Off-Grid Cabin with Secret root cellar, hidden pantry, & solid security. GREAT IDEAS!

I'm Barb I'm Dan Welcome to our Homestead [Music] through our front entryway our mud room as we call it we originally had built the cabin so coming and going we could just shut her off lock her up and leave you always think about security when you're off grid and we made this place as secure as you can make it when it comes down to it somebody wants to break into your place you're not around they're going to get in it's just how much damage are you going to do getting in but the more you can make it look secure we just feel the better about it and we had just a open porch out here but when we decided to live here in the winter time we decide we need to enclose this it's still in work work in progress but it definitely keeps the snow off the clothes and keeps the snow out of the house we can come in this way we usually keep it just like that for the winter time but the summertime when we want more light we can open up the other side too so that's that's what the Chain's for and this porch transforms completely in the in the summertime coat hooks are coats are gone and packed away we move the coat rack rockers on the porch yep our rockers come out and morning coffee time watching the deer and listening to the birds it's very useful out here we put a cover over the wooden rack because we don't need that in the summertime and that becomes a shelf but in the winter time you multitask and that becomes your second refrigerator there's Piggy I'm gonna turn on some lights quick we were always originally going to build a traditional home on the property a pandemic hit and there's just couldn't get anything done we said well we're just gonna go for it and live completely off grid and small and small because things were expensive at the time so we went small yeah so we're off grid but we're also a very very small tiny house yep Welcome to our house warm and cozy in here you guys it's cozy right now a lot of times it can be way too warm we have to be careful with our fire yeah not too high otherwise we're sweating out of here real quick on fire in the morning gets it warm for most of the day and then we start another fire late afternoon any more than that it's too hot in here now we have no place for a kitchen table but this is the one thing we bought and didn't build but it's a place for that we can sit together and eat at but a lot of times to be honest we ended up after she's done cooking we sit in our swivel rockers there and relax when we're here our wood stove is our primary heat but we do have the the LP gas set about at 58 degrees so when we're gone for well we work fairly long hours thermostat controlled so you can set it at whatever temperature you want the wood stove will not stay running that long so that's sufficient to keep the place warm and keep things from freezing up when we're gone when you add it all up we have about 500 square feet total of space but the indoor living heated area is 350 square feet so a lot of what my design goes into building something like this is I built four traditional houses before we move to Northern Michigan and I just like to build that what's simple basic rustic and for ease of building also that's another thing you got to consider you start getting too elaborate and it takes time it takes money and it takes a lot of know-how always something to work on here so one of the requirements that barb has is her kitchen she loves her kitchen and even she loves cooking and she's good at it she has certain things that were absolute since she needed sufficient storage space so how do you do that in a 14 by 16 room for inside storage we decided to come up with this here the wall is extra thick and we just built shelves into the wall so it's also the bedroom door yep and then we have the pantry there and more Pantry here but in a small space Swinging Doors really don't work they run into things so we decided to go with just the sliding doors and use that for all her indoor Pantry storage so the biggest surprise for me is I don't feel like we're off grid I feel like we have everything that we need I sometimes forget that we're off grid for all practical purposes we are living the same as everybody else we have everything we need that's hasn't been that much sacrifice really my kitchen is small but it's fully functional this is my off-grid refrigerator it's a 10 cubic foot 12 volt fridge runs completely off of our solar power I am happy with it it does need to be defrosted more than a normal refrigerator so we end up doing that a couple of times a year I have a off-grid stove it runs off of a D cell battery for ignition and it's just a regular gas stove that's my newest addition I have normal hot and cold running water regular kitchen sink we have an on-demand water heater outside I'm not lacking anything in this kitchen that isn't in a modern kitchen I do need to be a little careful when I use some of my appliances I do have a Vitamix I have an instant pot I just need to make sure that I don't use them when the well is kicking on so I will shut the well fuse off usually if I'm going to use those and make sure the generator is running at the time when I want to use those because that is