Thrifty couple builds self-reliant, $60K homestead & workshop

rough bumpy road next one mile thanks for the warning we're almost there yeah i wonder if they own all this a lot of property compliance forests i came here about 10 years ago this land is about 300 acres owned by a friend of mine who lives down the hill and so i just came more like a land caretaker because at that time i wanted to get away from the world i was living in austin i had this whole life and i think it was around 2008 2009 the crash the stock market crash and and that was a good window to be like okay i want a different life where's the house i don't know i was just thinking the same thing oh there it is cold this road was sort of here it was a really bad shape it's a water runoff for the hill so we recently fixed it about a year and a half ago we actually put all this gravel but before you could only walk up here like she had to walk down the hill and walk up 20 minutes with a backpack full of groceries or or a truck a good truck could make it home he could meet me in that one so we lived like that for a little while and then slowly you know we've been improving making it more and more fun when i first came here when i was camping mostly just part time not really full time out here but had a tent within a couple of months of just having a tent on the ground i felt like there are too many bugs too many different things so i built this deck so this is probably 10 years ago was the first thing i made so it was like a deck for a tent it was just a deck for a tent i think within a couple of months of just having a tent on the ground i felt like there were too many bugs too many different things so i built this deck so this deck probably 10 years ago was the first thing i made i don't consider myself a carpenter when i started building my this deck a friend came out he's like i'm not stepping a foot on you there because i had no idea how to do it i just thought a deck is just you put thing thing and you put a thing but then you don't realize there's give and sponge and you have to have every two feet and so he came out he's like no no you gotta have way more things and so that's how i learned to build a deck it was just a deck for a tent it was a little off the ground it felt safer and i'm kind of city raised so i you know i wanted to be in nature so much but i would get bothered too much so run off and stay at my mom's house to stay in austin and tent was like a tp canvas it's called soul pad i don't know if you know about him so half the deco soul pad half the decos deck and then i also stretched like a plastic tarp over it it had this giant plastic tarp it lasted three months till the elements took it apart and then a couple years later build the room did you have building experience i had a little bit but definitely not much and it's definitely figuring out and like people wanted to help me but i had this desire to see if i could do it myself so it was a lot of trial and error it really is just the desire to problem solve and being able to do it so i built everything myself i think initially i had friends who wanted to help and whatnot people were sort of intrigued about my idea of just coming out here and doing nothing but building my homestead but i also had different jobs so i was kind of in carpentry and all my free time and free money i would bring and buy what i'm missing mostly is like a lot of craigslist and just dumpster diving from different jobs collecting lumber and stuff so this room was probably 40 50 reused materials and as far as like windows and doors was all stuff i found for free and floor and so really uh the only new stuff is the actual structural lumber and most of it was also stuff i found and then marlena came and we built everything else the floor was the old gym yeah little gym floor that we it was like a kid's small kid's gym in town and so they had like a red section a yellow section there was a lot of boards that were like this they're just not treated we didn't have enough red so we painted a couple of them been a long time cleaning every board these were pieces i pulled off different leftover construction sites that's why i kind of checkered them for about a couple years i worked in town for a carpenter any job i did i would take the materials that people let me have all of it went into the house you didn't have power tools yeah when i built this room i didn't have a generator i figured out i could hook wires to my car and like run my car battery and run tools that way but a lot of this room was built by sewing by hand and i had a lot of time so i was kind of like i had three times i was like i'm just gonna take my time and build my house and i had very limited resources i think this room alone probably took me six months of slow and again i wasn't here full time but i always wanted to be here more and more which really full-time didn't come in till we got together in 2016. and it was just this room it was just this room when she came and there was a roof over the kitchen but it was no actual kitchen there's no running water there was no barely reception at that time reception has gotten way better so we have full internet now but uh on our phones yeah not like wi-fi there's no wi-fi and we got really into solar panels air conditioner is probably the hardest thing to connect to solar it takes a lot 10 times more power than the refrigerator which is 10 times more power than everything else how much power does it take to move these the fan this is actually very it's called a dc motor fan so it actually only takes on the highest setting is 24 watts like right now it's probably taking about 10. that's really low it's so