About Us
What Are You Doing and Why?
We love the tiny house TV shows, but…
Television spends too much time talking about aesthetics: colors, textures, fabric choices. Blah! Also, have you noticed how many programs will bait you with a tease message, go to commercial and when they return, they repeat, sometimes several minutes, the tease before commercial? Why is this? Is the typical audience member’s attention span too short? What a waste of time!
We want to know the inner workings of the tiny house: power, water, sanitation, insulation, heating, and cooling. How do you make these things work, really, especially off grid?
Also, society seems to get a lot of things wrong. For instance, why do we flush our toilets with clean drinking water? Seems wasteful.
So, this site is about how we think, what we did and are doing to make the journey to off grid living in a tiny house we built ourselves.
What follows is a story of how a city girl and quasi-suburban boy come together in their golden years to form a partnership in marriage and survival. Follow along as we detail the many failures and occasional successes of our progress towards independent living.
As we began the journey of learning about this lifestyle, we found it difficult to organize the information we were gathering through our research. After pondering a methodology to categorize our data gathering, we came up with eight major categories:
Energy
Food
Health & Sanitation
Mobility & Communication
Security & Safety
Shelter
Water
Miscellaneous (which turns out to be a very bad idea for a category!)
To get our articles and clippings organized, we bought 3″ D-ring binders and labeled them appropriately. You will notice the organization of this site (for the most part) matches the way we’ve organized our thinking.
Enjoy!
Bottom Line Up Front
The shared vision is to live comfortably, with all the modern conveniences, and yet be completely free from any utility company. Living a sustainable lifestyle, completely off grid and fully self-sufficient. Sounds like a lofty goal, huh? The ugly reality of a goal like this is unattainable. The goal demands mastery of skills beyond the reach of one or two people. True survival and sustainability requires a community. No one person, regardless of how resourceful, or educated, can be a doctor, welder, carpenter, electrician, veterinarian, and possess all the other required knowledge and abilities. Certain skill sets require regular practice to maintain proficiency: that’s why they’re called perishable skills. So we all need a little help now and then.
As a couple, they possess a plethora of experiences and a combined skill sets that include farming, canning, beekeeping, wood working, plastics, metal, concrete, and to some extent, engineering, chemistry, and electronics. Sandy spent the early part of her adulthood living on 98 acres in a hippie fashion, while Nick was raised in a military family and then made a career of the Armed Forces.
Do you have the skills, knowledge, and desire to live an off-grid lifestyle? If you never have ran a skill saw or power drill, you are merely at the beginning.
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