a little bit too much of a power surge for our inverter other than that it's just a regular kitchen I looked at lots and lots of pictures and we designed it just by pictures with the iron shelves open shelves everything between that and the layout here and in the cast iron rack I really like that that's my favorite and saving space with the hanging pot rack I really love I love ceilings are in here you guys yeah our posts our posts came extra long when we ordered our first bit of lumber we did it a post frame building they didn't have the specific size and I thought well why don't we go two feet higher on our walls and that ended up being a great blessing it the upper shelf Barb has her special ladder she needs to get to those because they are quite high for her you know I'm thinking ahead she won't she loves her cast iron so we built extra framing into the wall and use that same half inch black pipe method and we can hang quite a bit of weight on those you know as far as uh Financial aspects of living off grid it a lot of it depends on how big you want to go and how little you want to go and we were able to fortunately cash flow the whole thing we bought the land with cash we built it with cash we built it the speed of cash and so we have no bills but when you break it down say well you don't have electric bill that's awesome but we paid Seven Grand for the system we had because we wanted a good quality system so you divide that out by months it takes you a while to recoup it but we never know when the electric goes out so that's a big plus for me I I always hated that being out of power we're never out of power we don't pay any heating bills really a little bit of propane but we heat mostly of wood and yeah it's very cheap living now that we're in it you know as far as thinking ahead and it does good to do your research um one thing I found out when I was researching solar power is that when you run things off of Regular power with your inverter even when you're not running things the inverter has a consumption itself and we weren't going to have that big a system we wanted to be able to leave it for periods of time and you save a lot of power by turning the inverter off therefore all of our lights in the house the refrigerator and the freezer out back which we'll see later all run straight off 12 volt the only thing we turn the inverter on is when we use the outlets so we turn the generator off Barb's going to use our Vitamix or use the KitchenAid or use her hair dryer using heavy stuff we'll just have a generator on at that time then we don't suck down too much power but those aren't things we use all the time so it's not a big deal yeah all the lights are all 12 volt um we use 12 volt light bulbs everything's done on 12 volt the only thing we need the inverter on is if we want to plug something into the wall so we can leave in the refrigerator and the freezer just run strictly off solar when the Sun's shining off the batteries at night time and it we can leave for a month in the summertime and it'll be fine I don't buy anything unless I know how many watts it takes when we originally moved in we had to find a propane stove that was older that ran only on pilot lights because a regular gas stove even a modern gas stove uses a lot of power to regulate your heat to run all your buttons and those were getting harder and harder to find and it lasted me about two years and it was starting to starting to fail a little bit pretty old yeah we ended up getting getting this one and I'm very happy with it it worked well it was on our wish list so we when there's something on the list we save up for it and when the time is right we pull the trigger we designed this entire cabin on off of Pinterest well and that's different that's something different and special about the bedroom we have 350 square feet of space but we also very much enjoy our king-size bed so how do you make that work we'll show you so we got ended up we're gonna basically with a bathroom on here we have a 10 by 12 room and we really enjoy our king-size bed so we figured out how are we going to do that when we spaced out just enough we just custom built a bed frame out of two by six bar it's extra tall that's Barb's requirement and then we didn't have room for closets but then with the bonus of the extra 10 foot sidewalls we decided the pipes worked in there why don't we hang our clothes on that I mean it's not the prettiest thing but it in the space you have it does everything we need we framed in our bathroom area we had a specific dimensions we knew we want a 48 inch shower so we made it we had 10 foot left we made it a 10 by 4 bathroom and we just fit it in for that stuff but we didn't need the ceiling nearly as tall in there so I put a secondary seal in there and then Barb has all her storage up on top of there too and this has been a Priceless addition for her I got her a decent quality step ladder that she uses quite a bit this is the hook that we had made so we can get our clothes off without climbing on the bed this is our bathroom we have a 48 inch shower we have full patent running water in the in the bathroom as well we have a composting toilet inside and the cat box is also under there yeah do you put a litter box in 350 