large they don't have options for dc fans so it's very extremely wide there just were no other things yeah there's also the only fan you can get that's a dc motor and then i was learning as i go because when i bought this i connected it straight to my dc battery and it wouldn't work and i didn't understand why but then i read the label it says dc motor and still have to plug it into regular 110 volt outlet so that took me a moment to figure out but a lot of things definitely plug and play and like figuring out like oh it's just a dc motor which means it's quiet and it doesn't use a lot of energy this door just craigslist found it on craigslist i was looking around there's nothing new in here like i was just looking like everything is second except for like literally the plywood for the walls that's it actually the landlady who owned this land her family has a restaurant they tore down all these doors all these doors came off this restaurant and she had like 16 of them nine feet i think they're nine foot doors and then the other ones she stored but the moisture got in and they fell apart so i got the glass and i built this whole other i'll show you we have another building where we used a lot of the glass but then we have like these doors for example these were i found them on the side of the road literally these were sliding glass doors that people have someone threw them away i framed them into wood and there are these shutters that we can open or close our kitchen oh so your kitchen is kind of it's porous kind of outdoors for the summer we keep it open i like to run the ac unless it's like 98.99 we just like the it just feels less claustrophobic there was like a mexican caretaker who lived on this property so he brought this floor from mexico and left it there on the pallet and it's been sitting there for god knows how long until the lady finally was like well if you can use for it and it was exactly the amount like i couldn't make under here so okay well i guess i need a counter this wide so in a way everything here built itself nothing was pre-planned it was kind of like oh what else do we need and what's the cheapest or like most available thing we can grab that door behind you is yeah literally i remember my friend of mine called me says there's a mansion next door to me that's being ripped down they have some cute stuff standing outside so i got this door there's a big round window i can walk through here okay it's just a little walkway this has so many windows that was a big idea yes my idea always i love windows i like being outside so i think there's the drive was like how can i make my existence as if i live outside but uh you know still comfortable i try to re-buy things so everything i got all these windows were kind of broken when we got them and so i just revive and fix so what's a climate all year round in here is you have four seasons and wow yeah so basically that's one of the pluses why we're able to build the way we build and live this way as you notice there's no siding on the walls it's mainly because the climate here is that it's very dry and so we are able to have a minimal build because normally they would a normal house they would put layers of drywall and on the outside you have layers of siding which is enormous amount of extra work and siding is not easy to combine it's actually very expensive new because it's it's easy to reuse we just recently redid our faucet we did it where that was storage up there but now we have a storage room so that became my closet is upstairs and then i'm in my closet and this is all my stuff here hanging that's all marlena's stuff there everything's so custom oh based on need you know what we need we add yeah we just add little we call them features i'll show you why in the kitchen we have a thing where molina can't reach the jar so i build like a full down little sticker that is so unique everything in the bathroom is also craigslist or found stuff people always have extra tile found this shower glass for 30 bucks normally they're like 600 make it yeah all the style was free yeah yeah yeah this window is from that mansion that i was telling you all pulled out and this time a friend of mine gave us that was paneling left over from this paneling job i did for somebody's house i just had these strips left i'm really good at reusing so i'm not a hoarder but i have been stashing a lot of things and i still have a stash of all the windows we use there's still a lot of windows left i need more structures then we have our water storage where we also slowly accumulate anytime i see a cheaper cheap enough tank on craigslist we grab it so all these used space yeah the 700 gallons that's 1500 gallons and do you have to be off grid water wise as well yeah this is all our water but there's no access to water you have to yes and being on top of the hill digging oil is like fifty sixty thousand dollars this day and the water's awful yeah very hard [Music] so putting on rainwater catchment what's the process you have to have a certain kind of roof i'm guessing yeah it's literally anything i mean metal roof has nice ridges so it kind of channels the water and then you have the gutters that catch it and it's just straight in this is i kept this simple there's another thing that our house has where it first fills up this pipes and that helps catch some of the dirt before it goes into the tank and then i just open it drain out the water and then it refills itself again it usually has a little bit of gunk and dirt that still somehow makes it onto this roof that's another one it's the same setup so we can have less junk going in the tank because then sooner or later after a few years