Off-Grid Living 📍
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How tiny of a cabin
I am reading Charlie Wings’ The Tiny House Handbook. So much of the book is about tiny houses, as the name would suggest. I find tiny houses appealing though maybe not quite as small as the sub 400 square foot designs, especially those designed to be towed, suggest in much of the book.
Is a tiny home really a home, if it’s designed to be towed? In my mind such a structure is a trailer with a lot of things economized to fit the dimensions and weight limits of the road. The same can be said about many pre-fab structures. There is a lot of benefits to building a structure remotely in a warehouse or a factory – but also disadvantages of weight and size limits on what can be towed on the road, especially to remote sites.
At the same time, something on wheels or constructed off site seems to lack permanence. Truth is no building is permanent though there are many very old buildings still in active use. Obviously that is the most sustainable option. But it’s hard to see the plastic and plywood buildings that dominate the suburbs today having much permanence. Maybe an old house is better – if it hasn’t been hauled off to the local dumping grounds yet – then they must have done something right building it.
Building science is both fascinating and infuriating in my mind. Builders have many good ideas, they know what works and doesn’t. Durable materials aren’t always sustainable or easily disposed on site by burning or burying due to the toxic compounds used in them to provide a long life. Neighbors growing up when they got their new double wide to replace their old trailer burned the debris vinyl , siding scraps, waste materials and that sure burnt black and stunk. Decades before the burn ban! Wood just seems like a better option even if it involves covering it with toxic stains and paints.
I read a lot about sustainable building but I’m not sure what is real and what is woke glossy marketing. The sustainability community sure likes their toxic materials that maximize energy efficiency a lot. Even if it keeps drafts from leaking out, vinyl hardly seems like a good material to be using in building any more than the absolute necessary. What is going to happen to the vinyl eventually? Be burned? Be pushed back into the earth to leach plasticizers into the earth?
In many ways I do embrace the tiny house movement in that I crave simplicity, something like a very rustic hunting cabin. Something lit by a light bulb hung from a cord in the ceiling, heat by a basic woodstove , maybe no inner walls at all, just a simple brass or wooden bed like you might find in an institutional setting. For cooking, a simple camp stove or maybe upgrade to a small, old used gas oven converted to propane. Inexpensive electric refrigerator and freezer like everybody else has powered by solar. Outside shower and outhouse. When it’s too cold to crap outdoors a bucket works to be dumped in the poop hole. Rather than sending all that shit to the landfill.
Truth is that I hate how wires are hidden and even things like garbage cans are hidden in people’s houses. Heat comes from an invisible source, water is pumped in then disappears down a drain to a leach field or sewer with all the scum being collected to be eventually dumped in the landfill. I get how infrastructure is necessary but I hate how it’s all so hidden. If we could only go back to the way it was done 120 years ago, out in the country.
Good things come to those who wait ⏳️
I am often reminded of back in 2009 and 2010 when I started looking at replacing my Ford Ranger with a bigger, newer truck. I decided to hold off a few more years and was able to get a nicer truck with more money saved, and relatively low prices due to do the recession. I had originally looked at getting a stripped down work truck or something used, but I decided to throw some more money at the Ford Ranger, and keep it on road for a few more years, despite pushing over 140k miles and needing more parts and repairs. But I ended up getting Big Red, and then lifting it with a 6-inch lift during the beginning of 2015.
I so want to buy a house, and I’ve been looking but I concede I don’t want to buy or build in New York State if I can avoid it due to the gun laws and burn ban. Plus most of the houses locally are your run of the mill, plastic-coated, vinyl-sided suburban houses with gas heat and grid-tied electricity on a tiny piece of land. There are a handful of rural houses that pop up on the market, but they are mostly a variation of the suburban house some in neighborhoods that smell like cow shit with a longer commute. But if I hold out for a bit longer until I’m 55, I know I can have something much better.
I’ve been watching how much battery, inverter and solar technology has improved over the past decade, and it’s truly remarkable. With advanced electronics and LiON batteries – it’s such a different world then old fashioned lead acid batteries and old-style MPPT controllers like Midnight Solar ones. It’s only going to get better and cheaper in the next decade. Combined with more money saved, I can build or rebuild really the ultimate off-grid homestead that I actually want, not some crap suburbanite-lite house with a big blue bin and grid-tied solar panels on the roof and Tesla Swastika-Car on driveway. I don’t have to stay in Albany or New York forever, if I don’t buy here but just focus making through age 55.
What is happiness?
You know that’s a really profound question that I really yet to find the answer to. While I didn’t view my dream of what is a good life – the off-grid homestead – as materialistic now I’m coming to the sad realization that it mostly is. Happiness is ultimately not what you buy – be it a big screen TV, pigs and cattle or a tractor with a manure spreader – but your ability to find Zen and meaning in the now.
For too often I’ve been consumed with the thoughts of tomorrow, planning for that house on the hill with that burn barrel out back and cows mooing in the field with the big jacked up truck and four wheelers in the front yard. Maybe not the glamorous homesteads you see in the magazine but some working land. All the thinking of the accrued benefits of hardwork and saving. I was concerned about the memories of the past. But maybe those things don’t matter as much as I used to think they once did.
There is no time but the present. It’s not to say that the past has no impact on the present or that today’s actions won’t impact tomorrow. But in many ways those things are meaningless as the only thing that exists is the present. That said, I still continue to work for the future even while I try to find more of now.
Shunning toilets 🚽
Since the pandemic and even more so in recent years when I’ve learned more about septic systems and sewage treatment plants, I’ve had more and more of a desire to piss on trees and bushes, to crap in buckets and bury the poop in the woods.
I’m not saying there okay systems in urban areas that help protect the public health from dangerous diseases like Cholera and E Coli and protect water quality from excess nitrogen and phosphorus. But the solution seems to often to landfill such substances rather than recover the nutrients.
Maybe it’s just the freedom to pee wherever you want up at camp, up at the wilderness. Flip down the tailgate and pee. Spray urine wherever. Unconcentrated it’s pretty harmless though as noted on the Blue Ridge Parkway, too many people peeing on a tree can burn it.
Outhouses and composting poop outside of the cities makes a lot of sense. While both septic tanks and sewage treatment works biodegrade some of the sludge, a lot of it is lost unless it is collected and spread, a particular concern in sewage treatment plants is pharmaceuticals and long lasting chemicals like PFAS and microplastics.
I get people’s ick factor and concerns on public health but it just seems like such a waste to send it all to the local dumping grounds.