Couple builds Off Grid Yurt Homestead for $60k - beautiful interior!

Hi, my name is Trent. And I'm Whitney, and this is our off-grid yurt located in Joshua Tree, California. Yeah, that's why I'm like, we have that fart in front of each other, love. It takes a real couple that really loves each other. In order to make it through something as daunting as building an off-grid homestead. Off-grid in the desert. In the desert, though. That's really it. That topped it off. It was sun, sun, and some more sun. We've been living in our off-grid yurt for four years. So the dimensions of our yurt is a 30-foot diameter yurt. It is 705 square feet. We built the yurt ourselves, just the two of us, and it took almost three years. This was 2.3 acres of raw land when we bought it, and we developed everything from the ground up, from putting the fence in for our animals, to the solar mounting, the water tank, all the plumbing, the home biogas system, and everything. We actually use a home biogas system, which is a all-natural system of septic. You can connect a toilet to it that comes with the home biogas toilet. And it's basically a septic tank that sits above the ground and uses the power of the sun to break down your waste. You can also put plant scraps in it, as well as food waste. And then the power of the sun breaks down all of that in the septic bag, and that creates natural cooking gas for inside of our yurt. Come on inside and see the yurt. Welcome to our yurt. It's 705 square feet, and my main inspiration for design and decoration in here was magical, whimsical, a Hagrid's Hut kind of vibe. We live here with our four animals, Ghost, Weasley, Panini, and Cornbread. Cornbread's our cat, and the other three are dogs. And they live a very wild life here in the desert. This area back here is my hobbies area where I do painting. I've got my plants. I have my snail pond because I like to raise aquatic snails. I recently just got a Lego shelf because I had Legos everywhere all over this yurt in different areas. So having a little area where all of my hobbies are in this main little section of the yurt has been really beneficial so that all of my hobbies aren't strewn out like they were before. My husband's gaming setup is over here as well. We just pull this rack out, and then his chair pulls out like this. And this is just one of the things that we have had to make adjustments for living tiny is so that he can have a game setup, I can have a hobby station, and it's all in just this one little section of the yurt. Next to my little hobbies station underneath our bedroom loft is our bathroom, and this is a compact space. So over here we have our sink, our backup solar generator, and my little mini washer to wash clothes. This is the Renogy 5000 backup solar generator station. This can also be wheeled around and used in everyday camping situations, but it's basically just a backup solar generator. Say we're running low on sun that day, we can flip this on and it'll give us an extra boost. This is our tankless hot water heater. We got it off Amazon and it works great. I don't know about you, but after the end of a long work day, I need to unwind. So I like to go out and work on the farm. On my phone, of course, I love chlaxing on heyday. A fun simple way to build and design my ideal fairy tale farm from the ground up. A magical place where plants never die. Grow, harvest, and trade at your own peaceful pace. Personally, I love caring for the adorable farm animals like the chickens and cows. Use fun production buildings to create and sell homemade goods from baked treats to cute outfits. Personalizing your farm is half the fun. Get a head start thanks to our partnership with Hay Day. Receive an exclusive 16 item reward pack when you get the game. My favorites so far are the dreamy ferns and charming floral instruments. Look, a harp to calm the chickens. So cute. It's free to download on iOS and Android devices, so don't wait. Just scan the QR code on the screen or click our link below to download the game and do it a second time to get your reward pack. This is our bathtub. I did all of the tile and grout myself for this. I was able to get this bathtub for 300 bucks off Marketplace. It's a really nice tub for that and it was really important that after living so rough for so many months that I have somewhere that I can come and soak in a long hot tub and that was my main thing of why I rallied for a bathtub is living so rough for so long. I just wanted a hot bath. Over here we have our home biogas toilet. This acts just like a regular toilet, only you pump it to flush it. Home biogas has really allowed us to be able to have our own free cooking gas whenever we want, so I would recommend this system for anyone. You can even get the system with just the bag to where you're putting food scraps in it and making waste just off of food scraps. You don't have to get the toilet whatsoever, so I think it's efficient for any family. This is my giant mirror. This was actually given to me by a community member for free for the year. He was taking it off of his old closet door and he was like, hey, can you use this anywhere? And I was like, absolutely. I need a mirror to be able to get ready and see a whole entire outfit. So I was really excited about this and we do plan on finishing the walls around it eventually, but getting the mirror hung was priority for me. On this side of the bathroom, here's my vanity. This is where I get ready, do my makeup, and then we have our little closet that we installed. After roughing it for so long, you definitely don't take anything for granted. I'm super thankful to get in the tub and take a long bath every day, and every time I do, I always think about when I wasn't able to and how nice this is. So you become very super grateful for the things that you've gone without. I think there is that common misconception that if you live off-grid that you are more rugged and that you can't necessarily be a girly girl and wear makeup and do your hair every day and look cute, smell good. But I'm here to tell you that you absolutely can, and if that's how you are and how you want to be, you absolutely can be an off-grid girl that wakes up and gets dolled up every day. I don't think that off-grid equals you have to lack in your personal style or hygiene. And I do social media. I do TikTok and Instagram and manage our YouTube and all those pages. I enjoy doing all of the social media side of things because I