The Grid Is For Squares

Hey friends! We come to you today with news… we’re officially taking a wee break from The Grid Is For Squares. Over the course of 36 episodes, we went from getting the idea for a homestead to buying 10 acres to building a greenhouse to building a yurt, and we thought that right now might be a reasonable time to call the end of Season 1.

It’s good timing in a few ways, actually, because although the main reason I’m putting a pause on the show is because I’m INSANELY STRESSED AND EXHAUSTED ALL THE TIME AND SOMETHING HAD TO GO, it also makes a lot of sense to pause right now because we just completed our Big Big Project (the yurt) and the latest “phase” of Vince living off-grid with his family just ended a few days ago. The rest of the summer, we’ll mostly just work on smaller projects like improving the rain catchment basin, firescaping, and saving money to build more things.

So enjoy your summer, everyone! We’ll pop back in if there’s anything major to report, otherwise we’ll return with Season 2 in a few months. It’s been so great going on this journey with you all and we look forward to what the future holds for our homestead.

❤️

It’s been a long time in the making, but it’s finally here! We have a yurt!

After work last Friday, I drove up to our property for a very brief but very important weekend… we built our yurt! It’s been months of excavation and building the platform and installing the flooring and waiting for the yurt company to fabricate the thing, and now we finally have a yurt!

A few days prior, Vince and his mom and brother rented a UHaul and drove up to Grass Valley CA to pick up our finished yurt— or at least, the pieces of our finished yurt. It was on us to actually put it together on site. Which, as you can imagine, was a bit of a project!

The first step was setting up the door (we paid extra for nice double French doors) and the lattice. Even just as soon as we stretched around the lattice, it started feeling like an interior space, a space separate from the outdoors. Magic!

The next step was raising the center ring. It’s a good thing Vince is so tall!

After that, we put on the roof covering and the insulated interior wall.

And the final step was putting up the exterior vinyl wall.

We actually thought the wall piece was mis-sized for the size of our yurt (it seemed to be the right size for a 16-foot yurt without French doors) but the company later told us that we’re supposed to cut it to size. I wish the instructions had been a little clearer on that point but I guess that makes sense—better to have it be too long than too short.

In general, Vince and Morey struggled a bit to follow the directions… it’s a great well-fabricated yurt but maybe another pass on the directions would be helpful. But I get it, they’re a small company and they’re mostly used to putting the yurts up themselves, not explaining to other people how to do it. And we figured it all out eventually. You don’t want these things to be too easy after all!

So yes, it took us 6 months to dig the foundation, 2 months to build the platform and install the flooring, and 1 day to actually build the yurt! What a journey it’s been.

Vince’s brother will be flying back to Chicago in a week, ending the couple-month phase of Off Grid Family Time that they’ve been enjoying. Hopefully they can cut the vinyl to size before then and complete the last few finishing touches to make the yurt 100% complete. And hopefully the next time I’m up on our property—which, with my work schedule, could literally be months from now—there’ll be furniture in there as well!

It was really exhausting (and not even in the good way I enjoy), going up for a single weekend. It’s a 6-hour drive and to go up and back in just one weekend, even a weekend where we got so much done, was just too much. I got sick the following week because I was just so burned out.

But I don’t want to never go up to our property again either, so until we get high-speed internet up there (which is likely a long way off), I’m not sure how I’m going to integrate this new job and our homesteading dreams. Do I just resign myself to the fact that I don’t get to be part of our homestead for the next couple years? Do I step away from a good-paying job or change the parameters of it somehow? We need to pay for the homestead to make it happen, so at least one of us needs a good job. And a good-paying job making podcasts, my vocation? I can’t walk away from that.

So I don’t know what the future holds. But I do know that we finally have a yurt, something I’ve been dreaming about since before we even bought these 10 acres of land. And for now, that’s enough. ❤️

Well, we have another “Grid Is For Squares Unplugged” this week… a little shorter, a little less edited than other episodes in the past. Vince and I have been so busy lately and I know everyone understands.

The podcast I was recently hired to produce professionally, The Suburban Women Problem, cracked Apple Podcasts’ Top 200 in its first week, which has been a strange and interesting and extremely stressful ride. But SWP is a political podcast with high-level guests like Chasten Buttigieg and this is a totally different beast… weird, small, and very personal. I’m fine with The Grid Is For Squares never topping any charts or getting any press—in fact, I prefer it that way. But if you are here and you have been traveling with us on this journey, thanks. We’re glad you’re here.

So while I’ve been doing that, Vince has been living up on our property with his mom and his brother Morey, just like he has since the beginning of April. Most of this episode is him updating everyone on what they’ve been up to—myself included, since I haven’t been there.

