Work In Progress
Given that messiness is painfully uncomfortable for me to be around in my living space, I consider it next-level practice to reside in a construction zone. I am the sort of gal who puts time & effort into maintaining organized & orderly spaces. I am also a nester, with an artist’s eye for making spaces look & feel nice. Don’t get me wrong. I understand that things take time. I understand that in order to make this big life-change move we’ve made and to live how we’re choosing to live, it requires needing to make a mess. I mean, for goodness sake, we’re building a small cabin in the woods with lumber we’re milling ourselves on site from raw materials - off-grid and without running water! Of course there will be some upheaval and disarray to live with for a time!
We don’t yet have siding or interior walls and our flooring inside the cabin is just basic OSB. We have a makeshift kitchen set up with a plastic folding table and a 2-burner Coleman campstove, and minimum, temporary shelving. Everything we have going inside the cabin is temporary. Functional but temporary. From how we’re storing our clothes and food to the furniture we have in the living room.
Honestly, I am quite content with how simply and bare bones we’re living. We genuinely have everything we need and are managing just fine, but it will be nice when we can stop looking at insulation batts when we’re inside and plastic house wrap when we’re outside. Both are super important and serve an incredibly useful function, they’re just not the nicest things to look at 24/7. No matter where I am in or around the cabin, I am acutely aware that our dwelling place is a work-in-progress. The only thing I think is done-done on our 12X14 cabin is the roof and the insulation. And to this I say: hooray & amazing! Both are critical components to our little cabin in the big woods.
Thankfully, thankfully, Mike, a skilled roofer by trade, can build, fix, and craft just about anything. It’s highly unlikely we would’ve gravitated to our current way of living if this were not the case. It’s also very unlikely we would be living this off-grid without running water way of life if I were the sort of gal who felt like she needed daily showers, regarded manual labor as being for dudes only, or got wigged out by bugs and dirt. If Mike’s skillsets and interests were in, say, accounting, and I were the high maintenance type, I reckon we’d be opting to live a very different kind of lifestyle.
With springtime in the north country mountains being slow to unfold, we too are slowly getting back into the swing of things here on the land at EM. Mike, our researcher of all things necessary, found two 55-gallon water tanks on Craigslist last week. He just finished adding gutters to our porch roof and routed them into the tanks on either side of the cabin. It’s an awesome upgrade for us, as previously we were catching rain water in 5-gallon buckets and a large trash can. With this increased capacity for water collection and storage, we won’t need to make as many water runs to the public use tap at the nearby national forest campground when it opens in mid-May.
We feel comfortable using straight rain water for pretty much everything except drinking and cooking. For these purposes, I will continue to haul water from Missoula when I go there on Mondays, and we can supplement extra drinking/cooking water by filtering the rain water with our new Lifestraw filter. We’ll need more systems upgrades on the water front as time goes on, but we’re starting where we are and making slow progress when and as we’re able. Here’s to moving slow & steady.