am creative. It allows me to be able to showcase our life in a way that might encourage others to see that they can also do this too. So I'm a mechanical engineer. I've been a mechanical design engineer for 10 years designing in the automotive industry. So my hobbies include, honestly, building off-grid and, you know, building things. Before we did our build, I didn't have any building skills, but after it's like, you know, we recently built an A-frame for a friend, and that was just a fun project. I like doing solar panel installs for people, kind of helping people enter the off-grid life, you know, on the electricity side of things. Our living situation prior to this, we actually had something really horrible happen to us. We had purchased our first home in Wisconsin, and two months after moving into this home, the police knocked on our door and informed us that the person that sold us this home actually didn't own it either, and they had forged a bunch of legal documents, and we would have to proceed in court to fight for this home that we had already put down down payment and signed off the paperwork for. And so that was a huge blow that we had got wrapped up in a scam by a scam artist, cut our losses, and he lost his job at the beginning of the pandemic as well, and that's when he got the job offer out here in California. So we said, screw it, let's get a travel trailer, let's go out there, let's start over, let's leave this mess behind. We don't want to pay what it's going to cost to fight this in court. The district attorney was already charging him on their own, because obviously it's a crime. The year had been a dream of mine since I was 15. I actually watched a documentary about Mongolian reindeer herders with my dad, and I was very fascinated with how they rolled up their house and put it on their back and went to the next location with their reindeer in like 12 feet of snow, and I was just like, wow, I want a house that's like that. I was like, I want to live in a round house more than anything. So that's where the yurt first got into my mind, and it stuck with me. The moment she brought it to me, I was, yeah, let's do it. You know, we were living in a travel trailer, we were looking to get into something a little more house-like, but I didn't care for the cookie cutter house either. I wanted something unique, something just especially open, you know, and after she showed me what a yurt was and I seen how just open they are, I was in love with it too. As I mentioned before, our bedroom loft is above us, so let's go check that out. Over here is our stairs. These are actually trees that came from Big Bear, California, that we made into a little makeshift railing. The railing was my idea. I wanted a natural feel to the yurt and for it to look very earthy and bent, out of shape. So now I'll show you the loft. This is our bedroom loft. It can fit a king-size bed. That's what we opted for so that all of our animals could sleep with us. We have a small TV, and that's about all we can fit up here besides some storage behind the bed and around the corners. I really wanted a loft when building the yurt. I wanted an elevated bedroom and I wanted to be close to the dome so that I could look out and see the stars at night. I think if there was anything I could change up here, it would just be having more air and more fans probably to push it down. It does get hot being up in the loft in the summer, but I do have fans that I plug in. I've learned to sleep through it. That's it for the loft. Now Trent's going to show you the rest of our living space. All right, so over here we have our couch, a nice reclining couch because I like to kick back and watch TV on our 55-inch. The TV was one of the first things I had to put in because I like kicking back and watching my TV, especially at night time. So if we keep moving over this way, we got our pellet stove. We used to have a wood stove and we used to drive up into the mountains. We'd get permits. We'd cut wood ourselves and take the chainsaw up. Trees that were already fallen down, you can basically cut up and make our own firewood and bring it back here. It was a ton of work. So we switched to the pellet stove. We buy bags from the store. It's a little easier and it's quite honestly cheaper than the gas we spend. We can fit a full 40-pound bag in here for the night. We don't have to worry about filling it up. Whereas the wood stove, I was having to get up every couple hours, keep feeding the stove wood. So this was an upgrade we recently made this year that was a very, very nice upgrade and saves our backs a ton. So on this wall, this is kind of Whitney's little painting collection area. So five out of eight of these are done by Whitney. Whitney is a great painter. Whitney painted this one, this one, this one, and this one. She follows Bob Ross videos, but she doesn't give herself any credit. She's still the one painting it though and following the video and getting it as good as it is. And so if we keep moving, you know, we got just a little relaxation chair and a nice little papasan chair with the net. Then we move on into the kitchen. So we have a Galan's retro style fridge here going for that retro blue and yellow look. So from the fridge, we move on to our custom countertops. So Whitney did all the tiling and grout here. I did the countertop, you know, I cut the boards. I got them cut to the shape of our wall and everything. So we have a nice long counter that wraps around. We got, you know, some simple cabinets, basic of the basic cabinets. And then we took, you know, four by eights and started cutting everything to the wall. And then we decided how much, you know, overhang, you know, how deep we wanted the counters. One thing I can mention, you know, we didn't put in a stove or an oven, I should say. So, you know, we have our, this is our home biogas burner right here. The bag feeds into here and that's our cooking eye. And then we have on larger scale toaster oven meets all the needs. We cook hams in here. We cook turkeys during Thanksgiving, you know. So here we have all of Whitney's pots and pans. She wanted them hung kind of out of the way. She's a little shorter than me. So obviously I'm constantly hitting my head off this one, especially it's part of the life, part of the life. So if we keep going on down, you know, we, we got the spice rack and everything, utensils. And then one of my favorite parts is I'm a big cereal guy. I eat like a bowl of