On that note, our separation has been getting harder. For the first month, it didn’t bother me that much… I had the stress of starting a new job, and there are some things about living alone that I do like, but these past 2 weeks of separation were tougher for both of us. We’re trying to make the most of the time we do have together and thinking about how we can structure our lives so we can both do our own thing but not spend too much time apart.

But let’s get to what Vince, Morey, and Judy have been doing on the property! As always, it’s easy to start projects and difficult to finish them. The greenhouse is almost done… they cast all the concrete bricks for the perimeter and installed them around 3 of the 4 sides. The shower now has more regulated temperature control, but still needs a better enclosure. And Morey has started building a shed so that hopefully soon, Judy can get rid of her storage unit. Finally, Vince built a new (much bigger) humanure composting station from wooden pallets. Hopefully this new compost station will last us a year or two.

The biggest news is that the yurt platform is ready to go, since Vince & co installed the drip edge and the finished bamboo flooring this month. They started with an underlayment called QuietWalk and then laid down tongue-and-groove bamboo flooring. Because bamboo expands and contracts more than most woods, they stuck the skinny end of a shim between each board as they went to give it a little more space to expand without cracking. Our research tells us that bamboo, while cheap and sustainable, isn’t ideal for outdoor applications because of this predilection for expansion. But bamboo was one of the only options in our budget and, like everything, this is an experiment. We’ll see how it goes!

I’ll finally be back on our property over Memorial Day weekend… setting up our yurt! Hopefully next episode, you’ll be able to hear about (and see pictures of) our finished and functional yurt.

P.S. “The Miscreant Zone” is what Vince calls the shady area behind the greenhouse. I didn’t know what to call this episode and that made me laugh, so now it’s the title. That’s TGIFS Unplugged for ya, baby.

I’m not going to lie to you, friends. I really did not want to edit this episode of The Grid Is For Squares. I’ve been working 60 hours a week at my new job, which is creating and editing a podcast, so the last thing I wanted to do was edit another podcast in my “free time.”

But I’m glad I did, for a few reasons. One, I haven’t seen Vince much this spring and it’s always nice to hear his voice. Two, our power was out in Glendale when we recorded, and it came back on while we were recording, which was a fun real-time adventure to go on during our recording session. And three, it’s been a few months now since I’ve been up on our property and this makes me feel like I’m at least kind of still part of it.

What a spring it’s been.

Well, I’m not going to linger on this post (see again: working 60 hours a week), but a few things you’ll hear in this episode are:

Meeting some neighbors

Capturing at least 50 gallons of water from a single day of rain

Burning poison oak (carefully) during the rainstorm

Helping our skoolie friends with some bus projects

A turkey taking an ash bath where we’d burned poison oak the day before

Using a vintage pudgy pie grill to create all kinds of culinary abominations

Our yurt should be ready sometime this week, so very soon we’ll be picking it up!

Well, that’s all for now. Stay safe out there and learn something about a mushroom today.

Hi friends! So April has been weird. I mean, of course the whole past year has been weird, being a sentient creature is weird, anything existing in the universe is weird, but for our particular microcosm, April has been especially weird. I just started a new job so I’ve been living alone in our apartment in LA while Vince, his mom, and his brother Morey have been living off the grid on our homestead all month.

So Vince and his mom and brother recorded this episode up on the property, hanging out in our greenhouse. It was great to hear Vince’s voice, because I miss him, but it was also interesting to hear about what they’ve been up to and what it’s been like living off the grid for this long.

Morey is thrilled to be back on the property… the only other time he’s been there was March of last year, when he helped us build our greenhouse right before before the world shut down. This time, he drove out from Chicago in a used Ford Ranger he bought especially for this occasion. As construction workers (of a sort—Morey works in custom concrete and Vince works in greywater), both he and Vince kept working all through the pandemic, so they’re really enjoying their time off.

And speaking of working in construction, they both say one thing they really appreciate about building for yourself instead of for a client is having more control over that classic balance of time/money/quality. We don’t have a lot of money, but with this long month on the property, they can focus on quality because they finally have the time.

They’ve been processing a lot of wood from fallen trees on our land, sealing with teak oil instead of stains to cut down on our VOC (volatile organic compound) impact. Morey reports that our local manzanitas and blue oaks both take teak oil really well.

But our homestead is far from complete, so they’re also discovering some pros and cons to living for that many weeks off the grid. The biggest pro is knowing that everything is run on solar power… Morey says his favorite thing right now is saying that he’s been “cutting wood with the sun.” Other pros include sleeping better and enjoying the quiet, but cons include not being able to stay in regular communication with the outside world because we still don’t really have reliable cell service and not being able to take a hot shower.

So to that end, one of their first big projects was building a shower! Morey built the structure with a fallen tree limb and Vince ran 150 feet of tubing up a hill to provide water pressure. And, of course, the shower pan drains into a bucket so they can reuse that water for gardening. There’s still a lot of work to do to regulate the temperature, but it’s a working shower! Hurrah.

