Hey there, I’m Jo!  I’m a wife, mama, and wannabe blogger.

My husband and I, along with our two kids, are currently living in an off-grid yurt in the Pacific Northwest.  We’ve been on the property for about two years, and after lots of blood, sweat, and sometimes tears, things are finally starting to feel like home!

Our dream started in 2016, shortly after we got married.  We were 19 years old, living in an old fifth wheel trailer on my parents rural property, both still in school, and living off his high school savings until one of us could get a job. Pretty much the classic story of living’ on love.  That trailer setup was super sketch…  An extension cord ran from the trailer to a standard outlet on my parents’ back porch, so if you had too many things drawing power at once it would trip the circuit and my folks would lose all their lights in the utility room.  So basically we could have coffee, light, or heat.  Pick one.

Since it was winter, heat always took priority, so we got pretty good at finding alternative forms of lighting.  Candles and solar lamps became the evening norm at our place.  Electricity and our cell phones were really our only regular bills at the time, and we were always trying to find more ways to reduce our energy costs, so we really didn’t mind this inconvenience.  In fact, it ended up being what sparked our interest in off-grid living!  What could we do to make our lives cost as little as possible?  We literally started down this road out of sheer poverty.

Well I finally got a job and it was enough to pay for an apartment in town.  The place had a dishwasher, but it was so loud we hated using it.  So we washed dishes by hand.  We tried to plant some lettuce on the back porch, but there wasn’t enough sunlight to grow anything.

Then I lost my job. Cody still had a few months of school left, so we had to leave the apartment.  Lucky for us, our friends had a vacant rental, and they said we could stay there until they were ready to remodel as long as we paid for the electricity!  

It was a beautiful place way out in the country, backing up to endless woods. My phone didn’t get cell service and we couldn’t afford internet service, but I discovered if I put my phone in the window of the back bathroom I could pick up a faint signal from the neighbor’s wifi, just enough to send texts.  Cody’s phone got cell service there, but he still had a flip phone, so we really didn’t have any internet access at home during that time.  

It was during that time that we learned to enjoy playing card games after dinner instead of watching YouTube.  My mother-in-law began teaching me how to quilt, so I started putting blocks together in my free time.  We still didn’t have a dishwasher there, and we continued our habit of using solar lamps to save on electricity.  

Once we both had jobs again, we moved into a duplex. It sure was hard moving back into town…  It didn’t take long to decide that we had to figure out a way to move back into the country!  And we knew that we wanted to live a lifestyle that would keep us in that simple, unplugged, family-oriented mindset.  So we began reading off-grid blogs and pinning ideas about homesteads on Pinterest, and experimenting with more money-saving ideas.  

At this point we could afford electricity, but now we held onto our penny pinching ways in hopes of being able to save enough money to buy some land. We kept the heat as low as possible, we grew a garden in the tiny backyard, and we started trying to find non-electric replacements for our kitchen gadgets. Bye bye microwave! These changes also prepared us for our future life off-grid.

By the fall of 2018 we were able to buy a house of our own in town.  It wasn’t our country dream, but it was a step in the right direction!  That place was definitely a fixer-upper, but we figured with a little bit of sweat equity and some luck with the housing market, we might be able to flip it and finally get out to the country.

A fireplace insert was the only heat source in that house, so we got used to heating with wood.  Again, no dishwasher.  We didn’t bother getting a dryer, and instead bought a couple drying racks off Amazon and hung all our clothes to dry.  Oh, and there were some pretty serious plumbing issues when we moved in, so we didn’t even have a working water heater for the first three months! But did you know you can rig up a pretty decent shower with a weed sprayer, a garden hose nozzle, and hot water boiled on the stove?

Flipping that place wasn’t easy.  Due to our small budget and Cody’s busy work schedule, we were only able to get things done a little bit at a time.  Over the next three years we also brought home a dog, then some ducks, and then a baby!

Then, when our daughter had just turned a year old, opportunity struck.  My parents bought a house on five acres in the woods, and the owners of the unimproved parcel next door offered to let them buy their five acres too.  This place was only accessible through my parents new property, so it wasn’t worth much to anyone else.  To make a long story short, Cody and I were able to strike a deal with those folks to trade our house in the city for their bare land!  It would mean starting over from scratch again, but it was worth it to get out of the city.

We temporarily moved into my parents’ new garage (it had been converted into a studio apartment), and used what little money we had left to buy a used yurt.  Since moving in, we’ve brought home a second dog and another beautiful baby girl.

It’s been a long journey to get to where we are, and there have been times people thought we were a little bit insane.  Sometimes I still wonder if maybe we are…  But watching my daughters grow up in this amazing place makes it worth every penny, every sacrifice, and every long day of hard work.  

The posts in this blog start at the one year anniversary of us being in the yurt, and hopefully they’ll document many more years to come! Thanks for coming along for the ride, and I hope you enjoy reading about our family’s off-grid adventures!