Hello friends!
Last week was crazy busy – every time I tried to sit down and write, one more thing kept calling me away. So I started writing this post last Friday, but I never got around to finishing it. Here’s hoping I can get it up by the end of today!
I’ve hinted at this topic a couple of times previously, but I wanted to do a full post on the subject. It’s time to fill you guys in on the scheming and dreaming we’ve been doing over the last few months…
We are officially planning to build a cabin!
A little housing backstory
As you know, our family currently lives in a 24’ Pacific Yurt. When we first sold our house in town and bought our property, we stayed in (what was at the time) my folk’s garage conversion/second living room. The room was quite large and had it’s own bathroom and exterior door, but we still shared the kitchen with the main house, and there was nowhere quiet for Pj to sleep unless Cody and I hung out “next door”.
The situation was a great temporary measure – emphases on temporary.
We knew we needed to get something up on our land quickly, and we had already been looking at yurts to fill that need. Buying one new was gonna be too expensive (we spent nearly all of our money on the land buy), but by God’s grace, we happened upon a used one for sale in our area, and it was in our budget and exactly the size we were looking for!
We spent the first two months of 2022 clearing a site and getting the yurt set up, and over the next two months we got the rooms framed in. There was still some finish work to do when we moved in, but we had to vacate the garage by mid April (because my sister and her husband-to-be were going to be moving in there after their honeymoon at the end of the month).
Over the last two years we’ve turned the yurt into a lovely little home for ourselves, raising our two young daughters here and now making room for the twins. I love hearing the birds and the frogs and the creek through the canvas walls. I thoroughly enjoy showing off our little piece of paradise to new-comers – yurt living is certainly a unique conversation starter when we meet new folks!
Being off-grid (mostly) has challenged us to become more intentional and focused our priorities, and living in a tiny house has provided many opportunities for growth when it comes to our consumer habits and our interpersonal relationships.
But… we do miss certain things about having a “normal” house.
I’d like to be able to host big groups of family and friends in our own space (currently our table is full with just our kids, so we always entertain larger groups next door).
I’d love to be able to wake up to a warm house (unless we feed the fire in the middle of the night, it tends too be pretty chilly by morning).
And it would be SO nice not to have our entryway and our bathroom be the same room!
These were all things we knew we’d have to deal with when we decided to live in a yurt, and we are so grateful for the ability to move onto our property right away! But tiny-house-living was never the long-term goal for this property.
Our goal has always been to build our very own off-grid cabin in the woods.
This year, we’re finally moving forward on that goal, and I’m super excited to share our plans and dreams with you all!
To permit or not to permit?
When we first started thinking about building a cabin, we talked about doing it “off the books”, so to speak. Permitting is expensive, and if we had to build fully “to code”, they’ll make us do a lot of stuff that we don’t need right away for our off-grid lifestyle. For example, setting up a quick “dry cabin” and moving in won’t cut it in our county. We’d have to have running hot water to get our occupancy permit.
Since we live next to my parents and share a driveway, we figured maybe we could use their address for packages and such, and just build a small cabin without permits and nobody would have any issues with it.
But last summer, when we really started digging into potentially growing a business around our homestead, we realized that we wanted to be able to use our property in ways that might include strangers regularly coming to our land. Think AirB&B, or hosting work-study students.
We decided that we don’t want to take the risk of some cantankerous person reporting us to the inspector’s office for having an unpermitted dwelling. It’s not likely to happen, but the chance is there, especially since we have a public social media presence. Unfortunately, some people just like to cause trouble, and we don’t want to limit our business opportunities in trying to keep our home a secret.
We thought for a while that we’d found a permitting loophole – build two separate even smaller structures that don’t need to be permitted and have an unattached covered porch between them – but apparently you can only build “accessory buildings” if you already have a “primary building”. And even then, you’re still not supposed to live in one unless it’s permitted. Bleh.
The land use and building codes in our area are crazy strict – you basically have to get a permit to sneeze around here!
After months of finagling and scheming and drawing and redrawing plans and pouring over the building code looking for loopholes to no avail, we finally concluded that if we want to build our cabin in a manner that won’t get us in trouble with the code-police, it will have to be a fully permitted build.
Oh well.
Designing an off-grid cabin
Once we decided to go ahead with a permitted build, it was time to design a floor plan.
That’s the part I enjoy! I’ve been sketching dream homes on graph paper since I was eight years old, and it’s been super fun to put my childhood hobby to practical use!
We had several elements we knew we for sure wanted to incorporate into our cabin.
- It has to be small. We very much dislike our family being spread out over a huge house, and I dislike cleaning a big house even more. 1,200 sqft is the max I want to deal with. If you need more space, go build a fort in the woods.
- It has to let lots of light in. I grew up in a house with huge floor-to-ceiling bay windows that faced the south, and I’ve been totally spoiled by the giant dome in the yurt, which lets in tons of light, even in the middle of the forest. I get sad in dark spaces. Our cabin design will need to take lighting concerns very seriously.