square feet that isn't stinking stuck it down underneath with a composting toilet so our composting toilet system we didn't I never liked the idea of the expensive composting toilets and watching different people some people love them some people hate them but the simplest thing we've seen was the bucket system five gallon bucket system we got a big barrel of dry sawdust outside but it's only something we use for the lady of the house to use a bathroom in the middle of night everything else I go to the Outhouse and if all summer long we use that house and now it doesn't bother us at all so the shower is just a regular 48 inch shower nice and big we've had regular hot and cold running water that is powered by the well and the pressure tank and then our hot water heater is right on the opposite wall in the shed in the back it's an on-demand water heater sliding door we had that's a very new addition it's still got to be finished when the weather improves yep this is another thing to think about when you're living off grid is your lighting but we were able to pick these security lights up and they run off of D cell batteries and I only have to change them out once a year but when you do want to use the Outhouse at night they turn on one by one all the way out to the Outhouse so you don't have to carry a flashlight or walk in the pitch black so having Outhouse we had we decide well for use and that let's make it nice so we made it a little bit roomier we have the light on here so it shines right nice and bright and winter time we do add a heater to it also we do have a small charge controller in here also just one 12 volt battery for the light and then if we need to there's the exhaust fan that we turn on also we just dug a hole and built the house over to half of it eventually I planned it out I got several moves I can make before we get too close yep I build it on four by six aluminized Timbers and then it's built up on top of that so it's just so you can slide it forwards or backwards what's your biggest challenge so far this challenge you don't have laundry here yes my biggest challenge is I don't have laundry at home I still have to go to a laundromat I can hand wash things if I need to but that's not ideal I don't enjoy that depends how clean you want to be yeah my biggest challenge for me so far is the winter times just keeping this place cleared out we're quite a ways off the road and just figuring out the best way to keep the snow cleared out and keep things functioning in the winter time they follow me everywhere outside so we have the back side of the cabin here we have two solar arrays here we have a total of 2 000 Watts potential of solar power there we did have to sacrifice some of our trees just uh when you're back in the woods if you've got trees and you got leaves you don't have solar so you got to choose one or the other it isn't fully optimal but it works for us it gives us the power we need one of the other requirements that the lady a house has is she loves her food store so it's like how do we do a freezer off grid without taking too much power without taking too much Tower or taking too much space so we made this lean to over the back and this is a 14 cubic foot 12 volt freezer we have not had a problem with that taking in too much power and in the winter time it's out here it's frozen anyways summertime we got lots of Sun so it runs off of solar during the day and the batteries at night and it hasn't been an issue for us one thing in Michigan we've everybody knows is winter time some solar is kind of a myth kind of a legend it's not always there so we always we did go with a generator backup we have a dual fuel generator we like running that on propane when you're not using a summertime or you leave it for amount of time you don't worry about gas it's propane so you can turn it on turn it off and it's good to go well that's layered right into our system we have an inverter charger so when we well in summertime when we do watering of the garden that's well pumped runs way too much for the system we have so we can turn the generator on when we're wiring the garden and it has an automatic transfer switch and it just runs off of generator power for the time we need to water the garden yeah we're actually Costco and we have another one as a backup I like backups to backups backup systems and even backups to backups is what I prefer so back here this is a lean-to shed we call it is the houses our Power Systems our water supply that was the one thing I kept scratching my head over how am I going to do water in Michigan in the winter time how are we going to keep things from freezing so we have a regular well we have a buried pressure tank supplies us back here but what do you do to keep everything freezing when it goes up because there's no basement on this cabin it's skirt board around pulse frame building so everything anything sitting there is going to freeze so we decided to come back here with it so we insulated this shed it has its own separate heater it's a much smaller one in the house we have this set and it runs steady 48 degrees it keeps us back here at 48 degrees all winter long we have a frost free hydrant so when I do need we do need to leave for a week or whatever