They’ve also been putting the finishing touches on the yurt platform while we wait for the yurt itself to be fabricated, including completing the trapdoor for our under-yurt pantry. Hopefully our yurt will be ready in a few weeks and I can be there for the final step of the process. It’s hard to not be there during wildflower season, but if I can’t be there when our yurt goes up, I’ll be pretty bummed. But if this past year has taught me anything, it’s that I gotta roll with the punches, so we’ll see.

Thanks for joining us! Here’s to weird April growing into wonderful May.

Hi, friends! We’re currently in an exciting and very busy moment for us… I just got a new job and I jumped into production for a new scripted sci-fi podcast this week. And over in Vince’s world, his brother Morey is coming out to visit this month and the whole family is planning to stay on the property for a good long while.

I’ll be working hard down here in LA while Vince, Judy and Morey live off the grid for a month or two. We don’t have anything brand-new to discuss (haven’t been up to the property since our last ep), and we don’t have a lot of time on our hands right now to research and create a whole new episode either.

So…. we thought it might be fun to pop back in time and take a listen to our very first episode. We listened to it too and responded to it afterwards.

We were curious to see how far we’ve come and how much things have changed (or stayed the same). The episode was recorded before the pandemic, which is weird. It was even before we purchased our land. We mention a few of our land parameters (10-40 acres, seasonal creek, public land adjacent, rolling terrain), some of which we scored (10 acres, rolling hills) and some of which we had to let go.

But more than that, Episode 1 was about us… who are we, what qualifies us to do this, and what exactly is it that we want to do? And those things haven’t really changed. The why of it, as they say, is still the backbone of everything we do.

We’re not 100% certain when we’ll be back, given all of the busy stuff we have going on in the next month. But we absolutely will be back. We have to tell you about our yurt (which will arrive in early May) and how our exciting month of spring blooming went. Take care of yourselves in the meantime and watch out for poison oak. 🌿❤️

Today marks the 30th episode of The Grid Is For Squares! It’s hard to believe we’ve been at this since January of 2020. And, perhaps accordingly, the format of today’s episode is a little different than usual… we have an interview!

Earlier this month, our friends Mike and Amber joined us up on our property to work on their skoolie. So I thought I’d take that opportunity to interview Mike about his experience converting a school bus into a home.

If you like The Grid Is For Squares, please leave us a rating and a review! We would really really really appreciate it. Thanks and stay safe out there!

Hi friends, welcome to another episode of The Grid Is For Squares! Today, we’re discussing something that we hate but something that’s an unfortunate reality in building an off-the-grid homestead: money.

We built our awesome yurt platform last month, which means the next step is to purchase the actual yurt. (Check out our timelapse video if you haven’t yet!) But the yurt will cost about $10,000 and our finances are really tight right now, which means that despite all of our hard work and careful planning, we’re not sure if we can responsibly buy a yurt right now. Which sucks! Why did we even build that platform then?! Blurg!

It’s so hard not to stress about money, and not just during the pandemic but generally in this late-capitalist hellscape where GoFundMe is apparently a health plan. We’re hoping to be self-sufficient and communal eventually but, ironically, that won’t be possible until we’ve built a lot more and thus spent a lot more money.

Talking about money can be difficult… at turns, I feel ashamed of how much and how little money we have. There are tons of people out there who couldn’t have built what we have already; they work hard but are surviving day to day. But I also feel embarrassed sometimes compared to other homesteaders who have way more funds than we do and have been able to build a much more impressive homestead in much less time. So we wanted to take this opportunity to be fully transparent about how much we’ve spent on our homestead so far.

Can you really put a price on rocks and trees?

Turns out the answer is yes, and it’s tens of thousands of dollars.

Let’s jump into some hard numbers. According to my research, it takes an estimated $200,000 to set up a self-sufficient homestead. But we don’t have that much money (not even close!) so our plan is basically just building as we can. Thus far, we’ve spent a total of $65,000. Most of that went to our 10 acres of land: $58,000, which we paid with $45,000 down and a 5-year payment plan for the remaining $13,000. (And be aware that most banks won’t give you a loan for bare land.) The yurt platform we built last month cost $2,000. The remaining thousands have gone to our greenhouse, tools like a chainsaw and wet/dry vac, various building materials, and more.

How have we saved that $65,000, you ask? Especially as artists and hippies living in California? Well, we’ve been socking away money for years, saving it in a separate Money Market account, which has made it easier for us to not spend our property savings on daily expenses. We do recommend that method it works for you.

