He lived on the street Now turns raw dryland into frugal homestead

15 miles on dirt road. We're out here and but decent roads for being dirt road. Yeah they maintain this whole county road just for for us. Your drive to a supermarket it's an hour to the nearest town and two hours to a city if you want like you know anything. You know during bad weather even trucks won't be able to make it. So during bad weather you are trapped out here? Yeah Sometimes it's just better to just stay home for a few weeks or a month while it dries out. How did you even find it out here? Well I've wanted to live off-grid my whole life pretty much and then I got laid off. I was saying what could I do with six thousand dollars basically. Yeah I paid so I paid eighteen hundred for my land. I started on my own you know and so you're living on the streets and you start to learn how to live on the streets and that's not how you thrive. I was 15 years old under a bridge. I wake up and it's covered in snow. There's a guy like 10 feet away fishing and I swear that was the exact moment that I was like I'm on my own. This is like I got to figure out how to support myself but it takes a long time to figure it out if you don't have someone show you. I used to shower in here because it's warmer and comfier but now I have another shower over here. Yeah there's just like redundancy to things. Sometimes I'll even just pull a hose off of the water tower and it's warm enough to shower when it's sunny. When you came out there was no well there was no electric there was no it was just dirt just dirt just dirt. That's why this all worked for me. I bought what people deemed less than desirable land. Nobody wanted this land that's why it was eighteen hundred dollars but you know think outside of the box you can make it work just fine. So I put in rain water harvesting so water comes all the from the front gate all the way down the drive through those swells past the root cellar and dumps right into the pond. In fact I should turn the pond on it'll just kind of filter out all the debris. Oh and you just put in a liner and that's it? Yeah you could use it for anything but it's obviously more ideal for like watering gardens and livestock but you could filter it out pretty easily. You know the roof surfaces is best for drinking water. Those are the two original totes that I came here with and that's a year supply of drinking water for me and then there's still underground cistern. The thing is is I can put a well in it's probably only a couple hundred feet that's thirty sixty thousand dollars. I paid two hundred dollars to build about twelve thousand gallons of rain storage. You know you start with cheap stuff because when you put a liner down like this you can use the water immediately but I'll bet that underneath the liner it's starting to glaze naturally and so by the time the liner's bad it's probably going to be a sealed pond then I'll have a lifelong cistern and I think that just works really well when you're starting with nothing. You started with the basic. Yeah and that's okay right I think it's okay to build three times if you have to because you can start with nothing and just start. This feels really old west because you're using wide planks. Yeah because this is all rough cut lumber so it's from a sawmill and these are 12 by 8. I made all the windows by hand all the hinges I made by hand. I just went to the scrap yard and got like 10 12 foot sheets of metal. I've got a forge over there and a little anvil I made to bend them and so it's a really simple thing to do but but it saved me. Imagine how much these would cost to buy these hinges. I probably paid about five bucks a piece to make them you know. It saved me a lot of money to just build what I could you know like building your own windows. Windows are expensive and these so I just ordered glass and you just cut wood and framed them in. It's cozy in here. Yeah the fire was going. You want a cup of water? Please. So I just bring in rainwater. It's slow going because it's filtering you know. Here you go. Oh thanks. Everything's wood even the just it's all the same materials. Yeah I just bought these were 700 bucks a load you know for this lumber which was pretty cheap for this big heavy lumber. Yeah. And so I figured why not build it robust like more like a cabin you know. So how did you know how to build? I've built houses. I used to frame houses but I was never the boss. I understood enough to get it done. We had a storm come through. In survival they talk about food, water, shelter. But if you're in a climate where it gets too cold, shelter is most important. You could die if you don't have shelter. I spent about thirteen thousand dollars to build the cabin pretty much. All my life I was working for this. To be clear my parents divorced when I was young. My mom died when I was 15. I was homeless under the bridge. I got into proctor care, foster care. And this is not a poor me this is just the truth. And so I didn't have structure. I didn't have stability. I didn't have what I needed. And now I do and I just was trying to create that for myself you know. This will actually fold up out of the way so I have more room. Everything has multiple purposes. This is a bed and a couch. It slides out. I made that a hundred percent. Yeah so the reason it works is they just slide out you know. And it's almost another queen-size bed you know. I've slept down here when I was real sick because I didn't even want to go upstairs. And the stairs themselves sir. Yeah so it's a full-size set of stairs yeah. This window opens and the upstairs window here opens. You want to be able to escape if you need to. Right so simple bed. You needn't even bother with a frame. You don't need that. Yeah I might build a frame later you know. I've been in here so it took me a year to build the place. And the truth is is I still need to build a little closet and some shelves