot of people are like oh my gosh it looks like it's so much room that it is it is pretty you know spacious i think so what we did was is here's one of the baskets it's amish made again i love it it's our hamper where we keep our clothes our dirty clothes and then we had one of our local neighbors amish neighbors make us these two cedar chests doug has the bigger one and i have the smaller one and this is where we put all of them my clothes are bigger yeah yeah that's why so uh we have the cedar chest and i really love them it makes the room smell so good as well as we have this cedar bed that i just love and one of my favorite things about the cedar bed is this quilt one of my amish neighbors i just love so much i always wanted a patchwork quilt made of denim so i some of my classes that i was teaching i teach senior classes like exercise classes and i had all of them start bringing me blue jeans and so they were bringing me old blue jeans and then i gave them to my amish friend and she go ahead went ahead and cut them all up and made them into this quilt and then i went ahead and got a flannel sheet and we put it on the back of it and it's one of my prized possessions i just love it and it keeps us really warm in the winter months so i use it on the end of the bed speaking of warm a lot of people ask us how we can handle the heat up here because heat rises and it's kind of a small space when with the sun beating right on the side of the building so for the first like seven years that we lived here we didn't even have the interior of this finished we had rafters you could see 16 on centers right like you would see and then we have the insulation in there the board batten insulation okay just like you would normally see and i was trying to figure out how we were going to do the interior space at the same time though i was noticing how the heat was transferring from the outside of the roof through those rafters and into this room and this room would get unbearable for the first several years that we lived here this has only been finished for a couple i mean we would have to sleep outside we would sleep in the outdoor kitchen and would just get it was 100 degrees outside it was 100 degrees up here okay then i started doing some homework and then my buddy greg who knows some information about this kind of stuff we took out all the insulation the fiberglass insulation and then we put in uh foam insulation we lined it with foil first then we created an air gap that's the trick if you guys are going to build a space like this and you're going to have an upstairs loft you have to have a way for that hot air not to transfer through and to escape okay so the hot air now has a channel that it can go up each one of these cavities instead of where the insulation was now there's foam insulation but we pulled it away from the ceiling okay so you have a gap back there so the air is able to travel up into this cavity up here this is where the vents are the gable vents in each top of the roof so the hot air now travels up and then escapes out of the gables now we can sleep up here in the summertime with just some battery operated bands no problem and then i finished all this off with some cedar it's turning receiver cedar and it adds a great smell and it has a nice look and the bugs don't like it that's what i like all right that wasn't too bad that's not too steep nope it's a i kept it at a little bit of an angle so that way we picked up a little more um space to move around here some of the designs that i saw i would have had to cut more into the room to pull that stair more at an angle here and then i would have to put a platform here so we could turn and make this into the room with this design i kept more room up in the stairs right and i got a little more room right here we have a bookshelf and then we have a little desk area and we also have our cuckoo clock because we don't have electricity this is all gravity fed straight from germany so it really helps out a lot now this is our berkey water system okay we mentioned earlier that we have a gravity fed water system this is an extra precaution that we've taken just recently okay this berkey water filter can filter 99 99.9 of all bacteria and viruses and all this kind of stuff that are waterborne okay so we are now taking the water that's filtered and then we'll fill it up into here and we're using this exclusively for our drinking water just because we've noticed a little more you know things that we need to be concerned about now what i'd like to show you guys here is our um that's kind of our back room i wouldn't say it's a bathroom i wouldn't say it's like a cabinet you know area stacia will go over a few things that she uses back here but i'm just going to explain to you guys real quick about the composting toilet okay because we live off grid we don't have a septic system and we don't have any public utilities so we use the composting toilet one thing a lot of people don't understand is that composting toilets have been around for a long time this is a perfect example to show you how long they've been around this is a chamber pot okay which is basically the composting toilet back in the early 1900s that we were able to find this was built back then used for the same purpose and now we're using it ourselves okay so basically it's a five gallon bucket system and then we use sawdust to cover it up and it's pretty um environmentally friendly i would say because what happens is once we use this toilet and we fill it up we take those buckets and we put them into a compost center it composts for one year and then after the second year of its sitting we're able to use that on our garden on decorative trees around our apple trees around anything we want around the homestead to add fertilization and natural compost because everything likes the natural stuff stay away from the chemicals that's right yeah and over here in the corner is probably one of my favorite things and guess who made it the amish did and it's a custom cabinet because doug and i wanted to optimize our space the best that we could in here so we thought putting a corner cabinet it wouldn't be so big and bulky so we