Lifestyle change, Montana...

[H8PVMNT]

So we were looking over our taxes and trying to figure out why we make plenty in our business but always seem broke... We determined it was all a combination of erratic payement from various clients with large droughts in income with alot of crap debt and the typical mortgage, etc with alot of expenses to stay in business. Now a smart fella would probably just throw in the towel and go get a regular job, but we've put alot into our appraisal business and it could, in theorey provide a quality of life most 9-5ers can't get because in theorey I can work whenever I want and bug out whenever I feel like it as long as we can eat and pay the bills.

We took a good look at our layout and we have ALL the peices of our ideal lifestyle, they just aren't in the right order. There are several folks looking for a house in our community and nothing for sale, so we can sell the house easy enough and pay off all our junk debt with cash to spare. We have about 5 acres along the creek here that paid for and I've been lucky enough to do a ton of appraisals on cool off grid cabins out here. Typical invenstment of generators, solar stuff and battery banks is 10-15K for a viable, house running setup. It would cost about 10K to get grid power to our site anyway, so we were sold. We want to build with alot of passive solar features like a big sun room with a slab, etc. Power bill will be gone...

We burn wood for heat anyway so we are good there. We sold our Celicas to start paying things off and I guess commiting to the project was the right thing to do because were were imediately blessed with a 1500+sf set of square hewn log walls for FREE! We just had to take them apart and strip the place to the foundation. This was a failed rec cabin project where the contractor split town, left his wife and a bunch of unpaid bills. They were going to pay someone to tear it down anyway...

A buddy who I do some Toyota favors for is helping us out with our foundation. We have some left over steel roofing from another project, almost enough to do the whole house. We took the money from one of the cars and bought a mill to finish up our timbers and any lumber we need with local free wood from our rancher buddy who wants land cleared. Another contractor buddy is doing a remodel on a fairly new place up at the lake and we get all the windows, which are fairly new good stuff for, that's right FREE. It's crazy and it's all just working out. We hope to be in a dry, paid for box with a wood stove buring in it by winter.

I might even get to go wheeling more often.

[n16ht5]

right on, I think you are headed to a great fresh start

[Nobody]

Good luck! Sounds like you have all the pieces to make it work. I often think about what it would take to go off-grid. It seems it takes a lot of cash up front. And you'd probably need a pretty decent stash to cover emergency repair/replacement of whatever power and heating system you use.

I'd love to have what you have now, 5 acres on a stream, and the freedom of working for myself!

[H8PVMNT]

We figure we have to go all in on it to make it work, no mortgage, no credit cards and all that. Everythng paid for, everything in the future bought with cash. Right now we have a milk cow, chickens and raise, grow or shoot most of what we eat anyway. When we get it all running we can keep about 65-75% of our income whereas right now we keep about 0%, or just slightly less of it. So cash reserves will be no problem, but they do need to go into an accout for replacing batteries in 10 years, udgrading solar cells etc. Our winter power bill here is over $400/month so it starts to pencil real fast. If you think about it people loved for thousands of years without "the grid". Farmers out here ran off wind and batteries until the about the 50s. The only thing I have to do since we build all our on vehicles is get ahold of a HUGE generator to run a shop. That's the only aspect of our life that requires that much electricity. Everything else we do can easily run of a modest solar setup with plenty of batthery bank storage.

[Nobody]

I grew up primarily on wood heat. My dad heats the water via the wood stove in the winter months. He's still a wood burner, but wood is getting harder to find cheap enough to make it worthwhile. And just this year my dad had an injury that has left him unable to stock up wood this year. So off-grid, it seems some alternative source of heat would be a good, be it propane or whatever. Sounds like you've got everything pretty well thought out though.

[H8PVMNT]

That's cool that he was heating his hot water with wood heat. How did he work it out?

I'm not sure how effective it will be because I've never been around it but we are really trying to work in the passive solar thing with alot of glass on the south side and masonry or slab extending into the main part of the house. Some folks are even heating their water this way with black tanks under the glass in a sun room. I guess it's pretty effective but we will start with some kind of on demand propane water heater and mess with the passive solar hot water in the future if the passive solar heat/slab thing works to heat the house at all. One thing good around here is that wood is still cheap and plentiful, mainly thanks to the pine beatle in the hills.

[Nobody]

I don't know exactly how it works, but the core of the system is piping the water through some copper pipe inside the insert and some special valves, that I forget the name of. He has two water tanks in the system. Endless hot water! He did say these systems were pretty common at one time, but they are considered illegal nowadays and he'd have to remove it if he were to try and sell the house.

