Off-grid, handcrafted life on Oregon farm & workshop

this is my off-grid organic farm this little house is a house that I built the first year and this is just a co2 proof structure to give us a place to legally stay and then I started building little auxilary structures things that are a little bit more to my taste things are a little bit more natural and organic this is a functioning organic farm we have a 65 family CSA we have rotating cast of volunteers and interns that work with us here on the farm we're completely off the grid and what that means is that we don't run with a lot of propane or auxilary inputs we have a couple solar photovoltaic panels that supply about a thousand watts of electricity when the sun's shining and then we also have a micro hydro generator that spins in the creek and both of those will give us about four kilowatts of energy a day when they're going full force and so in the winter we run off wood and hydroelectricity and in the summer we run off photovoltaic and then also solar hot water the real smart money I don't think is necessarily in photovoltaic solar electricity panels are not really all that mature of a technology and not all that efficient they make sense in some off-grid applications anything to do with solar thermal is amazing this here is a Sun Oven it's a commercially manufactured product it's got mirrors that reflect into an insulated box and you can cook a chicken in an hour and a half in this thing on a bright sunny day a lot of people will try to kind of buy their way into off-grid living by taking a normal living situation and then just throwing tons and tons of money and electricity at it and you can get a lot more efficiency if you're willing to modify your lifestyle just a little bit and that doesn't mean living under flickering light bulbs and lukewarm showers it just means thinking a little bit differently in how you consume things these are old solar hot water panels that I purchased on Craigslist for a few hundred dollars they're the same as a modern paddle the technology really hasn't changed it's just copper tubes painted black inside of an insulated box with a pane of glass on it and what we're looking at right he is my own prototype solar-powered bathhouse what I've got going on is this little photovoltaic panel and that photovoltaic panel powers a tiny little photovoltaic direct pump anytime the Sun comes out right now we're pumping water from 100 gallon tank inside at 110 degrees and it's coming out of these panels at 125 degrees what I've got is all of this thermal energy from the Sun being pushed into to salvage hot water tanks from the dump basically I'm always looking for different ways to increase solar thermal inputs because you know the Sun is free and it's shining when it's shining so we might as well use it so one more way to get more heat inside of this structure is a solar thermal window and so this is just basically a pane of glass and a little bit of a reflector and insulator for when we need to close it at night and that pours sunlight right into there so this is the bath house I modeled I model a lot of the things I build I'm really really enamored of the Japanese aesthetic I like the beauty of it and I like the really really intelligent superior use of space and I like the idea of making your living experience art and beautiful so at the end of the day you're not just taking a shower or you're having an experience that really de-stress is you this whole structure is built I have salvaged materials I took the rafters they washed up on the beach and I plane them down all these raw cedar poles were blow down from a friend's property and we just cut them and carried them out one by one out of the woods the joinery is not traditional Japanese jointer it's just notched and Lag bolted which I think the purist Japanese carpenter would have a heart attack looking at but it takes 10 minutes as opposed to 10 hours and it's still beautiful and I think it captures the aesthetics on what the bathtub that we have here is just a simple 70 gallon soaking tank I get a lot of stuff from Salvage Yards and I think everybody in the 1970s decided that they were going to install a 70 gallon fiberglass soaking tub and nobody wanted them in their houses so they usually just get pulled out you can get them for a dime a dozen and I'm really proud of my nozzle here I wanted to make it look like a little waterfall I sculpted the inside of this by hand and I had a piece here and I kept putting it in and taking it out and putting it in and taking it out the first time I think it sprayed water all over the side of the bathhouse and then finally after about 20 tries I got it to work kind of like I wanted when you're working on a farm you're oftentimes working 10 14 hours a day and you don't have a time to take a break and so every part of your life has to become something that you actually enjoy what these ports are here is the intake ports for a wood-fired hot tub heater because we live in a rain forest there's obviously not Sun year-round and so we do a lot of stuff from the Sun in the summer but then we also do a lot of stuff with wood in the winter and I actually feel really good about that because for people with the resource available they're sustainably harvested it wood is actually a carbon neutral resource and so what you're looking at is an intake port where cold water comes in and then it circulates around a wood-fired firebox and then hot water comes out and it just goes in a circle if you come inside I'll show you the machine this is the Cho feu wood-fired hot tub heater and it is not rated for this particular use and so I got the idea of what if I were to plumb the same thing to a smaller tub that would give a similar soaking experience but then also elbow the unit through a sauna space because by doing that we're harvesting all the waste heat that normally comes off of this chimney pipe and off of the machine as well so in the course of the hour that it takes to heat up that bathtub it also raises this space up to a sauna temperature and so there's a lot of thermal efficiency there so he bought this property yes I mean it was hard because you know for people of our generation properties not what he used to be when we were first building the land we didn't have any places to stay there was a little derelict cabin up here and so the roof was good but everything else was bad so I suspended the roof and destroyed the rest and then built this tiny little cabin and this eight-by-twelve cabin is where myself and the co-owner of the farm ginger and we are not dating so sleeping