I can shut that off let it back drain turn that off I have a compressor here and I put in a line and I can have the water lines blown out in 10 minutes the house is winterized we have not had any regrets we've do everything ourselves and we run our systems ourselves and we're it's just the two of us so it fits us perfect this was where we originally were going to build a traditional on grid house up in this area and we're about 400 feet north of where the off-grid cabinet so when they put the well then I had them run a pipe it's about four foot underground all the way down to the well to supply water down there one issue we ran into is we originally when they put it in we had them to water the garden so they had a pressure tank above ground and they put a 110 pump in there and we brought our generator up here we'd turn on The Well of the generator and water our garden well that's not going to work in the winter time with a pressure tank above ground so what's the solution well the one thing they can do is they buried the pressure tank so the pressure tanks buried at the well head over here and we after they were done I ran a line up from the cabin power line and so it runs right off our inverter to run the well and we got really good water pressure so it hasn't been a problem for us our original plans to build a house on a different area of the property we've decided not to do because we didn't want this property to go to waste or this house we like the size of it we're comfortable with it we have other plans that we would rather spend the money on we even had plans drawn up a year ago of a house we were going to build up on the front of the property and we just couldn't come to terms with that we had everything we need we're living cheaply just didn't make sense to us to go and spend cash here and establish this when we're perfect we can come to this property we can leave this property I can have this place winterize in 10 minutes and I'm gone we just did not have peace with building a house so our long-term plans are to stay here as long as we physically can we both worked full-time jobs I think there's a lot of different definitions of Life off grid and life off grid doesn't necessarily mean that you're not working we live and work a normal life for a few more years for a few more years this is my garden I think we're going to put a hoop house on the back side we have a lot of fencing because we have a lot of deer problems here the first year they ate everything we like to hunt yes and we have a we have a 3D fencing system we have five or six lines there and then we also have electrified fence that sits outside of that because the deer don't like the 3D fence they'll go right through the through the wires but with the 3D fence they don't like that and it keeps them out I have a greenhouse that Dan built me oh it is nice and warm in here it's very warm in here it's currently 70 degrees in here right now it definitely gets about 120 degrees in here when the sun is out in the summertime Yep this will be the back side of the cabin we're not originally planned on putting this here we just kind of figured things out as we went along this is only a 2 000 watt inverter we have the lithium ion battery is because we knew he wanted us to last for quite a while so we just decided to pull the trigger and spend the money on a good system right away but even our well is a 110 well half horse and when that does kick on and it's running off the inverter I can watch what wattage it uses and it goes up to 1800 watts but it only runs for 30 40 seconds the pressure Tank's full and it shuts off a lot of this I just watched a lot of what other people were doing I figured this is what we need this would work for us this doesn't work for us and we've had a couple upgrades we started off with a smaller solar system because we didn't know exactly what we needed we had 200 watts of solar panels we had a 1000 watt inverter and we had six golf cart batteries that was the system we used for the first fall the biggest reward for me is figuring things out setting up the systems and it's like hey that actually works we have everything we need the biggest reward for me is the freedom we don't depend on anybody for anything other than ourselves I decided to pipe the wood stove out of the side of the house that was um just some little nugget I picked up from a guy named Bush radical that said I never liked putting things through my roof and I thought you know that's a really good idea especially with a metal roof it's just really hard to flash it properly so we decided to go out the side and it's worked really good for us we had to make an extension a friend of mine welded that up for us at thanks nice heavy duty extension so we can get it past the e but once we did that it's been problem for you it's really easy to clean out we originally started out we had a 100 pound propane tank out here for the indoor uh wall heater we had another 100 pound propane tank on the other side for the cook stove and we were had a separate tank for the heater out in the back and we said why don't we just get a small tank and have it filled and Plumb them all together which has been great it's an example of a progression of things we needed some