- An attached greenhouse off the kitchen, for growing food and passive heating in the winter.
- A rocket mass heater.
- A metal roof.
- A wet room. Basically a bathroom with water-proof floors and walls. (This one might have to be an add-on later down the road)
- A large open concept living/dining/kitchen space, with enough space to host family and friends. I have SO missed hosting big gatherings while living in the yurt! Our table is currently maxed out with two adults and four young kids.
Once we had a good idea of the basic design elements we were looking for, I used Homestyler.com to begin drawing up more detailed plans. That website lets you drop to-scale furniture into your design and view it in 3D, which really helps me figure out if the space I envisioned is really a good size. I thought 20×20 was huge – until I added the couches and a dining room table! 30×30 turned out to be much more reasonable.
Currently the plan is to have a normal well and septic tank, and we’re hoping to run the whole thing on solar or hydroelectric. I’d like to have a place for my washing machine in the house, but I’m not sure we’ll be able to afford a solar set-up big enough to power that right off the bat. We’re gonna prioritize making enough power for running the well, a small refrigerator, and a freezer.
Finances and Building
Originally we wanted our build to be 100% debt-free. We don’t like the idea of having our home leveraged against us if some kind of emergency came up. However, that plan seemed a lot more realistic when we were just gonna do a diy dry cabin in the woods and add on as we had the money…
Now we’re thinking we might take out a loan and get the bulk of it done and over with all at once, or at least borrow enough money to get the well and septic installed and the house dried in. Then we could finish out the inside as time and finances allowed.
My mom will have her drafting certificate completed by the end of spring term, and she said our cabin will be her first project! We’ve had a blast going over design ideas together – she’s the one who got me into pencil and graph paper floorpans as a kid!
Mom also spent fourteen years as a small-town planing commissioner where I grew up, and she designed and oversaw the build of their last house, so she has a ton of experience working with our country planning department. She is very familiar with our local building code and the folks who work down at the county, so it will be super helpful to have someone on hand who knows exactly who to talk when it comes to our quirky design particulars.
When it comes to the actual build itself, Cody’s dad has been a contractor for almost twenty years now (Cody and his siblings grew up working in the trades with him), and one of my sister-in-laws married another super handy guy (my brother-in-law-once-removed?), and my youngest sister married a contractor, and all of the family lives locally, so when we all get together to work on a building project it goes together like an amish barn raising!
I’m hoping between all the talent in our two families, we’ll be able to do most of the labor ourselves with minimal costs. We’ll know more once the designs are finished and we find out how many permits we’ll need to pull.
Next Steps
While we’re deciding on financing and waiting on Mom’s drafting certificate, Cody and I have been working on clearing the way for a road to the house site. We will still be sharing a driveway with my folks (building our own bridge across the river would be way out of our budget!), and we’ll just continue it past the shop and out to our homesite.
We need to culvert a small creek, level the ground, and take out a few trees, which should keep us busy for a while. Then we can get a tractor back there to help clear the actual site itself. It’ll be a big project, but fortunately we’ve got a few friends that are itching to put their chainsaws to work!
We can also start working now on getting applications approved for a well and a septic system, which could take up to a few months to process. Ah the joys of bureaucracy.
Overall we’re anticipating the full project to take about two years to complete, although I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it takes a little longer to get the inside totally finished. We’ll need to assess how much we want to DIY, knowing that it’ll take longer but be cheaper, vs hiring professionals to get the work done quickly with a higher price tag.
Like I said, we’d like to do this with as little debt as possible. We’ll probably get a loan to hire a few professionals for the bigger tasks (like well and septic) and get the bare bones done quickly, and then chip away at the details as we get the cash on hand.
Waiting patiently and enjoying our yurt
In the meantime, we’re practicing contentment and remembering to enjoy this time in our little unconventional home. After all, not many people get a chance to experience the perks of living in a home like ours! There will definitely be things that I will miss once we’re in a “normal house”.
I know I’ll miss the cozy atmosphere, knowing where all the kids are at all times (and what they’re getting into lol), and being able to lie in bed up in the loft and talk to Cody in the kitchen while he makes breakfast.
I’ll miss hearing the owl in the tree right outside the bedroom without having to open a window.
I’ll miss standing in the kitchen and hearing my dad walking up the path, hollering “Hello in the yurt!”
Our cabin will still be off-grid, so we’ll still be relying on candles and lamps and other quiet lights in the evening. We won’t have big TVs or video games making noise in the living room. It’ll be nice to have more space for certain practical things (like a pantry, or a more private bathroom!), but I’m hoping to incorporate a loft over the living room, to allow more of that “togetherness” feeling.
I’ve learned that each season of life has it’s perks and it’s draw-backs, and the secret to a contended life is to be happy with the perks and patient with the draw-backs. We can’t always move forward when we want to, and we can’t go back once the years have slipped away.
So we’ll continue to be patient and content during this dreaming and scheming process…
But we’re also still very excited to start working on our very own off-grid cabin the woods!
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