Off-Grid Living
WE WERE LIED TO About OFF GRID LIFE.
It’s Great to be Back At The Cabin!
I always like catching up to see what Dale is up to these days.
Cabin with 24M views…….all the details
This Bush Radical video of his basic off-grid cabin is pretty neat. When I own land, I'd love to live the simple life like this.
Why I don’t talk much about owning my own land and living off-grid these days 🚜
Sometimes the best thing to do with an automatic investment is to just let it run its course. Let the bimonthly deposits go in on schedule, let the markets grow, ignore the ups and downs, know that better days are ahead but don’t give it a lot of thought in the near term.
The truth is my hope and vision for the future hasn’t changed much though my expectations have been somewhat tempered watching the rate the markets grow, my quickly aging parents, the progress of my career. I realize probably within the next decade my parents are either likely to pass on or retire to a nursing home when they are no longer able to take on their homestead. My sister has little interest in their five acre property in Westerlo, so it will either get sold or I’ll take it up as my own home.
It’s not everything I would want in land but there is a lot of possibility with the property and it’s within commuting distance of my current job. Another thing two I’m considering is that I’m within 5 years from having twenty years in with the state retirement system at which point I will get a big bump in my retirement benefits. My current apartment isn’t great but it works well enough and is super convenient on the bus line and not a long ride to work.
On that land, if it’s someday mine I could rework it more into my own vision of the land.
Clearing the Path at the New Cabin | We Move In!
After watching that video I was thinking about all the tools I have for land research with public data and GIS tools 🗺
After watching that video I was thinking about all the tools I have for land research with public data and GIS tools 🗺
Most counties and states now publicly post tax maps and rolls. If I can connect to those REST Services then I can have fairly good idea of property lines, assessed value and taxes. Using R Studio I can easily calculate the assessed value per acre in an area or for similar properties.
Then then there is a lot I can find out about a property without ever even stepping foot on it. Aerial photography, especially the most-common leaf-less type taken either in April or November before the snow can show a lot about what conditions are like on the ground. It can give on an idea of what buildings exist there, what trees and pasture exist. What kind of logging practices have taken past in the recent past. In addition, most places now have a wide variety of historical aerial photos available. For most areas, you can easily get aerial photos from the 1950s and early 1960s, which can give you insight on whether or not the land was farmed in the recent past.
But maybe the next most interesting is the information one can obtain from LIDAR elevation data. In most cases, LIDAR survey data can show stone wells, gullies, potential wetlands and swamps, and old trash dumps above grade. Basically anything that is ground cover, that is not trees. If you download the full-point cloud data, you can get things like building and tree heights, which can give you more ideas on what trees are on the property and what is salable.
It’s actually quite remarkable what you can do with modern databases, some R code and GIS data to discover a lot about land that might in a few years back be unknowable without a detailed, on the ground property survey. I am fortunate to have so many resources available at my finger tips these days — recognizing though that other people also have access to data, though maybe others aren’t quite as talented when it comes to working with big data or sifting through GIS data.