went ahead and gave our amish friend the dimensions and he came up with this beautiful cedar cabinet with the two doors and then that way i can store a lot of my things just like you would have a pantry in your house so this is my little pantry so it really helps to kind of save space and i can put things in there and it's very spacious i must admit with all the almost furniture it's well built i'm jealous because it is hard to find quality furniture period i will also say if you can find um amish carpenters to build your furniture they're very reasonably priced for being handmade i guess i would say that wasn't much more than we could have bought a cabinet maybe at ikea or something and i hired my local guy to do it yep and then i also use this room in here where i hang a lot of my herbs so if i have quite a few herbs in here so this has just been kind of good i do that there's some yarrow and some catnip and some mint and what else and some oregano i think in here hanging right now so i just hang a lot of my herbs but pretty soon we're going to organize this a little bit better i kind of call it our multi-purpose room it has lots of purposes and it'll probably be more purposes next month or next year so stay tuned you never know what's going to be going on that's one thing everything is ever flowing on the homestead it's not just set it and forget it like that you're always making improvements you're always fine-tuning everything and then you get really to a point where you can operate smooth and with a house like this considered a tiny house it you're doing what you can to conserve space everywhere sure and to maximize the use of every single inch that you have here and this is more like houses used to be built back in the day and if you notice one of the smallest rooms in the whole house which are all pretty small was the bedroom that's pretty much the place where you're just going to lay down and sleep get up and then hit it because you got to get outside you got to get those chores done you got to run that homestead don't make a big bedroom we'll get your chores done we're going to take you guys out now and show you our outdoor kitchen all right [Music] all righty so this is basically an outdoor kitchen okay and the pioneer days everyone had an outdoor kitchen that's where they processed their food they kept the heat out of the house you can't really run a wood cook stove and it's 100 degrees outside here's a tip for you if you are gonna run a wood cook stove in the summertime it's a good idea because it'll take the humidity out of the air one of the problems that we have with living off grid is maintaining the house not getting mold and getting too you know funky with the musty smells because you can get the mold on the cabinets yeah it does i was like what is this right because you know we're so used to before having air conditioning and all that so there's all these different things that you kind of went through and i was like whoa and i would open the cabinets inside would have a little bit mold and the outside of the cabinets would have a little bit mold yeah so it definitely does help so what you do is you don't want to get a full fire going in there you just put a little piece of wood in there and you just let it kind of do its thing you don't want to get it roaring it's just kind of tinkering away in there and that'll be just enough to snatch the humidity out of the air okay so i built the outdoor kitchen so when we process all of our garden produce we have a nice spot to do it where we won't get heated up and we have lots of space because you guys saw how big our kitchen was in the house right so inside of here we have some cabinets we have a nice table for when we have guests over yes and i have multiple ways of cooking i have a camp chef oven that i can bake bread or cookies things like that i also have a three burner propane stove i even have a propane refrigerator that we just got probably within the past year right that's our first ice that we have in our drinks on the homestead yeah summer it's really wonderful and then we have a gas grill as well as we also have a cowboy grill outside that i could cook on fire if i need to so i have multiple ways and then my favorite way is we have an all-american sun oven that i use the sun and then i could cook with two so we have lots of ways that we can cook you know depending on our needs for the day now i know you guys were looking in that back room and you were like okay i see the composting toilet but are these people just funky don't they ever take a shower or something so i'm gonna take you guys over right now and show you our outdoor shower all right so i built this shower a little bit ago it's all gravity fed it's 500 gallons of rain water that's why my beard is so beautiful that's rain water so you might don't have that rain water in his house so he might switch over you might see that beard growing on him a little better but all this stuff is super easy to do right gravity fed stuff is all about getting the tanks up in the air it's 500 gallons and i put this tarp on it because i didn't want to paint the tanks if you paint your white tanks the paint comes off and the water inside the tank gets super hot okay it does get warm with this on here but it'll it's allowed to breathe so it doesn't really suck in the heat like it did with the paint okay i have a ball valve right here so i can just fill up a bucket maybe give this turkey some water or whatever we're gonna do we also use it for cleaning the composting toilet area right now and then right here is where you take your shower now again just like inside the house i had to construct my own setup because nothing you can get will allow gravity fed to flow through it but as you can see i have a pretty powerful little shower going on right there 500 gallons and my head pressure is really close that's why it comes out really good we do have a filter on this water just to kind of take out some of the sediment for when we take our shower but other than that this is it this is our whole summer shower this is we can only use this in the summer and we have a winter shower that i'm putting together now that we'll