and things. And you know it's not exactly where it'll be when I'm finished. But you're building as you go. Yeah it's perfectly fine for now. Did you build that chair? Yeah these are just two by fours. I wanted a rocking chair and I didn't want to spend a hundred dollars on a rocking chair. And so I built these rocking chairs. Here's another one out here. So they were like 10 bucks for both of them. And I built them in an hour or so. I'm cheap like that. Frugal. It's frugal right? Did you grow up that way? Think frugal? Yeah you know I hated it when I saw my grandma dig through garbage cans for cans. And she didn't have to. They grandma and grandpa did fine. But grandma went through the depression. And so I was embarrassed. But guess what? Her digging for cans paid for my cousin's college. I think I learned from that that who cares what anybody thinks about. As far as the chimney that metal they have the triple wall. So it doesn't even get warm to the touch. There's also diesel air heat. I like redundancy so that if one heat source fails. If you live in the middle of nowhere and a heat source fails and then it's zero degrees the next time you won't have you know you'll have two sources of heat. And so I've got several. But heating this you're just doing it really with a stove. Yeah it's been down in 10 degrees and I haven't had a fire in it since this morning. And they're just so smart for holding heat. The concrete on the bottom is like 4,000 pounds. And then this is an entire pallet of brick and so it holds that heat. There's only a small hole. It holds heat that way so it has to force the heat down there. And then there's just a small entrance to the chimney. And that's how it heats all the brick and holds it for 12 hours roughly at a time. How did you find out how to build this kind of I just looked around and so this is a double bell. So it's kind of like a Russian stove. And they have a double bell system which is the fire box here and it has its own clean out. And then there's a smoke box behind that with its own clean out. And I've actually got 50 feet of coiled copper tubing that is a water heater. And then the pizza oven sits above the smoke box. What that does is gives you like a slow it's like 200 degrees. So it's good for baking pie and stuff. And then I can put a metal box on the front here if I want to bake at a higher temperature. And it's got the cooktop. The kitchen is super simple for like water. It just comes from a water container. The gray water just goes into a gallon because I hardly use any. This is just a hand pump. It just pumps water up. I can cook on the stove or I can use these are so easy to cook on you know. It'll just fire up and you can cook. You can use it for heat. The bed's right there you know. You're using kind of a propane. Yes that's redundancy. That's the biggest kind of a vehicle fridge you'd get. This is broken. These are just ice blocks because this died down. I've got two more in the freezer and just every two or three days I just trade them and it's fine. That's frugal again you know like I could buy a fridge but I don't need to. It works fine you know. And you use this as cutting surface when you're not. Yeah and look like I'm thawing out meat in there right now. Oh my gosh. So right now you'll see there's 400 pounds of pork right there and I don't like to process them and I don't have to as much now but I've always got that if I need it. All right there's a root cellar right there. You dug this? Yeah. Dug or lifted dirt on top or? Well I dug down until I hit caliche which is like concrete. If I knew what I know now I would have kept going. It just would have been hard but that's why four feet's above ground four feet below ground so it's eight by eight by eight which is like a single family root cellar. I'm 5'10 and I can't reach the top at all. When you're outside you can see this berm really covers it pretty well. Now that this is completely covered we do have these vents. It never hits freezing in here. I think I'll build a nicer door and cover it again eventually but you can see how solid. Oh my gosh it's deep. Is it reinforced inside? It's basically not reinforced other than the roof because the caliche is full of what's called Portland cement so it's really hard. I'm not recommending anyone does it this way but in six years I've never had a problem. But right now there's not a lot because there's a huge amount of space in there. This last year I didn't harvest nearly as much like I got sick and stuff. I quit upkeeping the greenhouses because I got sick but you know there's still a bunch of stuff that'll bounce back but then the geothermal greenhouse that's underground and you can grow way more stuff than you normally would. Oh yeah it drops. Yeah so yeah there's two full rows like standard growing rows but you can see even with zero maintenance I haven't been doing anything in here there's still quite a bit of stuff. You could come have a swiss chard salad if you want. I started digging this immediately. I dug the first part with a shovel with a four dollar shovel. The reason for putting this tubing five feet underground and burying it in dirt is to grab that temperature. It stays 50 degrees year round at that depth and I can pump air through the tubing cool it or warm it and then pump it back in to the greenhouse to regulate the temperature. The fan would be pulling in the hot air from the top of the geothermal and pulling it down. It's about three feet deep it goes 200 linear feet and then comes back out and would be blowing in here. What that'll do is the ground stays 55 degrees down there so the difference it'll cool the air and then pump it back in to the geothermal here and the aim is to be able to actually keep it cool enough to grow in here year round and then obviously I can keep it warm in the winter time. Now that I've had the geothermal set up it's had its own weather inside. It's been raining