tiny & off-grid - with minimal hurties

Ingredients List

1 science guy, heavy on DIY skills

1 shamanic post-urban hippy chick, conversant with trees

2 talking cats, slightly past middle-aged

1- 10’ X 15’ cabin, off grid, with no running water

Uproot all creatures, 2-legged and 4-legged, from urban environment, shake well, and mash together, stirring occasionally, in the tiny off-grid cabin. Light up the cookstove and see what happens. Oh yeah, and allow mixture to marinate for 3 years.

Truly, even I thought we would have killed each other by now. I mean, you’d figure at least one of the four of us would have cracked.

In 2017 we sold our two-storey home in London, Ontario, packed up the plantation, and set ourselves down in the eastern Ontario woods. We had a tiny cabin, as per specifications above, an eventual 4 kilowatts of solar power, and an old wood-burning cookstove to keep us warm.

Almost four years later, our worldly goods are still packed in a storage container, semi trailer, and an old school bus. My husband is building a larger dwelling, more along the lines of 22’ X 32’, but it’s taking him a while. There’s the small issue of earning sufficient dollars to eat and pay for the rest of the materials, so we both work. That limits the amount of time that can go into building. We are still hauling our drinking water in jugs that we fill up at an outside tap at the neighbours’. We carry shower water 25 feet up a steep slope from a hand-dug, spring-fed well. We have an outhouse—woohoo!—and a shower house with a propane tank and heater. We shower by ladelling water over our heads from a pot.

Sound horrific to you? I understand. But we’re doing way better than you’d think. In case you are crazy and plan to try this at home, as it were, here are a few tips to help you survive and thrive:

Don’t Just Love Each Other - Like Each Other

I mean, really. They say the litmus test for a marriage is being able to put up wallpaper together without filing for divorce. Uh, no. Try living in a space the size of a bedroom with 2 cats for several years, a jumble of essential items stuffed strategically on shelves all around you. You can reach out and touch the kitchen counter from the bed.

I adore my husband. Sometimes I want to pinch him when he hits the sack before me and kicks a pile of freshly folded laundry onto the sandy floor (which neither of us has swept yet). But I weigh this against the fact that he keeps a shovel in the car so he can nudge turtles safely off the highway on his way to work. I like that he comes home and tells me how the farmer he works for caught him holding a chicken and singing to it. He’s just my kinda guy. I can’t stay mad at him. He’s too much fun.

Learn to Dance

The above-mentioned restrictive living space? Calling out do-si-do and doing a little sidestep as you squeeze past each other brushing your teeth really beats swearing at each other. There is the spraying of toothpaste issue, but hey, just wipe it up.

Give Your Cats Voices

Sometimes we don’t even talk to each other directly. Instead, conversations go more like this, with me channelling the voice of my cat in a highfalutin British accent:

AnnaLee: Daddy.

Jer: Yes, AnnaLee?

AnnaLee: Daddy—when are you going to build us a house?

Jer: I’m a pretty busy guy, you know.

AnnaLee: I know. But if we had a house, I wouldn’t have to sleep on a shelf above the bed. Then I wouldn’t have to jump on your gonads at night when you forget to clear off the windowsill.

Really - it’s not me. It’s totally her talking.

Practise Gratitude

This is the Mother of All Tips, I kid you not. Are we warm? Are we dry? Do we have enough to eat, and enough to drink? Do we enjoy each other’s company? Do we see the Milky Way at night when we take a trip to the outhouse? Do we have acres of woods to wander through, and a beautiful clear stream to meditate beside? Does it smell like heaven with the incense of poplars after a rain? Is it so quiet at night we can we hear wolves howling in the dark, kilometres away? Do we have amazing neighbours who look after one another and make us laugh? Oh yeeeaaaahhh, baybee.

The first day I stood on this land, before we called it our own, I drummed, as I often do. I asked to meet the Spirit of the Land, to see if this was going to be the right place for us . Here’s what she told me:

If it feels like Home, it is Home.

It did, and it still does. Truth is, we have never doubted our decision to leave the city behind. The ideal of rustic living is no longer a bright, shiny romantic dream. Off-grid life in our tiny cabina is challenging, and often exhausting. But we are so glad we made the move.