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    Wilderness Life DIY: A City Family Bumbles Towards Self-Sufficiency
    Wilderness Life DIY: A City Family Bumbles Towards Self-Sufficiency
    Wilderness Life DIY: A City Family Bumbles Towards Self-Sufficiency
    Ebook158 pages3 hours

    Wilderness Life DIY: A City Family Bumbles Towards Self-Sufficiency

    By Blythe Tait

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Can a clueless city couple learn to build a house in the wilderness completely by themselves? What is life like on 525 watts of power? When is the right time to change a toilet bucket? The answers to these questions and more are in 'Wilderness Life DIY', the tale of a city family who leaves a comfortable city existence to make a home in the Australian Tasmanian wilderness.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlythe Tait
    Release dateMay 26, 2016
    ISBN9780994618504
    Wilderness Life DIY: A City Family Bumbles Towards Self-Sufficiency
    Author

    Blythe Tait

    Blythe Tait lives in the middle of nowhere in Tasmania, Australia with her husband Peter Robey, their two sons, and a dog in a house Peter and Blythe built themselves with no prior building experience. After a life in the city mostly engaging in pursuits in which they acquired no useful skills for homesteading (photography for Peter, poledancing for Blythe), they made the decision to take the leap, move to the wilderness, and figure it out as they went along. It seemed crazy enough to write a book about.Find out more about them at their website http://www.thehousethatworkedout.com

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      Book preview

      Wilderness Life DIY - Blythe Tait

      Wilderness Life DIY:

      A City Family Bumbles Towards Self- Sufficiency

      By Blythe Tait

      with Peter Robey

      Copyright 2016 Blythe Tait

      Smashwords Edition

      This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it to smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      http://www.thehousethatworkedout.com

      Table of Contents

      Preface

      Chapter 1 The Preparation

      Chapter 2 Leaving for the Country

      Chapter 3 Building the Cabin

      Chapter 4 Building the Cabin, Continued

      Chapter 5 The Cordwood Masonry Workshop

      Chapter 6 Moving In

      Chapter 7 Water

      Chapter 8 Hot Water

      Chapter 9 Power

      Chapter 10 The Toilet

      Chapter 11 Heating

      Chapter 12 Other Projects

      Afterword

      Connect with Us

      Preface

      Wow. I’d love to do that.

      This is the most common reaction we receive when we tell people of how we left a full and busy life in the city to go and live off-the-grid in Tasmanian wilderness in a self-built shelter.

      It’s not the only reaction we receive. Some people shudder in horror and proclaim, I could never do that!!

      But far, far more common are expressions of wistfulness and longing.

      [Footnote. And, to be honest, we very often hear, I’d love to, but the wife would never go for it… Obviously stated out of earshot of said wife.].

      It seems that a great many of us fantasise about downsizing, about simplifying, and about learning some basic and necessary skills- creating our own shelters, growing some food, and having the space and freedom to explore projects which feel meaningful and real.

      Peter and I are not country folk. We are city-folk, born and bred. We are not builders. We’d had limited success with food gardening, no understanding of any kind of electricity systems, and had never done any plumbing tasks beyond changing a washer in the shower. We were an average couple raising two young children in the suburbs, and we had no skills which could be considered useful for carving out a new life on a bush property that had no access, no existing dwellings, and no services.

      Yet here we are, living in a beautiful, eco-friendly, two-storey, passive-solar-designed house which we built ourselves- without taking out a mortgage. The water which comes out of our taps is the same pressure we had in the city- but there are no pumps creating the pressure. We watch TV, use laptops and ipads, wash our clothes in a washing machine, and keep our food cold in a fridge- but we have no electricity bill. And everything we had no prior experience in- building, electricity, plumbing, gardening- we can now say, we DO have experience in: real world experience, learned as needed for the life we wanted to create.

      In our society, we hire a plumber when something leaks, an electrician when the fuses blow, a builder to put a gazebo in the backyard… for many of us, this tendency to ‘outsource’ to other, more skilled people has become so ingrained that we don’t even consider trying to solve our own problems. That has been the biggest lesson in our new life here off the grid. Areas which hitherto were veiled in shrouds of mystery- plumbing, building, fencing, - have turned out to be well within our ability and reach. And they are also within yours.