and whatnot in there it's just that humid. So you can see that I've connected the fan. It'll suck the hottest air down through the tube. It'll go through the 200 linear feet of tube underground and come out in the middle at the pipe right there. I only had the fan running a few minutes and all of the condensation from inside the geothermal was gone. So this gauge shows that it's 73 degrees roughly inside the geothermal and I put one inside of the outlet so right out the gate we've got a 12 degree difference that seems promising to me. It really helps to have the temperature regulated that way A normal greenhouse like that has pretty well died off but a geothermal like this guy this is where the money's at. You can grow and harvest quite a bit in here all year long. The first season I was here I had not gardened my entire life really. I wasn't even sure I could grow out here whatsoever. So this is four inch hose and it's 200 feet linear and it's three feet underground and so that ground stays about 50 degrees year round. So when it's 10 degrees this is pumping in 50 degree air and so it stays quite warm and comfortable in here. And then the aquaponics back here. So there's 600 gallons of water which also is a battery. It usually is up running. It's up and running enough but like I said I pretty well shut the gardens down. But what's neat is there's still these are you know water plants are doing just fine a bunch of mint. It doesn't take a lot to maintain it. I'll be able to start it right back up and the water is already cycled so I could throw fish in here next week if I wanted to. So you had fish going? I did. Edible fish? Oh yeah. Yeah I had bluegill in here which are pretty good little fish. Pretty much year round you're growing? Yeah it was 10 degrees just the other day and look there's spinach and there's swiss chard and I haven't even watered in here in a long time. Like this is a red raspberry tree. It'll bounce back here in a couple weeks. Even with zero carry you could come in here and grab a salad which is nice. But usually I'm pulling about 50 pounds of stuff out of here each season you know. Do you have bees up there? I started bees in this beehive and then I moved them too much and I scared them away and it just hasn't been in the budget yet. I tried to catch wild bees but I'll buy more bees eventually. It's just one more thing you know like that's one thing about homesteading is people will tell you try this try that you should get llamas you should get and you know you spread yourself thin and so it's a matter of getting what works. Oh here I'll hold the ladder while you go up though just to be real safe. I love this because it does feel like the old water towers in a town when someone's established like this is your little town. There's a reason that every town has a water tower you know. If things shut down you got water. Hold this yeah. Yeah use hold on to that. You need to live you need water so if things go crazy you got this is a lot of water for one person. Yeah this is a week's supply for the entire homestead if we go gung-ho. That includes water in the gardens like plenty you know. So this is just rain water goes from that roof into that cistern behind it and then it's pumped up to this and that's all. Wow you have a whole system here. Yeah so at the very front gate I started a driveway and down both sides of the driveway are kind of carved out and so they naturally will direct water and I just I looked at my land for a while and realized it slopes from there all the way to the pond here and so I harvest all the water down the sides. It's not like there's vehicle oil or anything it's just dirt and so that water comes down it'll fill the entire pond really quickly. That pond stays full all year every year and then I've got about 10,000 gallons of storage underground for drinking water and stuff and it's quite a system. If I tripled the system I have now I could go three years without it raining and have enough for everything. What a great thing to just buy a little bit of land and then make it work for you. You can't get accurate weather because we're too far out here and so having your own weather station will actually because think about it it's an hour drive to the nearest town right so if you're looking at that that's an hour that weather's an hour away and that's the closest you can get. So this helps a lot because I'll look at it and say oh it's going to rain and the news will say it's not going to. That's like a three hour drive out that way to the horizon and there's nothing. Imagine walking that way and if you needed water you'd be in trouble man. It's a long way. And you wanted this. Oh I love it. Quiet is just a really great place to get to know yourself. It's just been real good for me. People ask me are you lonely? I never have even crossed my mind to be lonely. I just feel so good in the solitude. I love it. Building a homestead from front to back has pretty well just been solitude and I was pedaling and pedaling trying to survive for so long. I don't have to fight for my life anymore you know to stay afloat. Because you have enough systems going. Yeah everything's all my needs are met and then some. So see these are cisterns. This is just a hole in the ground lined and it holds 3,600 gallons of water. And you just got some wood and yeah yeah this is still scrap material. I had to do this at the beginning so it's really about as easy and cheap as you could make it. There's still a couple thousand gallons in there. Is there really? Yeah and so when you spread that out amongst everything there's about probably 8,000 gallons right now which is a lot for me. Yeah. I don't use that much. You're one guy. Yeah. This is human manure if you want to roll in it or yeah we can look at the shed over here. So I built this originally just to get more rain mostly but then you see we've got pigs. I try to keep about 10 pigs because