maybe hopefully five six seven years we drain it get in there and clean it because it does grow algae and the tanks get pretty nice a lot of things if everything's very manual it's like sailing a ship living out here you have to you have to maneuver it we can see the whole utility cloud okay this is the filtration system you got sediment filter carbon filter and then the bacteria filter which is the uv filter so it kills all viruses and bacteria and this just clears stuff in and rain water is pretty good but we still have like plastic leeches into the water the metal from the roof rust leeches into the water so you still a lot of stuff you wanna you don't wanna just drink rain water and then there's the pump we went through different pump companies and finally found the pump that's steady and works well sure flow and then we have our propane which we still use for cooking and the water heater so we have all the batteries we have eight batteries so this is our normal inverter runs for a house and this one we got specifically for the air conditioners and we can also run our gas propane generator that's our backup to recharge our batteries if we need so if it's cloudy for too long or we want to run air conditioner past like 7 p.m we can run our generator but so all this is expensive like what are we talking about for you know getting yourself off grid it's expensive i guess to dig a well but then what is it to have water oh the water tanks the water tanks i think we got each of them for like three hundred dollars i mean new they're probably a thousand like this tank is is probably 1200 new we saw it on craigslist for 300 we went and grabbed it it's the solar power solar you can't get that used obviously batteries used are not good so you want to get new you want to get everything kind of together and we just kept adding panels so now we have 24 panels on some level this was something i dreamed about for a long time we probably built it three years ago yeah a little sky deck it's a partial failure because i just didn't know what to do i just went for it and there's a place where you really have to duck like right here you have to kind of bend over and not hit your head but it's a little bit crawl space has a trap door but this was the point is the sky deck is the view i love the views one of the reasons i chose the spot on the hill it had the best view so san antonio is over there austin is over there okay and you can sort of see them on this really clear night you can see the glows of the city but overall this stays pretty dark here so are there a lot of other upgrade people out here or the texas definitely don't encourage people to be completely off grid before when i was learning this i talked to a bunch of installers and like i don't know anything about upgrade that i could only do on grid systems so i had to figure out myself yeah so we started out with those four panels and we didn't have a refrigerator we had a gas powered refrigerator we had four panels system and that worked really well no problem sometimes we run out we turn candles on it's no big deal and then we got the refrigerator so we got three more so we're able to get a refrigerator and we were able to get our ac which also worked kind of minimal like we had to turn it off at six and to really watch because if we kind of forgot about it and didn't turn off in time it would drain our batteries the problem with batteries if you drain them too many times you kind of damage them so you're actually you have batteries but you're not even supposed to discharge them more than like six down to 60 80 they even say then they'll last 20 years if you just charge them down to 50 they only last like five years if you discharge them to zero they only last one year so we have ruined batteries already this way so we learned our lesson directly a lot of things i learned here i learned directly and then we do better so the cost of all that i think was probably spent overall 10 000 on electricity but i guess you're thinning a lot less after that oh yeah there's no bills yeah we have no time but i think the biggest thing was that this was all kind of a dream cobbled together so it's like going off grid was the only way that it would have happened i mean it's like we we can't get power lines here what are we going to do right right so it's not like it was like oh let's make the choice let's be off grid instead of on grid it's more like i would like to be able to charge my phone let's get a few solar panels because we did spend a while without power and that was its own life you know and then eventually get sick of that you wanna try something different but like this neighborhood over there they spent so much time and i'm sure we found out it's about five thousand dollars to stick a pole in the ground and then it's every 200 feet you have to put a pole so they spend a ton of money developing this neighborhood because people don't trust solar yet but i feel like if they knew what we know they could have bought everybody their own solar system you can go to the garden the the original beds were all dug into the earth but we have what's called caliche and it's like what is it about six inch under the soil there's been not good soil here at all yeah blanco the reason it's called blanco is because there's this white limestone all underground we recently raised the beds i dug out all the dirt put rotting logs and compost inside and put dirt back in then raised the bed then got more dirt and filled the beds that's probably enough we dream of eventually like having full sustenance from the garden but it's still still plain and chickens they're still little so we can't have them out on their