outside storage so it became an 8 by 16 shed that was going to be our Woodshed well turned out that the wood didn't dry so well in there I thought it would get more since the wood is green so it turned into a storage shed and then we bought the side by side over here with a snowplow for our first winter we needed some snow removal system and I wanted a place to keep that out of the weather so Barb said after looking around and buying other building supplies and lumber was real expensive at the time she said well why don't you just build a wing off from the storage shed so we built this Wing off from the storage shed and I parked my side by side underneath there we'll then come next spring she needed a place for maple syrup to be done so she did her maple syrup in there and my side by side got kicked out and then in the summer it turned into an outdoor kitchen or outdoor kitchen so then we said well let's just build a wing off the other side so I was able to keep my side by side in the wing on the other side but now I got kicked out again for maybe maple syrup again so I'm going to have to find a new home for my side by side wood splitter for us was a game changer the first winner we hear we got behind times and we had a load of wood delivered it came big so after hand splitting some of that we said yeah let's get a wood splitter and that's been a game changer for us now we just Harvest all the wood off of our land here well and now I'm going to lose my shed because this is slated to become a chicken coop this spring as far as all the work here we've done it all ourselves it's all there's no plans the plans were in my head and then you know we watch a lot of other people off-gridders doing other YouTube channels like no that's not for me but whoa that's really cool I want to try that and so you just keep experimenting and growing this is going to end up being what we're going to call our little guest cabin this will have a front porch off from it too oh but the Genesis for this was we wanted a place for that storage so we just built the cabin over top of it foreign seller it's seven feet deep in the ground but we built it with um womanized Lumber we'll see how she holds up very sandy soil here so I'm not too concerned about it but so far it's kept everything from freezing for the winter we're gonna work on the lighting down in here also so this is four by sixes on four foot centers and then it's tongue and groove two almond ice two by six and then what's under the dirt I've wrapped with house wrap around there to further prevent any moisture problems but we have to work on the ventilation issues in here all right we we came up with this design because uh was sufficient amount of space for what we needed and it was out without having to put too much money into it I dug the hole myself with a bulldozer that I have dug that out ramped it out and then had to do a little hand digging after that put the post down wrapped it with a two by sixes and then uh brace it all off and then we put the cement floor in it well most people want a root storage for storing root vegetables and preserving but since we are limited on space on the inside we with all the canned goods we wanted a place that was Frost Proof so once again you could shut that door close the place up leave for five years and come back and everything should still be okay because when we left here for that winter when we had to rent I had to take all of my canned goods out of the house and that was a lot of canned goods it was a lot of moving moisture has been a little bit of an issue down here we did ventilate it but it's been waste probably because we used the womanized wood it just hasn't properly dried out yet like I said we finished it closed it in last fall in the rainy season everything was quite wet when we did it so we'll give it some time see how it does and if it doesn't fix a problem once again you work on the next issue how do you solve the problems that's probably the fun of it figure out a better ventilation system that's uh it's supposed to be the end you're supposed to have the infant lower than the out vents right here flush with the ceiling I think once the cabin's complete we'll put a pipe going up so you get some draft on it my words of advice for somebody that wants to start living off grid is just try it get out there and do it you don't know what you need you don't know what you can go without you don't know what you can get away with until you start doing it we knew nothing when we started and we bought that cabin in the up and we knew nothing about it and we slowly adapted and we learned as we went and we found out it was fun I enjoyed that's been come kind of our passion so when you're living the way you want to live and that you're enjoying what you're doing it just makes life that much better quiet simple and independent this should be said about the simple life [Music]

Channel: Girl in the Woods

Views: 426,998

Keywords: off grid cabin, cabin ideas, off grid cabin ideas, diy cabin, cabin systems, off grid solar system, off grid water system, cabin security, hidden storage, cabin root cellar, hidden root cellar

Id: e6DT1BgYXPQ

Length: 27min 8sec (1628 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 10 2023