Do Whatever it Takes to Get the Job Done!
Wow, life has been a wild ride lately! This is going to be a quick and, honestly unpolished update. We now live off grid full time on our property. It is amazing! However, our situation for the time being is somewhat primitive. We are basically camping! The site that we have our camper parked at on our property is very beautiful! However, it is also a little more remote and we don’t get any cell phone service there. It is also somewhat far from the build site. Our shed, and many of our things are up the road where we do get service. While we like being off the beaten path, we also want to stay connected and we’ve found that it is difficult to communicate with our family and our neighbors so we are preparing to move to a new site.
We picked a new site that is right on the edge of where we get service. Even if we don’t get service in our camper, we’ll be able to step out and get service and that will make a big difference. Once we have a more permanent location, we’ll also get out the starlink and get that set up so that we can actually be connected to the outside world occasionally. We won’t have it running 24/7 though, just on an as-needed basis. We will also set up a more permanent outdoor kitchen and bathroom area. Like I said, we are basically camping right now. It has been fun and nobody in the family has complained about it, but I sense that the time is coming when we’re going to want some better solutions. However, as it seems to be the template, there are some problems we have to solve first…
You’d think the goats would do more clearing than they have… they aren’t used to this job and are still getting the hang of things.
The first is clearing. The spot we picked was cleared at one point, but here in Missouri, the forest is the default and the land is always going back to that default. This spot was cleared sometime before we bought the land and it has brush, grass, and a few trees growing there. I bought a mower attachment at an auction to go on the skid steer we decided to buy. It’s a great tool! So far it has served us better than the tractor and the tractor is currently up for sale. The first hitch in our plans was when I took off the bucket and went to attach to the mower. After fiddling with it for longer than I should have, I found that the quick attach on my machine is not actually the universal quick attach. It is some other kind of attachment system that I’m not familiar with. I’m certain that there is some kind of adapter that I can buy, but I have no idea where to start looking for that and to be honest, our service has been so poor that it is a chore in and of itself. (By the way, if you’re wondering, I’m writing this on my laptop inside the landromat in town! We don’t yet have a good enough laundry system in place for a family of 7 living off grid!)
One morning I was awakened early by the dog and I laid there thinking. I thought to myself, “you know, people have lived for many years without these big machines. They were not afraid of hard work! Get your butt out of bed and get to work! I could almost hear Marty Raney from Homestead Rescue saying, “You get the job done, no matter what it takes! It’s the Raney way!” So I got up before everyone else, got dressed, grabbed a machete and started whacking. I spent several hours until I came back to camp to milk and eat. Then my boys joined me after that and by the end of the day we had cleared a nice area! We removed trees, brush, grass, etc. However, We’d like to level the ground a bit before moving. That should be easy with a skid steer right???
When it comes to machinery, I hear the phrase, “it sure beats using a shovel!” a lot. Honestly, I’m not sure about that. Machinery can be so fickle. It breaks down, it needs a ton of maintenance, it takes time to learn, and it often doesn’t do the job as you expect it to. In some cases, it’s actually simpler to just grab a tool and do the job yourself!
The next issue we had is that at some point, the skid steer machine wouldn’t start. We had to jump it every time we needed to use it. Then, even that stopped working. The battery was new, so I dug in and found that a battery cable was damaged at some point, and the alternator is pretty much toast. So, we took a trip into the nearest city and I went everywhere I could think of to see if I could get that part. I was running into dead ends until, on a whim, I stopped at Napa auto parts. To my amazement, they were able to get one ordered and it was cheaper there than online. So, here I am in town getting it picked up. Since I was making the trip, Mary sent me with a load of laundry and here I am.
Hopefully I’ll be up and running in the skid steer again tomorrow and we can move our trailer to a better spot and get some better systems going! Hopefully I’ll be able to post more regularly after that. We LOVE our property but we have a lot of work to do to make a more livable space. Wish us luck!