show you here in a second but we thought we'd like to you guys would like to see our shower set up and it's nice you're out here under the stars the sun's shining stacey put bushes here that'll eventually grow big enough or people who maybe can't see us but nobody can see us because we're out in the middle almost nowhere but it's just a nice little space and it's worked out really good oh also this is the back of our outdoor kitchen that we were just talking about and i'll be able to plumb this in so she'll have water at her sink inside one day so how tall do you think that sunflower is right there shoot i'm six foot five and with an arm here i probably i'm probably close to ten feet so that's got to be a good 12 to 13. because i know they can get up to 15 feet tall all these sunflowers yeah we'll show them the garden yeah come on this is my garden where i grow about 90 of our food that we have here that we store and eat during the winter months but i can't really show it to you right now because stay tuned mike and lacey have a full tour of our garden a little bit later so make sure you hit that subscribe button get all notifications so when they go upload that video you guys will be able to go on this tour see all this abundance inside of here i will tell you that we have they probably didn't talk about it because that's my area we have a 500 gallon tank in there that we also collect rain water off of our greenhouse so all of our garden is watered with the best water you can put on your food rain water well we're going to take you guys up right now and show you the 3 000 gallon water storage tanks that we have for our rain water wait before that you got some animals that you guys are really in here tell us a little bit about that yeah so we keep on a variety of the chickens we have some turkeys we have a breeding pair we have our food turkeys we have our sheep we have our food sheep you know we have a lot of systems in place so we can provide 90 of our food and also we have elderberries all around our chicken houses elderberries are a great medicine for you and your chickens it's the funniest thing you'll ever see is if you put this around your chicken coop they'll be jumping up and picking these elderberries off and it's the craziest thing to watch as they jump up and snatch those berries off of there we have a lot of fun with it we hatch them out here we also have broody hens we also use incubators at stacy's schools that she teaches at so we always have a good um flow of birds that we don't pay for and they're raising one of the best of all my favorite ducks indian runners the indian runners are so fun the way they waddle and run and stick together i love it let's go check out up the water [Music] all right this is the building that we have it's about 70 feet long and 30 40 feet wide i don't know the exact measurements i know them but i don't retain them in my mind because it's not that important but i'm going to take you over here and show you what we got i also use a horse and buggy so i don't just get around by our vehicle and just in case gas isn't available or rubber for our tires isn't available i always have a way to get around to visit our neighbors with the buggies so not only do you have the amish attire going on you definitely have the amish buggies going here too that's pretty neat i've basically been told i'm more amish than some amish all right and i was told that by amish people right but i when we got here my whole thing was um you know uh off-grid you know uh providing for my wife i started thinking about scenarios you know look what's going on right now okay look how fast everything's happening i've sold when we first got out here that was my focus how can i go see my neighbors if something were to happen if i couldn't get gas if i couldn't get tires and oil changes plus the expense of all that right tires oil changes insurance taxes so i ditched we had two cars and i ditched a car so we could save that money and then i was riding the horse and buggy everywhere to visit all my neighbors to build relationships with them and i really actually enjoy using the horse and buggy and we also have a saddle horse smokey and sadie i hope you guys are paying close attention he's dropping a number of tips in here that really that you guys need to keep in mind all right so when we got this barn in this space this room wasn't here this was just an open barn no concrete floor it takes 10 years to actually get this building in line to how we want to use it on our homestead okay one thing you guys have to remember as you're starting out in your journey is this stuff doesn't happen overnight you know you might see us at this particular point where we are now but you have to remember it took us years to get here so when you guys are out there you're doing your thing and you're starting off don't think it's all going to happen really fast or you'll get frustrated and you want to quit so just stick in there slow and steady wins the race i mean i just put hey buddy i just put this wall up right here because old smokey was hanging out in his building and kicking up the dust in here and it was causing all my tools to get dusty so i put that building in this is a standard bread horse with a little bit of morgan in him okay that's why he's so big and he is a good boy all right this building right here though i built is holding my two 1500 gallon tanks come here now we got the he's eating a little clover out in the field when the horses eat the clover they get a little bit of a water mouth there it doesn't hurt him or anything you don't want to have too much but right now that seems to be his uh fodder of choice i built this room actually with uh all recycled materials a neighbor had a tin laying around that he wasn't using so i was asking him about the tin he actually just let me have it i had some scraps laying around some wood i built this room here you can see right here i actually had to raise up the floor okay i put two two by sixes in see that and i raised that up a foot when i raised this up a foot it put the bottom of my tanks level with my sink down at my log cabin isn't that something so you guys are way up