One early fall morning in 2011, we packed everything we owned into a minivan and 5 × 8-foot (1.5 × 2.4-m) trailer and headed south. Two acres sat thousands of miles away with nothing more than a camper, a roofline and a water tank to greet us as we began our journey toward sustainability. Our little family had decided to start an off-grid homestead from scratch and, after getting rid of nearly half of what we owned, we quit a corporate job and took the plunge.
We had purchased 2 acres in the middle of Texas and had a dream in mind. It really didn’t seem that outlandish to simply want to live as former generations had; to follow the old paths wherein is the good way, and walk therein. So we started with 2 acres we purchased outright. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we didn’t want a bunch of debt either. A few years in, we realized we needed to expand if we were to have a pasture, so we purchased 3 acres from our friend and neighbor on a monthly payment. It was debt, to be sure, but the short-term nature of it, coupled with our need to feed a family of seven, made it something we were willing to live with.
It probably goes without saying that hard decisions like that have been many along the way.
We began with a raw piece of land with no water, sewer or electrical hookup. Prior to moving, we hired help to put up a roofline to begin catching rainwater. We had a 1,500-gallon (5,678-L) water tank delivered and hooked up. We purchased an old camper to live in so that we could begin building both the household and homestead infrastructure from scratch.
With two young children in tow and water and temporary shelter in place, the first thing we did was dig an outhouse hole when we arrived on our new land. A small propane cookstove in the camper cooked our meals, and a cooler was utilized as refrigeration for several days. Within the first couple of weeks, we had installed a solar panel, deep cycle marine batteries and plugged in our mini solar refrigerator.
We started small garden beds shortly after we moved here and were gifted a few chickens, and thus began our adventures in raising livestock. Many fruit trees were planted and subsequently killed either by roaming cows we hadn’t fenced out properly or a lack of diligent care on our parts. Likewise, many garden beds came to naught due to poor soil preparation, shortcut fencing or a lack of diligence in watering. So many things were tried; so many mistakes made. At some point, Providence made a way for the gardens, animals and fruit trees that are now beginning to feed us, despite our many, many failures.
Those first few weeks of homesteading were a revelation. We had left the corporate job behind and, though the work was harder than we’d ever known, our days seemed our own for the first time in our thirty-some years. While we had no land payment, mortgage or utility bills, the expense of feeding a growing family and all of those homestead projects started to add up. Soon, that little bit we had saved to get us by for the first few months began to dwindle, and so it was that we began considering employment options.
We quickly learned that financing a homestead is a complicated and very personal business.
In modern times, the homestead is usually built one of three ways:
1. With enough cash to quickly build a comfortable setup, often with many modern, alternatively powered comforts and with the ability to hire out at least some of the work.
2. By taking on debt in order to achieve the aforementioned.
3. Without much capital, building a homestead from raw land, working with your hands over a longer period of time to build your homestead incrementally, often working to earn a wage while building a homestead from scratch.
Having just paid off student loans prior to purchasing our 2 acres, we chose the third option.
When we quit the biweekly paycheck, we knew we would not be living entirely off the land for quite some time—we still aren’t entirely. We figured Stewart would get a job as a ranch hand or find something part-time somewhere. I was also pregnant when we made that move, and while I had begun to do some part-time writing online, neither of us desired me to work outside of our home.
Then, a funny thing happened in this day of the Internet. We both began freelance work as writers and web designers. Stewart has also day-labored at times when freelance work has slowed. Sometimes, a bigger project would come through and we could save up for a water tank or begin building a house; other times, we had just enough to feed our family and be content to wait on the furtherance of the homestead. And so it came to be that we lived off-grid, working from home and financing our homestead while building it.
The fluidity of this has made much of this life possible and, though it has felt painfully complicated at times, we are thankful that it has allowed for us to be with our children in life and work. One of the things that makes it possible is learning to live without so many of the things that demand more of our money and therefore more of our time.
We have, in recent years, begun to approach a tipping point that is one we think most homesteaders work toward. It is that point where you are beginning to produce enough of your own food, your infrastructure is past the critical point and you can begin to truly sink your days into this homestead of yours. Looking ahead, we would be happy to provide others with real food by the work of our hands and work less and less at jobs that take us away from our homestead and family duties.
We don’t believe there is one right way, but we do know there are many, many different circumstances under which people have to make often hard decisions when it comes to financing a homestead. We are grateful that many of our own plans were thwarted and the life carved out for us has come in its place.