Tags
12x12 compost, bc, cabin, off the grid, simple, simplicity, summer, sustainable
Happy Solstice everyone! Hope the new solar year brings you much love, peace and happiness. This entry is long overdue and is somewhat out of season.
The time of my life has flown by again, in a good way. It has been some time. And to be fair, I did not have strong, reliable internet connection for 5 months. So posting a blog or photos quickly became frustrating if not impossible and it was time to surrender. Surrender from the technology and to nature and simplicity. I have no excuse for the last two months though in which Jingo and I have been back in Vancouver. But here I am now.
Our summer was a pure joy full of challenges and inspiration. Jingo, my wife and I had an opportunity to live very simply in a 12 x 12 cabin on a 100 x 100 lot. No running water. No toilet. We did have electricity though.
We spent any free days that we had in the winter, running off to the cabin to prepare it and make it more livable. There was work to be done with this deal and that’s exactly what we looking for. We insulated the inside, put walls up, painted them, and put on new outside siding.
The month of May was the first of our five months we actually lived at the cabin. Our days were completely filled by doing work and making the cabin truly livable. We found most of our supplies from recycled and reclaimed materials and did all the work ourselves. Wooden pallets are amazing, can i just say. You can find them anywhere, in an alley, outside storebacks. They have multi-purposes. We built a deck from pallets, the floor of the outdoor kitchen. Pallets were used as the bottoms of out outdoor shower and outhouse. And then you can still always tear pallets apart and use them for the individual pieces of wood… and pallets come in so many different sizes. I disgress. So the month of May, our little cabin space was transformed.
Our little projects consisted of: an outdoor composting toilet (outhouse), couple cabinets for the kitchen, outdoor shower, small garden with raised beds, composting area, wood stack, clearing out bits of land for various spaces ie. hammock area. It was brilliant. And we rigged a very simple gravity-fed water system just with a garden house and couple rainbarrels and a helpful neighbour.
I loved the experience for everything that it brought to the table…working with my hands, being outdoors so much, living so close to nature, living so simply, the peace, the knowledge. It was challenging and inspiring, and another magical step on this amazing journey. Less is more. Living simply in a 12 x 12 space is being.
TRACES 