these are small but they're about 40 pounds a pig. So 10 that's 400 pounds that's a year supply of meat that's always here. But you see there's a sow and a boar so I can continue to make another 400 pounds continually forever. How big do you let them grow or how long do you let them live to before they? Well nine months is the cheapest most economical way but I push them a year often. I don't need to. I just don't need it exactly. I just want to always have a year supply just in case. You never know the economy could collapse. It was only 80 years ago that people could have definitely used 400 pounds of pork you know to feed them. I've got the agricultural shed over here and this is kind of the agricultural and then my little gym. So when I came out here I was 365 pounds so morbidly obese. I was on six different blood pressure medications when I came out here. I don't take anything now and that's mostly because I was really careful with my health and decided to turn it around like you know we're all human and you go through things. There's a reason you're eating a crazy amount of food and I wasn't in the best place and this lifestyle allowed me to work through everything one thing at a time just like everything else. So your your diet's probably changed right? Oh yeah I'm so number one I tried to drink 30 beers every night before I came out here. You can't lose weight and do that. So I haven't had a drink in two years now so that's one of the biggest things and then I only eat whole foods so and it's and it's easy it's easy to get in good shape if you just eat whole food because whole food is satiating. But you're also just eating what's practical out here right? I mean you're eating you have you see what you're eating. Yes yes my food storage is what I eat so if you look in my pantry it's you know I got meat and vegetables and that's all I eat. I almost don't even eat sugar it's just good food. I quit upkeeping the greenhouses because I got sick but the cool thing is is there's still a bunch of onions and stuff that'll bounce back and you know I haven't been paying attention in here but what I have been doing is I've got some peppers and I just throw those down look at this tomato is still perfectly fine but you just you let them go down and they'll grow yeah and see there's onions back here these are these are old you know and they'll actually probably come to seed this year and so it doesn't look like much now but I'll come back in here put down fresh stuff plant stuff. So you were in Utah like how long did it take you to think I can go find my way to be sort of more self-reliant? I finally had a really good career and then I got laid off but then I said I'm just gonna go for it. I was already living in the van how much worse could it be I just got laid off so I'm either homeless in the city there or homeless on a piece of land I own. It's an absolute mess right now because I I'm not in here anymore and I've been building and yeah but so it had a nice little kitchenette everything is wrapped in the cedar pickets you get at Lowe's or Home Depot. Both of these couches fold out so I lay these studs across from one couch to the other and it just folds out there's hinges and this one folds out then I have a queen-size bed. When you came out here you just parked your truck and lived in it? Right you know I came out with a cheap RV solar system a little car fridge a year supply of food just the basics. Four years in here? Yeah so I brought out two tanks of water and that gave me some room to I knew I could make it a year you know. I'm grateful I did it it was a it was cheap it was a frugal way to start a homestead and it worked for me you know. The first thing I did was build the shop here the way I look at things is you want shelter water food power income the van allowed me to have all in a small in a moderate system and then this was my first shelter because it you know it really put shelter above the van but it keeps it 10 degrees cooler by having that over the top so I built the shop and you know tried to build my business up enough to pay for things. So this is my tea business so like the green tea blend they're all of you know unique blends I made and look I keep lot numbers and stuff because you know that's how you're supposed to do it. I was a warehouse manager for a produce company before I came out here so that made that part of things easier you know. Yeah these are seeds and stuff that I've harvested and so then you saved up enough money to build a cabin. Yeah it took four years to get to the point to build this and then I hired an engineer also so and then he made sure everything had worked because the plan was to permit it. Yeah and that wasn't even that much money either it was I think it was 300 bucks to hire the engineer. I just wanted no problems I wanted to have a house and nobody bother me about my house and now here it is you know for the rest of my life nobody's going to bother me. Here on your whiteboard are you collecting these? I'll have aha moments. One day I thought I build environments where I can breathe and I design systems that by time more structure less pressure that's everything that's that's the whole thing. What I do here is I build more structure which allows me to have these systems that reduces pressure. I don't need to worry about someone coming breathing down my neck about this that's less pressure and it's more structure. Because it's all up to code. Yeah and everything follows that yeah because and it was as a little kid I wanted to get away I would climb into a cardboard box because it gave structure and it reduced pressure. This cabin is that kind of structure? This is a cardboard box. I burned all the posts it's supposed to help them weather better and then I dipped the ends in asphalt before going into the concrete to keep it from eating the wood away and then once everything was done then I sprayed everything with