here at the you walked up here with us we're way up here but this is the level this is how high my sinks are in my house there's about eight foot fall from this barn to the log cabin okay now the higher you get your gravity fed stuff the better water pressure you're going to get so that's why i had to raise it up just a little bit more so that way as the tanks empty on gravity the lower the line is for level the more water you'll be able to get out of those tanks if that makes sense genius when i first built the room i didn't have it spray foam so we were struggling a couple years to actually keep the tanks from freezing we live in a four seasons climate where it can get awful cold maybe down to even below zero for several days in a row sometimes we get like 10 degrees below zero several days in a row so we were having problems with the not the whole tank freezing because it's a lot of mass but we get the outside and then if the ball valves freeze on these tanks or your ibc totes if you guys are collecting rainwater it's gonna be game over because you won't be able to use them they'll bust open and all your water will just come right out okay so what we did is we had it spray foamed insulated so this is some open cell foam because it was cheaper right i wasn't interested in getting the more expensive stuff because i don't really need to keep it that super duty warm in here and they sprayed the roof the walls all over and it's worked like a dream i can actually heat this room now with a candle so it really is working out good it's two 1500 gallon tanks and that's our first flush diverter a first flush diverter means that it cleans the roof okay the first quarter inch of rain inch of rain gets captured in this cylinder and then all the rain after that goes into the big tank so that's the dirty water from the dirty roof and then after about an inch of rain it's calculated to be a clean roof and now that clean water will go into these tanks and that's gravity fed all the way down to the house is there a filter that needs to be changed out every so often in there or how does that work yeah on the first flush there's no filter on it okay this is the tank closest to the house so this is where the water exits on this other side here that i can't really show you guys um i'd have to climb over all this stuff and mike doesn't want to do it there is a sediment filter so to speak on the way out and another one and then it goes into the line and then underneath the house we have three filters and then like i was explaining to you earlier we're now using the berkey system as well even this door was recycled i got this off of a post office that they closed and i took this door and brought it back here so we can have a door on our barn here you guys be amazed what you can find for free out there it even has operating hours on it yeah everything was perfect and it's a metal door it's awesome [Music] all right i'm going to show you guys our latest project this is what we call the learning center we're in the process of building a place where people can come and learn how to live this lifestyle okay you guys just noticed outside we have some solar panels we're about to hook up solar power after 10 years with no power at all we basically use a small generator power on demand when we need it and we found over 10 years of living here without electricity we don't need a lot of electricity so it's actually worked really good for us but we are about to hook up some solar power so if you guys are checking out our channel that'll be coming up pretty soon and we'll like to walk you guys through that and maybe could give you some information as well we built this building like i said for the learning center it's also a multi-purpose room where i have a little office and then also underneath this floor which no one's ever seen is the root cellar and we're actually on mike's channel today and lacey's channel we're gonna show you guys all right never seen before on youtube stay tuned for our full tour coming up it's a little bit rough i got a little more work to do bringing you you can already feel the temperature getting colder oh yeah it feels a lot better in here that's good all right this is our root cellar okay now my big ingenious idea was to use icf insulated concrete forms okay see the styrofoam everywhere basically a wall of styrofoam on each side dirt side interior space side with concrete in the middle okay a lot of basements are all basements the concrete is porous so the heat and the water transfer through the concrete okay with this icf this foam insulation i get no transfer so it keeps the spring very steady with the temperature okay i'm going to give you guys a few tips on what i think i did wrong or some things i'm going to approve on maybe i didn't do them wrong but i've just noticed a few things when i was doing all my research about root cellars i found out that they like it humid inside of there okay it helps keep the produce longer but they never really talk about how much humidity in an aspect they tell you what percentages are good right but how to deliver that humidity some say have a bucket a lot say to have a dirt floor so we went with the dirt floor i put some gravel down so we can walk on it but it's too much humidity is what we're finding out okay first we had a lot of problems with uh water getting inside the basement you know we don't have a pump or you know anything like that there's no concrete floor so i actually had to put in a sub pump because we were really having some issues with it we've had a really wet fall you know and then spring and now summer even we just had seven inches of rain in the last week so i was able to install this pit that's run off of a battery okay it runs off of this battery the sub pump pits right there and i lined it up it pumps the water out and then it goes out of my gray water for my shower that i'll show you guys upstairs here in a little bit this system charges up by itself when i run the generator or as soon as we hook up the solar power it'll be constantly charging and it operates all by itself there's a float valve on there whenever the water comes in it just pumps it right out so