We’ve also made… let’s say “lifestyle choices.” Just saying those words makes me cringe because I know there are millions of people out there who, despite working hard, could never save that much money; there’s Lifestyle Choices and then there’s The System Is Broken. And lest we forget, us working in the arts and environmentalism in California, rather than “normal jobs” in the Midwest, was a series of lifestyle choices too. Luckily for us, between our various jobs and having no life (even before the pandemic, we didn’t go to movies, we didn’t go to restaurants, we didn’t go on vacation), we’ve been able to painstakingly save that $65,000.

That’s all to say, it hasn’t been easy. It’s involved a significant amount of sacrifice. And, in case you’ve forgotten, we also currently live in a one-bedroom apartment with Vince’s mom. But it’s all been worth it because of the progress we’ve made on our homestead dream.

We then reflected a bit on our childhoods and how they’ve shaped our feelings about money. Vince says he grew up poor, so the fact that we have any savings is enough for him. My upper-middle-class parents, on the other hand, raised me to be “financially responsible” in ways that mean I feel like a failure for not reaching certain milestones. I think there’s a part of me that’s always assumed I would eventually become a Grown-Up Who Doesn’t Worry About Money. In the deepest darkest recesses of my heart, I won’t feel like a successful artist until I become rich and/or famous. But I’m 35 now and I ain’t there yet, so I’m earnestly trying to reframe my life outside of capitalism.

And that’s part of why this homestead appeals to me… it breaks the paradigm of Success/Failure. Capitalism only allows us to travel up and down a single continuum: on one end there’s Failure/Poverty and on the other end there’s Success/Riches. But a homestead takes us 90 degrees in the other direction, allowing us to create our own reality that doesn’t conform to traditional success or failure. And hopefully that, in turn, helps us break some of the other binaries that society has locked us into without our consent.

Soooooo all that said, after doing a deep dive into our finances last week, we determined that we can purchase our yurt and have a cushion of a couple thousand left over. In a few days, we’ll send off our $5,000 down payment, and in 8-10 weeks we’ll finally have a yurt to put on our platform!

Hey friends! Today we have exciting news to report... we built the platform for our 16-foot yurt!

I have lots of words and pictures to share, and of course you can listen to today’s episode too, but the best illustration of how we kicked ass is this timelapse video below. 4 days of work condensed into 3 minutes!

This is a timelapse of our yurt platform construction-- 4 days compressed into 3 minutes! For more information, you can check out our podcast and/or our blog!

It was a serious construction project that began a year ago when I first had the dream to build a yurt, then through the past few months as we dug out dozens of cubic feet of dirt by hand as we prepared our building site, but last week we took a massive step forward as we finally built the platform for our yurt.

At its core, a yurt platform is just a round deck with insulation. We’re planning on buying a 16-foot yurt, which means that our platform is exactly 16 feet in diameter. Vince designed it, first on paper and then in SketchUp, and it’s truly a magical feeling to see those pixels turn into 3-dimensional reality.

You can see how one half of the platform is fairly standard, but the other half is a little more complicated; we want to install a cellar under the yurt, so that required a slightly more complex design to incorporate a hatch and interior staircase.

We did all of the labor ourselves, but it cost about $1600 in materials. You can see the full breakdown of our material costs here if you’d like to know more.

I feel great about how hands-on I was through the whole construction process. I put in a lot of hours on the drill and the impact driver! Vince’s mom and I ended up driving most of the screws and doing the actual construction while Vince carefully measured and cut all of the lumber. It really was a team effort.

After we finished building the skeleton of the platform, we stapled in glass wool insulation and screwed down 4x8 sheets of OSB. And before we left, Vince’s mom added 1/2” hardware cloth underneath the insulation to keep it in place and to keep rodents from ripping it all out. We still have to install stairs and the drip edge, which is a piece of plywood that goes all around the outside of the platform to keep moisture out of the yurt, and finished bamboo flooring too, but the platform is done!

The next natural step is to order our yurt… it’s a 8-10 week production window once we put in our order, so I’d love to get that process underway, but our money situation is a bit fraught at the moment. Hopefully between our tax returns, the stimulus, and whatever paid work we can collectively cobble together in the next month, we can put in that order soon. Now that the platform is built and ready for our yurt, I want it more than ever.

Is life hard? Oh yes. Is the pandemic weighing on us, like it is on everybody? Of course. Are we extremely stressed about money right now? Absolutely. But last week we created something out of nothing and that feels damn good. Onward and yurtward!

Welcome to another episode of The Grid Is For Squares! I don’t want this podcast to turn into a summary of our to-do list, cause that would be boring, so it’s important to me that when we don’t have a major breakthrough to report, we focus on a theme.

So today’s theme is… time and space! Which, granted, covers everything in existence. But it’s also a way of framing our property, our projects, and the different ways we approach the world.

In today’s episode, Vince uses a bunyip and SketchUp, we think about how weird time has been during the pandemic and how it sucks that we have to spend so much time apart, and more. We’re almost ready to build our yurt platform!