used motor oil and then eventually I'll do the boiled linseed inside and it just repels water damage and insects that allowed me not to use the hardware and just save some money you know. So this is only 2.5 acres which a lot of people would not think as much at all but it's way more than a lot in a city and it's plenty to do what I need to do you know. You have horses? Yeah horses are good for transportation. If things went real south right you'd want some transportation you'd want to be able to pull farm equipment. They also drop a huge amount of manure and that's how I'm going to make all the soil nice again and that whole pasture will grow grass eventually. If I can offset the cost of feed it makes a lot of sense. There'd be hundreds if not thousands of pounds of grass out there you know because this soil is actually not as bad as it looks it just needs organic matter. So the horses were pretty well feral when I got them that pasture will grow grass but it didn't take a long time but the trick is is you let them wipe it out once then you get manure all over it and then once you partition it and they they cycle three or four months per that gives each one plenty of time to grow grass and you don't even have to water it you can base it off of the rain. You see this field is covered in manure that's going to be where I first try to do grass on the other side is a pond and there will be ponds all the way up to the corner then you see the little crescents those are demi-loons they're half moons and water will soak into those these this whole section you see all the little foliage right yeah they'll hold this will hold water for six months it'll rain it'll soak in here and that's why it's kind of a swell kind of a ditch is swells are supposed to just be pretty sedentary and this actually directs but it holds water too and that's why there's stuff growing on it the entire homestead look the whole driveway out there is leading in here this is all swells along the road how'd you learn about it just reading like you see this spot here yeah it doesn't look like much but that's the lowest point of my property and it's the startings of what's called a recharge pit and so what I can do eventually if I dug that down 20 feet filled it full of rock put in a well with filtration oh when it rains there'd be you know 20-30,000 gallons of water you could at least pump it until that ran out but really it can actually kind of start to create its own aquifer and so if 10,000 gallons continues to go in there could be a quarter million gallons of water down there and and it's called a shallow well basically so I'm going to try that gold right like a lot of water you know before you know it that might be three year supply of water wow because everything else works so amazing and you have it intentionally come right next to your house yeah I kind of like the idea of I'm in the desert and but when it rains I've got a river running by and it doesn't cause any problems there's a root cellar right there the caliche is like concrete and there's a see I've dug kind of a ditch down the back side of the place I'm going to dig it out larger but basically you know this might be three feet wide three feet deep and I'll probably just run it around the fences and do all around all the fences for the whole property that's a huge massive amount of water you could start to grow trees so really what homesteaders did right like setting up trees and really kind of yeah yeah we're basically trying to live like 1800s pioneer without being ashamed of using technology they because here's the thing they used technology too if you think they didn't have the nicest trailer at the time or the nicest horse harnesses available to mankind off-grid has always been high technology I think so I'm seeing that you have some solar it looks like on the house so you did a solar siding most of the solar is on the roof but because it had so many panels you know a lot of people say don't do them horizontal but it actually I can see the individual input and it puts in a significant amount and it's it's probably largely why I can run everything 24-7 year round this is my kind of a blacksmithing area I made this out of a railroad track it's just a simple anvil and then a little forge here and that's what allowed me to bend the hinges so for the solar system here I just had to put down tracks and whatnot to space them so they're off of the roof a little bit that helps you harvest the rainwater too so it can get into the gutter right here I changed tires and you need a tire changer if you're out here who's gonna come fix your tires and this outhouse so this is a system it's basically a composting toilet system you don't smell anything no no it's clean and then this is just the last time this one got full it sits there for six months and breaks down and then you just can put it under a tree or whatever so this vents it and then this is a fly trap this will fill with water it's being gravity fed from something from this oh from the roof yeah this alone keeps that thing full year-round and just for washing hands you know oh and only natural soaps I only use salt based soap nice and then the water just goes out to one of the ditches that just gets absorbed in the ground you know it's just hand water so we see here fence this is a neighbor yeah that's not my property like cattle grazing or yeah cattle come out here all the time and they just come graze and they rotate them so you might not see them for a year so the ranchers have so much land oh hundreds and hundreds of acres and so somebody just sold you a tiny piece of theirs yeah I just bought 2.5 acres here your approach is very different and it's more self-sustaining and also high productive they might think I'm a complete yuppie you know but you know to each their own and at the same time I wouldn't be surprised if a rancher might think that guy's got it figured out you know