own so we're starting now to train them to let them be out and then i use those mealy worms to coax them back in which they will do anything for the worms so so obviously on the list is still wheat we do drink milk so we're thinking to get goats and also i consume a lot of honey so we're going to get these might as well have our own honey it is right so we have all these ideas not necessarily so much out of need but more like it's kind of like a life project how can we make a place where we don't have to leave as often as right now we don't even have to leave but once every two weeks which is the best way of reach really so when i was growing up i'm actually from a country called moldova i came when i was 13 in 92 with my parents it was part of the soviet union falling apart and everyone's running away we had a country home so we lived in the city and then my grandfather had a country home with fruit trees so in the summers i would spend months there and that was definitely that's my childhood memories that was the sweetest place i hated the city especially like post communist russia i mean it was very very dreary place and so then we came straight to austin i think i realized more and more that i'm very much a country oriented person nature really need nature yeah so finding this place like i found home and i wanted to spend as much time as i could out here and then when marlena came and she's very similar but she kind of grew up her childhood was sort of in the country in mississippi i moved to austin after i graduated from college and that was amazing to live in a city where there's my town had about 7 000 people in it but when i moved out here it's just like ah just like everything in me unwound it's like i'm home i'm home and then this project we when we got married we pulled together i think was about 12 000 this whole cabin and i had a lot of materials already accumulated like i had all the windows that i got for free a while ago and and so we designed it and built it in two months i think it was a two months of just every day because we wanted to get it done by the waiting time this was kind of an example of what you can do by i would say 90 of materials other than lumber are used and probably ten percent of the lumber is used so including everything that we got great deals on there's about twelve thousand dollars for this house this was going to be literally for people we were sick of people staying in our living room so this was going to be like a tiny little shack so that they can have their own space and then as we start building and we're like ah we should we're already doing this we're going to make it big and then little by little oh we're going to add a kitchen too oh we're going to have a full shower like okay oh we're gonna rent this i'm just swinging away this is the prime spot did you create that the concept yeah there's one over there it's hanging under the sky deck where we okay i don't know if you saw it but it was the first one we built and it was just massive and heavy and this one's just kind of light and simple oh yeah with the same setup it's pretty simple like the wood came from leftovers leftovers from building yeah and then just some cables yeah these i bought they're probably home depot you got to get it rated and everything just the right and then all windows and doors here were off craigslist that i collected including these these i think were kind of they came without a rail so i think they were like 10 bucks each or 20 bucks each and i built this from scratch just got the perfect size rail was it hard to do it took time i mean even here like see all the little details i got to chisel that out takes time to get it like precise [Music] but it closes really well i'm often impressed with myself that something works like wow because it doesn't feel like i did it actually it feels like it happened and then marlena's dad actually his profession was cabinetry so he's a because i could never i didn't know how to make like really professional ones you know that slide out so he came and actually he taught me to do this and we did this together this is maple woods it's and we use them we can make the shelf those shelves this used to be the gas fridge it was actually this this was the size of it this happened last week yeah it happened last week it literally broke we got it out bought this one real quick and then i shoved it in there because that's how the gas fridge used to be the gas fridge produced a lot of heat and gas that's why it's out of the room it's actually was supposed to be in there being ventilated i love that you just are doing a little burner here it's like it's a little fancier than a camper stove yeah but it's still connected through a gas pipe goes to the gas so we're still waiting for our shower glass for that shower to just complete this the faucets just i put together little brass pieces that don't rust so easily and okay everything is sold at hardware stores yeah we were lucky to get all these windows they all came from a mansion they were fairly new but the people didn't like the slats so they replaced these with exactly the same windows but no slats and i lucky i was in the neighborhood so to speak and so i got i scored them and they all came together so when did this building i was already kept in mind like i have four big windows four small windows like what are we going to do and two glass doors i had these windows probably a year they were just sitting around waiting for their home so a little front porch i think for a lot of people what scares them is the labor part of it right because we have never hired a person yeah oh and they're all figuring out like even this last