The journey toward a homestead and a self-sufficient life is always a long one. Sometimes, the journey is scenic and lovely and one just looks around and loves the moment; but more often than not, it is a white-knuckle ride over deeply rutted road with hairpin turns, very few guardrails, no roadmap and the tank perilously close to ‘E’. It’s more of a learning experience than an enjoyable one, but that isn’t to say it doesn’t have its moments. It can be fun, seeing where the road leads; seeing where God wants to take us and how He chooses to provide.

Every journey has a beginning. Ours began a couple years ago, with a random comment from a friend who was already living the off-grid self-sufficient life. “Wouldn’t it be interesting,” they said when we mentioned that we were beginning to outgrow the potential of our small acre, “if you bought a property nearby, went off-grid, and we could help each other. Build our own community. Share our skills.” It was simply one of those “what if?” games, but it lit a fire in us we hadn’t known was waiting for a flame. What if we DID?! What would we want to build? How would we want our life to look? What exactly were our dreams made of?

This sent me down a deep rabbit hole of research for many months. Building styles, lifestyle alternatives, off-grid solutions, animal husbandry, permaculture, regenerative agriculture, useful and medicinal plants, herbs, and trees, food preservation, textile creation. I read it all, voraciously. I started drawing out floorplans on graph paper. How small could we go and not be piled on top of each other? How “off grid” did we want to go? What was absolutely non-negotiable and what could be discarded? Change this, change that, tweak this other thing.

We made lifestyle changes, even living in our regular, on-grid house. We traded out our electrical appliances for manual alternatives, pruned down our posessions, evaluated and re-evaluated the things we kept, discarded more things. Vanload after vanload of things we no longer used went to secondhand stores or were sold. Two dumpsters of broken junk were hauled away. And with each load that left, we felt more free. It was exhilerating. This dream began to acquire a faint hint of reality. Someday, we might actually manage to make it happen! Wouldn’t that be wonderful?