Moving off The Homestead... An unusual Winter Ritual

Winter is coming and we are moving once again!!! After 4 years of having left the busy city to build a community homestead, we're still moving to a warmer shelter for winter. The difference this time, the usual part of this year's ritual is that we're making the move a little more permanent. We decided to buy a house! While there’s a bit of work to do in the house, it’s mostly cosmetic.

We wanted to stay within 10 minutes from the property, the kid's school, and of course it’s exactly what we found! All you have to really do to chase your dream is to really want it.

I feel a bit like we failed in terms of homesteading, and building community. It's sad moving away from our beloved forest. In the end the decision to move “off property” is for the best.

We were spending most of our energy and time on “human comforts”. Living in a travel trailer is fun, but full-time living off the grid in a trailer means that you’re constantly chasing problems to fix. Imagine living in a house that needs repair. That means you’re living mostly in the middle of a construction site… it’s kind of like that. While the interior of our trailer was mostly a battle to keep it tidy and clutter free (the trailer always won by the way), the exterior space was becoming overrun with our “things”. Not having an attic or a basement means we have a lot of our belongings living outside. It’s not a junk yard, we keep things mostly organized and we have a couple sheds to work with, but with an almost tropical summer and high humidity for the duration of the warmer months, mildew finds its way everywhere!!!

This move is going to enable us to restructure our thoughts, our plan, and our homestead. While living in a real suburban setting wasn’t what we dreamed of when we left the city, it will be fun for our little human! There are kids everywhere running around on their bikes, and there’s even an old kid-made bmx trail in the nearby abandoned grounds of what used to be an IBM plant. We now have a small plot to turn into a little permaculture haven!!!

The 20 acre homestead we had started wasn’t going to grow into the village we wanted fast enough… We’re the only family there after 4 years still!!! Even though, I understand it takes generations to build a proper village, I thought that if we built it, they would come. We were pretty hands off in terms of trying to find the right people to share our vision of a multi-family homestead with anarchist tendencies. I imagined the place growing “organically”, but that only brought an element of hard drugs, that stunted its growth, and moved the vision in a much darker direction than I had expected. I wrote about the subject in this post: Leaving the Big City - Creating a life of Self-reliance

What's most exciting about living in a house:

We will re-build better, find the people who want this kind of tribal village lIfe, and finally we will have the time to create our Earthship!!!