ac like wait a minute it's got youtube like going youtube for 100 bucks you buy the thing and the pump and the everything you need and then i just watched this 30 minute video and i installed this ac and amazing it works now we don't have to pay for anyone to come install ac but there's still solar it looks like right and this one's still solar yeah so that's like little actually everything is displayed because we did it all at once i got the batteries this is the inverter this is a little backup thing i put a wire on the ground that connects our houses so that i can flip a switch and charge their batteries because they only have four panels and sometimes they do run out especially not that the fridge depends on solar we can't really and you filter the water here on spot right yeah there's their filter filter and uv filter right and a water heater and this is the only rain tank here because they don't seem to use much water people come i think they see rain water everyone is very like respectful and they're just like oh we're gonna use much water even though they can't totally use water and we we have to we could buy one there's an option where you can order a truck of 2 000 gallons will come for a couple hundred dollars so this is our new new structure we pour the concrete foundation [Music] ourselves this is the first time i decided to do a slab which is pouring concrete which turned out to be a little cheaper but more work and it's going to last a lot longer so we did the slab here i think the next building i probably do a slab again more work more steady more stable and then yeah all these doors came from craigslist they're extremely different from each other but we painted them all and cleaned them up and fixed them up and like sealed all the door holes and put like our own little things and then these doors i built from scratch actually oh yeah all that glass remember i told you that i scored it all went into these windows up top including this so i just two by fours right i just kind of stuck it together and embedded the glass in it and then those are the words that come from the bottom of the doors and i still need to make a little step so this is basically my workshop but the cool thing about it is we're going to make it because as my workshop it's probably not going to make as much money but we're making it a convertible into an event space like people can have like small wedding or meditation yoga thing or something all my tool stuff is here a lot of room all my stuff that used to be in that storage room is now all my tools can be stashed away and then we'll make it really cute inside that's what we're working on right now is to make the inside really cute we'll insulate it and the ceiling and so you can quickly convert into event space yeah this is the biggest building i built so far you need an engineered architect to go no this is all all us and i got a little more help here but only really from her dad and her brother came out a couple of times and helped me like push the metal roof up on top most of this building i did pretty much by myself with merlin's occasion like come hold this for me i think we just barely cleared 60 000 for everything we spent obviously not including labor and not including the land 60 thousand for a couple structures and several the new workshop i'm kind of including in that too yeah and water water and solar too are you including i think i'm including that too i sit on the deck a lot and just play sometimes animals will come out and like i must we're not used to having down time we actually pretty much last three four years very yeah we just next thing in the next thing and we launch into it we work all the time but we love it one of the fears is like running other things to do [Music] that thing is it was actually a commission work it was just a flat trailer that somebody asked me to build shower bathroom and sink and this was actually i was learning to weld my friend had a welder the trailer was just this thing it was literally just i knocked it together screwed this plywood in from the inside it was all very intuitive work then it turned out to be very bottom light like it would swerve on the road so i poured a bunch of concrete just to weigh it down i made this huge block and then since i had leftover tile this is my mom actually did a remodel in her house and there's a shower is that roofing material the side there yeah it's the same roofing that we used in many places and this was a see-through roofing material used for greenhouses got it registered and everything 1600 pounds a lot of people like oh i want to come out here and like oh maybe you build me a house and we buy some land over there but to me it's kind of like well if you come and i like make you a thing and you go there you might go nuts because part of it was like me coming out here a little bit at a time and sometimes going crazy and being like ah this is too eerie or too quiet so it was the slow process of like coming out here taking my time building it loving it hating it

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 912,972

Rating: 4.9106784 out of 5

Keywords: homestead, diy homestead, texas homestead, thrifty homestead, frugal homestead, rainwater capture, recycled rainwater barrels, home water filtration, recycled windows, recycled doors, recycled flooring, recycled building materials, frugal builders, offgrid rental cabin, raised beds, plywood construction, plywood walls, 60k homestead, blanco, texas, marlena jarjoura, soulpad tent, offgrid workshop, composting toilets, gas refrigerator, dc fan

Id: Io2JkJmjPtQ

Length: 28min 7sec (1687 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020