My dad also has some passive solar water heater panels that he never got around to installing.

[H8PVMNT]

Started setting piers today!

[H8PVMNT]

Neighbor at the end of the road is tearing down a house tomorrow to make way for a new construction project. The windows in the place were completely replaced about 3 years ago. They called this morning and said we could have them all for free if we come get them today. We just have to haul them about 1/4 mile across the mud with the Toyota to where our site is!

[H8PVMNT]

We have our piers set and all leveled. We also ended up with a perfect sized set of new trusses we traded strait accross for a mule. The community at large is attempting to shut us down though. We are in the county where no permits of any kind have to be pulled, but after numerous phone calls from concerned citizens who don't want anyone to build anything new in this region we may be hitting a stone wall with the powers that be. They apparently don't like any kind of allternative or off grid stuff, composting toilets are out.

We have to move further out to accomplish want we want, time will tell.

[Nobody]

Do you have any pictures? I have a hard time understanding why anyone would have a problem with what you are doing. Now if I was down wind of a poorly setup composting toilet I might have an issue, but that the type of issue that can be resolved.

[H8PVMNT]

Well as it turns out the inner gossip circle in our fair community had been spreading around that we allready had our house mostly up and had some sort of sketchy drain system that dumped out refuse back into the creek. Also the access we have been using skirts what is called "the park", a kind of loosely defined community park where everyone from the last generation had their first beer. Nobody but out ot towners and fishermen use it now. We do have a legal easement to cross this area, but when some gravel for a bike path project got dumped there everyone started thinking we were building an improved hi-grade road. This got everyone all stired up and the county planning office got about a half dozen calls from concerned citizens regarding all the terrible things were were doing.

The local "commercial club" was having a covert meeting to discuss our evil doings. I was informed of this by the county commisioner and one of the officers of the club who is sympathetic and I ended up going to the meeting. No one said anything untill the end when the officer asked on of the guys if he wanted to bring it up. He turned red, fumbled for words and looked at the floor. Long story short I was able to dispell all the rumors and explain exactly what we had done and what we were doing so now everyone knows the truth and can spread the right rumors.

We are developing a new access where out property touches the highway, we just have to install a big culvert, which the county will help us with at a reduced cost...

Now, we don't need any permits for our project at all in this county out of city limits, but due to all the calls claiming we were poluting the creek and building roads the sanatarian was obligated to come out and inspect our site. He was pretty hostile untill he saw that we hadn't done any of the things people were saying. Then it was allright. He is an old SCCA guy who I knew from the local coffee shop anyway which also helped out alot.

Montana DEQ sees no difference between grey water and black water (sewage), and they don't understand proper composting toilet technology, so the sanitarian who wouldn't have been envoled at all were it not for our wonderful community flapping their mouths would require us to have a conventional septic system on top of what we had planed. The good news is our place has soil types that makes it a perfect sand filter and we can use a typical, standard septic system without having to spend an arm and a leg, however, we are now required to hire an engineer to confirm all this because the sanitarian wants to cover his butt with documentation due to our proximity to the creek.

So we hit a bit of a financial wall for now, but we will be finishing up our foundation and putting up walls over the next few months. Then we will need to wait untill we get our current home sold in order to afford the culvert, septic system, drill a well, solar, etc.

The important thing is that we don't go into debt on this thing, then it will be a success.

Phone is in though and is only costing us $55. :)

[H8PVMNT]

Finally got the saw mill up and running again and started milling timbers. We need to mill about 300 feet of 6x8 and a bunch of floor joists, then we can put up our allready milled walls.

[Nobody]

A picture! Now you're talking.

[H8PVMNT]

So I was posting an engine swap thread over on Marlin Crawler Forum this year and it kind of turned into a house project thread...

http://board.marlincrawler.com/index.php?board=16.0

Here are a couple of teaser pics. We moved in.

[H8PVMNT]

In an interesting turn of events I got the job as the appraiser for the whole county for department of revenue dealing with property values for property taxes. Oddly enough that seemed to quite the folks that were giving us a hard time. Can't imagine why...

Over the last year we got the house up and are living in it. I did score a good deal on a $2500 composting toilet that I got from a guy who had picked it up with an unfinished cabin he bought. He sold it for $600. Turns out we can use it legally after all!

[Nobody]

You stole my thunder, I was going to make a wise crack about an indoor toilet. Looks like a nice spread. Congrats on the job.

I'm actually a bit jealous. Sometimes I just want to liquidate and join you! Parts of Eastern Wa are very similar to there. I'd really like to pick up some recreational property there some year.