side by side inside of this 8 by 12 cat cabin during the cold pouring wet winter while we tried to build a house when we first moved onto the property we wanted to build a 20-foot diameter Pacific year but then we found out from the state that you're not allowed to build yurts in our County and so we had to take that down and then we had to build the code approved house which was kind of hard because it's not the vision that we had for this property but I certainly had the skills to do it and so I borrowed some money and we just built a really small simple house it was hard because if you want to work with the available resources of the land it's better to live in a location for a few years first and let it tell you what it wants but because of the existing requirements for how we're required to live on our own land in Clatsop County the first thing you have to do is build a house if you want to live here so reluctantly we did that and there is a lot of things I would have liked to change about this structure if I had more lead time but I'll show you what we came up with so we're a working farm we've got a lot of energy consumption here but very little energy to work with this is a chest freezer just a basic hardware store chest freezer but what we've got going on with it is we're running it through an external thermostat here and what that does is regulate the temperature so it can never drop down below 30 degrees and freeze what's inside of it so we've taken a chest freezer and we turned it into a refrigerator and the net result of that is you have a refrigeration unit that uses because of its thick insulated walls and also because the cold air doesn't just fall out of it uses 1/10 of the electricity of a regular refrigerator so we're refrigerating a lot of stuff for very little electricity and then inside the house just a tiny little house so in the wintertime this is the heartbeat of our house what this is is an old majestic 1940's wood-fired cook stove this is past the generation when wood-fired cook stoves were ornate and beautiful and onto the generation and they're just kind of ugly looking boxes but we got it for just a few hundred dollars and it serves three functions for us in the wintertime this heats our food it heats our house and then what you're looking at is 60 feet of soft copper spiraled through the flue pipe in the chimney and what that does is it harvests all that waste heat that would be going into the atmosphere and it thermo siphons water to a tank on the second floor so cold water falls down to the bottom of the coil inside of this pipe here and then hot water comes out of the top and so every time we have a fire we're heating our food we're heating our house and we're heating up our hot water and then on to the electricity side of things this is a completely code approve off-grid electricity system if you could look inside what you would see here is two different charging sources you have a photovoltaic array of three solar panels totaling a thousand watts at full output and then you have another input which is the line from our little micro hydro generator which sits in the creek and that gives us about 200 watts continuous and either of those charging sources will give about four and a half kilowatts per day and to contrast that against your average American household which uses about eight we're still doing pretty good on electricity so in the summer we run off the Sun and in the winter we run off the hydro and in between seasons it's a little bit of both and where these go is they dump into a battery bank and what's in here is eight hundred and ten pound lead acid batteries totaling about 700 amp hours about four days of electricity and then that goes through a series of switches for safety and then into this thing which is called an inverter it's basically just a big fancy transformer turns DC electricity into AC electricity and everything downstream from there's this regular household AC and we have everything that every normal house has circuit breakers telephones internet Wi-Fi everything you need to live after we were final I got rid of the propane in the house so I wanted to see if we could actually run this farm completely off the grid because propane tends to be the dirty little secret of off-grid living and I'm I'm not unwilling to be a pragmatist and pragmatist and do things the way if when I need them but first I wanted to see if we didn't need them and so I got rid of the propane water heater and I there was a giant hole in the wall with a pipe and my friend had this cold box that he created that's really thick styrofoam walls essentially all this is is a hole to the north side of the building where it stays the coolest that goes into an insulated box and this is a really really common technology from the turn of the century and for all but the hottest summer months they kept the food fairly cold so in the wintertime we can just put our food in here and it stays nice and cold and right now what it's doing is its storing our seeds for our farm keeping everything in about 60 degrees 50 degrees I've worked as a carpenter over the years one of the things that's so important to me when I'm creating structures is to start from scratch and actually mill the wood myself and search out the materials that I'm going to be working for these are the logs that I just collected out of the bay in the wintertime during the floods I go out in my kayak and I look for logs that are floating that it flooded down the rivers and I'll tie those off and then I'll come back and I'll organize them into a raft and the process sometimes takes a couple years to get all the logs together I just do it in my spare time and then on a high tide I will float them all to a boat ramp with the tide and I'll haul them out onto a flatbed trailer and then I'll drop them here what we're walking up to is my it's my dream for what I think living should look like so this space I finished a couple of years ago I call it the Japanese forest house the architectural component of it is influenced by the Japanese Minka which are their traditional tall straw bale houses where they have kind of a small understory and a huge ponderous roof that comes down I've built lots of code frame simple balloon construction sheetrock and fiberglass insulation houses it's someplace to live but it doesn't nourish your soul I nailed one by 20 chainsaw milled hemlock boards from a tree that fell over just behind the house right back here and then over the top of that I nailed this board on board cedar siding which is the easiest siding in the world to make because