Building Our Dream Homestead! How Long? What You SHOULD Do!

Good afternoon, welcome to our homestead. Have you ever wondered how long it might take you to build your dream homestead? We're going to talk about a couple of different ways to do it and how long it took us to build ours and exactly what we did. Let's get going. Before I show you what I started with and what I added, I am going to talk about, throughout the video, finances and economics because that plays a really important role. Because when we got here, we didn't have much. So when we first got here, it was just a house in the barn and the rest of it was completely open or forested like behind me. But you can see we've added a ton of fruit trees and grapes and fruiting vines, everything like that. I'm walking through one of our orchards over here. We've got just a ton of different things. We've also added, of course, solar and that came with time. But when we first got out here, we barely had $50 extra per month to do anything with and it was super, super tight. As we saved up money and found some extra work and some side jobs and some side hustles, we added a greenhouse, we added this big garden. That was one of the first things that we did when we got on our property. The well was already here in the well house, but we added some small structures all around the property, mostly for our chickens. These are some other small structures that we added for our chickens over time. We didn't start with this fancy shed right here for our chickens. This is something we saved up for and built over time. This is funny. I thought this was a dead leg horn down here. It's actually a nap of cabbage that I had put in the freezer or in the refrigerator and it froze and so it wasn't good for us to eat. Of course, feed it to the chickens. Every fruiting thing you can think of that grows well in this area, we added elderberries, we've got raspberries. Next to the chicken coop between the garden, we've got another small orchard and I'm trying to create a permaculture environment and I'll talk about that in a future video. We added rainwater reclamation here on the barn, which was the best place for us because the barn sits elevated from the house. We can use gravity to pull that down to the house. We added a small coop inside of the stable part of this barn complex right here. Then we've had things fall apart too, like the roof ripped off of our stable here and I still haven't had the time to replace it. We added a small coop over here that was one of our first. Actually, when I added that, the lumber only cost me, along with the connectors, 200 bucks. You can tell how much prices have gone up since we've been here. We added some solar panels back here for the barn and then in this space, we let the wild blackberries grow up so we can harvest those. We didn't have to plant anything extra because there are so many brambles in this area and the dewberries and the blackberries are fantastic. Why not take advantage of that? In that area with the garden and the chicken coop and everything, there used to be a few trees, but I cleared that space because as you can see beyond, we do have a heavy forest over on the other portion of the property. We cleared this space because it's the sunniest, most open, and so we just chopped down a few of them. Over here behind the house, we've got additional systems. We added this propane and we got this kid's playset from my buddy Pete B over at Pete B's Homestead. Then we added in addition onto the house, embarrassingly, I still haven't finished siding it and painting it. We also have a small leisurely sitting structure that we added over here. Beyond the kid's playset, we've added some more fruit trees down in this area because it does get a decent amount of sun. I have a philosophy of ABP, always be planting. The more you can stash on your property that will grow properly, add it. Over here on the north side of the property, we've added a couple of grape trellises, a new area for blueberries. Behind me down there is our original orchard. Up over here, we've got a space for a new garden. Then next to that, we'll go a cabin. We started to add water lines over here for the cabin and also to irrigate all of the new plants that we have. Let me go sit down under a nice shade tree. I'll tell you what was originally here and where I think you should start. Friends, it took us eight years to build what I just showed you. Now, can you do all those things in a tiny short period of time? Yes, you can, but it's about money and saving money for the next project and the next project. It's taken us that long to build all of that up. It's taken us that long to actually plant and get those fruit producing. When we started, we had the house, the fencing, the water, the rural electricity, and the barn. Friends, to be able to do this and leave the city, we actually left our careers and started over again. Of course, we had money and savings and stuff like that, but we had with the income that we were getting $50 extra. That's not a lot. Buying raw land, I think, is a mistake because of the infrastructure costs specifically. They can be a lot. You need to be able to get access to your property. That means getting a road in there or a long driveway. Paying for that is going to cost you a decent amount of cash. If you need to keep things out and keep your things in, you need a fence. Depending on your size of property, that could get