this right here has been a game changer for our setup now the other thing i think i need to do is put a little more concrete down here i'd like to put some concrete under the wood steps because the wood is getting wet and that might be causing me some problems and i also would like to have a better area to walk on and to put the cabinets on the shelving on so what i think i'm going to do is leave this part of it kind of open for the dirt floor aspect and i think there's enough humidity provided by that subpunk pit that i think will be fine okay so basically this is our food stores we have all of our ferments that stacy has been working on actually many of these ferments are from last year ferments last six months to a year easy okay so these are ferments that we did last year some salsa that you can some stuff that we buy from the store here's some syrup you know we like to keep stocked up on our extra virgin olive oil and all that stuff we haven't been to the stores hardly ever since that thing's been going on so we just keep some things here that we might need on the fly my son got us some mres i haven't touched these yet maybe one day i'll open one up just for fun but it's just some emergency food store just in case and we didn't want to just throw them away so we just kept a hold of them the other thing that i noticed too is i think too much cold air is escaping out of here okay look over here see how i have an open staircase okay i don't want to put a door in here because it creates another thing to open and maneuver around so what i'm going to do here is build a wall and then that'll just narrow this opening to just right here where we're coming it out i feel like i'm losing too much of my cold air because of this great big space so i just want to bring that down to right here so it's just this area right here i think that's going to make a big difference so hopefully you guys enjoyed our little root cellar here we're going to get it packed in with a lot more food so stay tuned for that stacy has been hard in the garden which you guys are going to see that tour coming up pretty soon fermenting and preserving our food and the reason why we ferment i don't know if stacey talked about it or if you know it provides gut health for us if you guys can your food you're killing all the enzymes and all your living food right and then when you eat it after a while it's just kind of like filler it makes you feel full but you're not getting all that good gut health and all that vital energy and stuff from your food when you ferment the food you keep it alive so you're eating live food and then that's really good for your gut health oh and this is the water system remember i told you about the 3 000 gallon gravity fed water i plumbed in a pipe right here and my shower our hot water shower for summertime remember that cold water shower for summertime this is our hot water shower for winter time i have yet to finish hooking it up we're going to get this all finished up i'm going to plumb this in the water will be coming up and i'm going to take you up right now and show you our hot water tank that's run wood fired and that'll provide us hot water for the shower man we're giving you guys the full blown tour today shoot i don't even think i've done this on my channel yet never before seen footage it's always good now this is our hot water heater okay this is kind of crazy you've never seen anything like this it's an homage made hot water heater and this is basically a cylinder and inside here is a hot box right so you're going to start your firing here i haven't hooked it up yet you'll start your firing here and then the water is all around this tube and then that's what heats the water and then it gravity feeds right into here my shower this is our winter shower so we'll have a hot water shower here in the winter time we're actually big proponents of cold showers so we don't really take hot showers though we just kind of lukewarm you know just take the bite out of the water in the winter time but it's pretty simple it's all gravity fed and stay tuned because i am still trying to figure out how i'm going to do all this shower stuff in here so that'll be fun stuff and you know a lot of this stuff is on the fly you've never done it before there's not much information out there so you're just doing the best you can with what you have and i haven't had a problem with it working out yet [Music] all right what a great tour i just can't get this sunflower out of my mind so i want to see how tall it is leave a comment down below what do you think when it drooped his head we need to push his head up a little bit more that is a 10 footer and if the head was straight it'd probably be 10 foot six man we were wrong earlier that's all right that's right it looks bigger than it is it's on tv that's why right on so hopefully you guys enjoyed our video about touring our homestead and maybe you got some ideas if you're thinking about the lifestyle right yeah thank you if you guys haven't hit the subscribe button here make sure you hit that subscribe button so you can see that garden tour that's why we ended up right here so we could be like don't you want to see it yep so make sure you check it out and doug and stacy thank you guys so much for bringing us along on your tour of your house your homestead you guys are doing some amazing things you guys always encourage us and i'm sure there's so many out there of you who also are encouraged by the things that you do and for those of you who don't know they have a youtube channel as well so make sure you click on their subscribe button as well as their notification off grid with duck and stacey and thanks a lot for coming out to the homesteading live conference mike we really appreciate the information you provide and we'd love to see you guys big group hug all right that's right bring it in bring it in all right you guys have a great day and don't miss a single episode [Music]

Channel: The Fit Farmer - Mike Dickson

Views: 592,966

Rating: 4.9280415 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: gGjAq7EVkxE

Length: 43min 41sec (2621 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020