cereal every night. I'm out of cereal right now. It's something I got to go get. I'll load it up with two different cereals and every night, usually do a little mixture. So moving on down, we've got the sink here and, you know, it comes with the vegetable tray rack. It's got the rolling drying rack. We went for one of the larger scale sinks just to be able to have that capability. This is Cornbread. He knows he's not supposed to be on the counter, but he thinks there's something special going on. So he's, he's taking his chance of making, yeah, there he goes. There he goes. He knows better. So here in our kitchen above the sink, we actually have our 24K unit mini split. We put it here to kind of give it that direction to the, you know, the living space where the couch and everything is. And then our other mini split is basically on the other wall. So they kind of meet in this kind of form to just bring all the cool air basically at us on the couch, you know, for when the hot summers are kicked in. And that was kind of the goal with our kitchen was space. You know, we got the open floor space, you know, easy walk around. We could add a kitchen island here if we really wanted. Not really too much I would want to change here. We don't have any issues when it comes to dishes or cooking. I mean, I would raise this one pot if I could, but it's, it's just the one that always clonks me in the head. We found the land through a husband and wife realty company. They're very small. They're called Candy Lands for $8,000 for 2.3 acres at the beginning of the pandemic. Now the same amount of land that's across the street from us is going for 63. The cost of the yurt itself was 24K. It could have been cheaper, but we got some upgrades like the tinted dome on the top and the French doors and some other little upgrades. Like we got an extra wind kit with ours because it's very windy out here. So ours was a little bit more expensive at 24K. You can get them for a lot cheaper than that. You can get some that have been returned even for like as low as 15K. This same size just depends on what you're looking for. But the entire build process, everything in here from the cabinets, the fridge, the water tank, including the yurt, everything all together with the land is 60K. We built everything, land included, yurt for 60K. You're going to get that back in not paying electricity bill over a couple of years. Not only that, like you know, for example, we live in California, rolling blackouts are a thing out here. We've never experienced one. You know, so people go complain on the Facebook pages about, you know, the power being out. We're just like, oh really? We're watching a movie right now. Yesterday Yucca Valley didn't have power and I saw it all over the community page and I had no idea because I'm on solar and I'm watching Wicket. Off-grid solar to be specific too because you know, some people that have solar, they don't have backup batteries. You know, just because power goes out. If it's nighttime, their solar ain't doing much for them. We took out a loan to pay for the yurt itself and then basically everything after the yurt kit was just paycheck to paycheck. So the development was all just, you know, small project to small project. I got a lot of things from the community marketplace. A lot of community members were excited to help me out. Like I got the kitchen cabinets for free. Someone donated them that was taking them out of their house and he was super excited that they were going in here. I like to say that all the dads on YouTube helped us build this yurt. When I bring him something, he's able to look at it and be like, oh, okay. And just do it in his head and make it happen. The problem with that also though, is trying to be a perfectionist. Being an engineer, you got to, you're a perfectionist. So he very much, if a cut is just a little off, to stop. We did it with limited tools. So like we built this whole thing with just a handsaw. We didn't have any table saws. We didn't have multiple saws. One circular saw, one circular saw built this whole thing. And a drill. And a drill and one hammer to literally build this entire thing. It still inspires me because you know, I think back of the building. Yeah. And it's like, if you don't believe us, you can just go check out our YouTube page. Our biggest challenge was building it in the heat. We started building it when there was actually a heat wave going on. So temperatures had jumped up to 115, 120, and they were floating around in that range. So we would actually sleep during the day and build at night. Another big challenge was not having water. I bathed in a pot for six months, which is pretty gross, but I did stay clean. We would heat the water on our wood stove. And then I would just do like a pot washcloth bath. We would also cook our meals on our wood stove, which would sometimes take forever because you got to put a lot of wood in there. When we finally got solar put in and when we finally got a water tank put in, it was like heaven on earth. You know what I mean? It was, especially once we got the plumbing hooked up for the water. So, you know, we had water coming into the bath and the shower, the sinks. That made a big difference. It makes you realize all the things you're thankful for growing up. Yeah. All the things you take for granted as a kid, you know, your normal shower and your normal electricity, leaving the TV on things like that. I was very salty. Like I'd see my cousins and they'd be like, I'm having it so hard. I'm like, well, at least you have a shower, Becky, shut up. Like I was very salty. Going bare minimum just to get it started. But if you want to do something like this, I feel like it kind of takes that sacrifice in the beginning, especially if you don't have unlimited fundings. You have to be willing to live uncomfortably for a little bit to get to this point where you can live more modern life. Thank you for watching our video and for stopping by tiny house expedition. I'm Alexis and I'm Christian. Don't forget to like comment and subscribe. And for more tiny home tours and stories, click the videos below and join us on Instagram for bonus content, including face-to-face conversations with us. We hope to see you there. All right. Thanks guys. Have a good one. Download Hay Day for free and get an exclusive 16 item reward pack. Click our link to get the game or scan the QR code on the screen and do it again to retrieve your reward pack.