7:46 pm - 50 degrees outside - clear night sky, stars are coming out, wind has picked up...
People ask us why we chose to live off-grid. We actually didn’t go looking to live off-grid it just sort of happened.
People ask us why we chose to live off-grid. We actually didn’t go looking to live off-grid it just sort of happened.
Five years ago we decided to look for some property where we could build a home. Our property search criteria was - acreage that was somewhat close to town. We figured we would know it when we saw it. No, we did not search out off-grid property! One weekend we went out for a drive in the mountains and saw a ‘Land for Sale’ sign. We called on it, went out and looked at, went home and talked about, went out and looked at it again, went home and talked about it again and put our home up for sale. We sold our home and purchased 22 acres, off-grid, up in the mountains. It was only 31 miles to a major airport, half-hour drive to town, had a phenomenal view of mountains and valleys, no man made structures in sight other than two radio towers way off in the distance, nice flat to semi-rolling build site for our new home, great new neighbors… we were sold. The whole off-grid thing was not something that we had been looking for but would be kind of fun and different, so why not.
In the beginning we thought we were pretty prepared. We had just built a house two years ago and thought we could figure it out and do it again, but build it ourselves this time. It didn’t take long for us to realize that we weren’t as prepared as we thought. Everything took longer than planned and cost two to three times more than planned. We also had to work around the weather. So need less to say, our home that we thought would take 12 to 18 months to build, is taking considerably longer to build.