all you're doing is taking rough slices off the tree it doesn't matter how beautiful you dress it up with the architecture if you're always working with the same palette of materials then there's only so much that you can do to really breathe life into the structure the sandwich here is cedar hemlock cotton spruce lath and then sand clay Pat plaster covered with milk paint and I like working with natural plaster because there's a richness to it that you just can't fake with sheetrock all of the wood in here came from things that I salvaged some of it was trees that have blown down a friend's property and others of these were logs that were floating in the bay and the floods in the wintertime and so that allowed us to get some really really unique incredible quality lumber when you come across a rough sawn like six by seven beam or a natural plaster wall or a piece of live edge deciding suddenly your brain stops because you don't have any type of pre-existing template for what that is and says this is something special in this is something unique and it really changes the way that you relate to space and that up there is a kayak frame this is what I do for a living I teach people to build skin on frame kayaks its traditional Eskimo style construction where you have a light wooden frame and then that frame gets covered originally with seal skin in our case it gets covered with fabric and it fits along with my general aesthetic and theme in my life which is things that are beautiful but really easy to build and lightweight and light on the land but very functional I think everybody dreams of building a wooden boat sometime in their lifetime but the reality of wooden boat building is that wooden boat building traditional wooden boat building is toxic time-consuming and expensive and difficult and this is exactly the opposite of those things it's very easy to build doesn't cost a lot of money and you still get all that romance of the wood and the curves and all of that so this is what I do for a living what you're looking at here is a light wooden skeleton I've covered with a nylon fabric it takes about five days to build the traditional technology here is an incredible way to prototype a boat because we don't have a form or a template we can build individual boats I can look at you I can look at your body how you're shaped and what you want to do with that kayak and in that one boat without a whole lot of extra effort we can change the shape and the design to really match exactly what you want to do the other reason is that it's just a really great technology a fiberglass boat is generally heavy if you get lighter into carbon-fiber you're looking at something not very durable in something really brittle you're also looking at something really expensive if you take a skin boat like this the skin is incredibly tough and durable it weighs about half what a commercial kayak does you could hit it with a hammer and it would just bounce right off you could drop it off the roof of your car and it would bounce off the pavement it's surprisingly functional for being something that's such an old technology how these boats were originally used is nothing short of shocking this is an exact copy of a traditional Inuit hunting kayak just to give you an idea of how something the mud like this might have been used if you were an inuit kayak hunter what you would have is you would have a sealskin parka that would seal at the wrists and at the face and then around the coaming here and then you would have some bearskin pants on and that would be all the immersion equipment that you had now this is a naked kayak but if you can picture how this was originally outfitted is that you would have a harpoon line stand on the deck right here that would come up to right about here and take up about this much room and then you would have 60 feet of coiled sealskin rope and that coil sealskin rope would connect the front of a harpoon up here and to the back of a giant sealskin float bat back here like a small inflated baby seal skin and then you would also have several lances and also several knives and in the 30s at least because the Inuits adopted any technology that would be advantageous to them as the minute it became available they didn't have any romantic notions about tradition because they lived so close to the margins of survival and so they would also have a sealskin rifle case right here and they would have a rifle on deck so this entire thing was one big floating weapon and your mission for the day was to go out and sneak up on an animal and harpoon it with a harpoon and what we don't people don't really realize is that about half the time these animals would attack back what they were doing out of these kayaks was so incredibly difficult that you wouldn't even conceive of trying unless you were absolutely starving and that's very much how it came about and so it's a beautiful piece of history and it's also an amazing testament to human survival I like to make things out of hand-built materials and whenever I have time I like to find materials and put them together myself our generation lost out on learning how to grow food learning how to create spaces for yourself spending time listening to nature and it adds this whole layer of richness to your life that you'd otherwise miss if you just walked into a store and paid a buck for something

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 1,272,405

Rating: 4.8972445 out of 5

Keywords: small space, simple living, simplicity, small house movement, small home, built-in furniture, craftsmanship, craft, diy house, diy home, recycled materials, handbuilt home, japanese aesthetic, woodwork, wood, local materials, scavenged materials, cheap home, affordable home, happiness, zen, micro hydro power, pv, photovoltaic panels, off grid, wood kayak, solar oven

Id: 7DSQ0W2lwtw

Length: 20min 12sec (1212 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 25 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/CryoClone]

I like how this went from off grid living to Inuit Kayak History Theater. Good post.

[u/jdglover]

As a solar installer I cringed at his shoddy setup. Especially the strip holding the small panel on that roof. That one thing is killing the production from that module.

[u/President_Camacho]

His description of sourcing fallen trees by means of his kayak blew my mind. I would love to see him do it.

[u/Apolik]

I'd love to live like him.

[u/Halfawake]

For all his dedication to beauty of living space, he sure seems opposed to clearing brush and maintaining the land he isn't directly farming.