      Maybe you dream of a sea change yourself; maybe you are in the process of making that sea change stage. Or maybe you have no interest in doing any of what we have done, but you like reading about it. For whichever reason, we hope you enjoy the tale of our Wilderness Life DIY.

      CHAPTER 1 The Preparation

      We had a responsible, adult plan. Truly, we did.

      .

      THE PLAN

      * We would take an extended camping family holiday over Christmas on our block of scrubby wilderness in Tasmania.

      * While we were there, we would build a small cabin on the property, giving us a feel for building and providing a place to stay for holidays.

      * After completing the cabin, we would return to our comfortable city existence in time for the new school-year.

      We took the holiday. We built the cabin. And then…we just never went back to our life in the city.

      *

      As many people do, we had a dream to one day leave the city and live in the wilderness. It’s not that life in the city was bad; in fact, we really enjoyed it. But little things, like the neighbour blower-vacuuming leaves off his driveway religiously every Saturday morning, or spending an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic for what should have been a five minute drive, made us think we would also enjoy life far away from the urban sprawl. We had realized this dream to the point where we owned a piece of bush wilderness in Tasmania, and our escapist fantasies involved packing up and going to live on it forever and ever.

      Our Tasmanian property had been cleared in places decades before when it was used for raspberry farming, but those days were long gone, and now the land was back to being near-impenetrable bushland. There was no electricity to the block, no phone landline service, no town water, no postal delivery service, no rubbish collection…basically, it was a completely blank canvas. That is one of the things we liked about it.

      Both of us thought that in our lifetimes, we would like to attempt to build a house there together. Neither of us had any experience in building, but just as bees know how to build hives, beavers know how to build dams, and every other animal on the planet intuitively knows how to create a shelter, we both felt that we should be able to build a liveable shelter. We wanted to test ourselves, and if found lacking, educate ourselves in this most fundamental of survival skills. And if we were going to build a house, we wanted something different to the stick frame houses surrounding us in the city.

      Over some months, Blythe checked out most of the local library’s books on alternative building, and she filled Peter in on her research, trying to convince him of the virtues of mudbrick (Blythe, we don’t know if we have the right soil for that), rammed earth (Looks time-consuming), and earthships (Just no). Peter asked why we weren’t considering strawbale ("Oh Pete, everyone builds with strawbale!"). For a while, Blythe was certain that earthbag building was the way to go, but Peter took one look at the plodding, slow, heavy work of earthbag building and gently suggested to Blythe that while it may work beautifully for a community build, it was not the right choice for a building team of two.

      Eventually, while researching on the internet, we came across photos of cordwood masonry buildings: page after page of cute, hobbit-like structures, nestled into hillsides and often capped with sprouting earth roofs. Blythe was entranced. A few more clicks and we were on Rob Roy’s website http://www.cordwoodmasonry.com

      [Footnote. Cordwood masonry is a building process whereby cords of wood are laid transversely across two rows of mortar to build a wall. Imagine a stack of firewood. This is what a cordwood wall looks like.].

      Roy lives in a round cordwood masonry house, ‘Earthwood’, which he and his wife built by themselves. Blythe was infatuated by the images of Earthwood surrounded by autumn trees, complete with a cordwood masonry sauna out the front, and she immediately started imagining a new life of invigorating sauna-taking and maple syrup-tapping. Peter, ever more pragmatic, looked past that, saw that Rob Roy sold the architectural plans to ‘Earthwood’, and from that moment on, we knew we wanted to build with cordwood masonry.

      Rob Roy is one of the world’s foremost experts on modern cordwood masonry and runs a building school in North America. More conveniently for us, he is the author of many DIY books on cordwood masonry and alternative building-related topics which are available online.

      We made a list of what to buy from Roy. The Earthwood houseplans were a definite, plus Rob’s book on cordwood masonry and another on building an earth-bermed house like Earthwood, but we weren’t sure of his other books- our building budget was tight. Peter thought the timber-framing book would be useful, and Blythe thought some others would also come in handy (What about the build-your-own-sauna book, Pete? Mightn’t we like to build a sauna? ). After much discussion, we finally put in an online order for ALL of his books.

      [Footnote. To this day, we remain the only

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