expensive. Then, of So you're going to need some sort of septic system to do that. Now, are there people out there who can live in a tent and dig a latrine every day? Absolutely. I commend those people, but that's not the majority of people. There are a few YouTube channels out there who glorify that. They are awesome. They're tough, but I don't think that's for everybody. Can you sell your home and buy an RV, live out of an RV, and build your own home? Absolutely. Do I think it's the best option for most people? No, I do not. Because again, the majority of people doing that have the skills already to be able to do that. A lot of channels out there where you see them building their own cabin or house or things like that, those people work in the trades. They work in construction. They're electricians. They're plumbers. They know how to do these things. They have connections. They don't do it all themselves, which is what a lot of them show on camera. They have people helping them. Please don't be fooled by that. Please don't be fooled by buying raw land, getting some lumber, and slapping up a house in a decent amount of time to be able to live in it. That's just not going to happen. Many of these channels who show building an off-grid homestead with a decent size house, a very beautiful place, that has taken them seven or eight years to do. While they're concentrating on building those houses, then other things are falling by the wayside. They're not being paid attention to, like gardening or raising livestock, whatever you want to do for your food source. Friends, again, in my humble opinion, I think you should find a small homestead that's already established or a piece of land with an older home on it. Maybe you can work on it, but it is livable to start with. Maybe if it's not 100% livable and you have a small travel trailer that you can live in and you don't have a big family that you're trying to stuff in this travel trailer, you can renovate the house. Then I think that's all right to do as well. Friends, I'm going to reiterate again, these things take time and money and they take planning. I don't want anybody to rush out of the city without doing proper planning. I still think there's a huge urgency to leave the city, but without any planning at all, you will get yourself in trouble and you will spend all of your money. Friends, keep in mind also another expense for a homestead if you're building it from the ground up are tools. Acquiring a lot of tools to be able to do all these jobs is going to be expensive. Now, can you do it with basic tools? Absolutely. The Amish do it all the time, but they have an entire large community that helps them out. If it's like a barn raising or something like that, you see 300 dudes get together and raise the barn in a couple of days. If you're coming out of the city right now, you don't have that community. You want to pick what's best for your abilities and your finances to start with. In my honest opinion, that's a small country house on a decent amount of property, maybe five acres, maybe 10, whatever's comfortable for you. Now, friends, at the risk of sounding hypocritical, I'm going to talk about the housing market in the economy. I still want everybody to look for a country property because housing prices out in the country are going to be lower. If you can find one that's maybe in a tax-linked situation or something like that, somebody has to get out there and move quickly to get a job. Those are available. I think the faltering economy in the near future is going to offer opportunities for people to get out of the city, get a decent amount of money for those homes, and to be able to get a country property. Right now, it might look daunting moving out to the country and buying a house, and the average home price or the median home price in the United States is $416,000. The average age for buying your first home has gone from 31 years old in the 1980s to 50 now. That might seem daunting, but trying to build a structure and get the materials out into a remote area is going to cost you more. I understand this because I'm an architect. Not too long ago, I designed a house for a lady. We looked at builders out in the countryside where she was, and it was just not feasible for her to build that structure that she wanted because the prices were so inflated from the builders. But they're struggling too with materials prices up, inflation is driving all of those materials costs up, and getting the trades out to a remote country property like a plumber and electrician and so forth is also very challenging and more expensive. So saying all that, I still think buying a home is the proper way to go. That is, of course, unless you want to live in a travel trailer and build a small cottage by yourself, and if you have the ability and means to do that. But again, most people don't. It takes much longer than you think it does to build up a place to be able to provide food for your family, to provide safety for your family, and to be a comfortable place to live. It takes a lot to be able to do that. Friends, I want you to get out of the cities, and I want the best for you, and that's why I make these videos. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them for me in the comment section below. Now go check out this series of videos right here, which is how we built that greenhouse by ourselves. Have a beautiful blessed day. See you next time. Bye.