November 20th, 2018

November 20, 2018

Captains Log: City to Gritty

Those of you following me @holisticrachel on IG or @holisticrachel_ on twitter got the news yesterday, but—here it is!

101 days ago, we bought our land and started our off-grid journey.

We spent weeks and hundreds of man hours renovating and fixing our trailer from the ground up. We invested thousands in improvements, generators, new furniture and fixtures, propane tanks, water tanks and more. We were ALL IN for the long haul.

Our set up works, is functional, and keeps us safe and alive.

But there were a lot of things we didn’t expect. Between the massive amounts of construction delays, back to back sicknesses, plans constantly changing and costs going up as the snow came down, and our stuff to be due to come out of military storage in a few weeks—we evaluated everything as entrepreneurs, as husband & wife and as parents on what is best for us, our careers, our kids and the future of our build.

We started looking at the numbers and separated ourselves from our triggers.

We started planning from a space of long term goals instead of in the moment needs.

And the result lead us to a gorgeous lakeside apartment with beautiful views of our mountain outside our windows. A place to store our stuff, do laundry, shower and still be close to our land.

We were lead to a new job and career shift for Todd to partner up with a new cloud based company that allows him to work from home while providing extraordinary benefits and rewards. (Whoo-hoo Todd!)

And we were lead to a better A-frame cabin opportunity too.

At the end of the day, our A-Frame is our GUEST HO– USE to our future dream house. All the delays we’ve been experiencing were really blessings because they allowed us to step back and think more about our plans.

We started wondering why we were about to spend almost a half a million dollars on a TINY custom guest house. If we were building the guest house at the same time as our big house, we would never spend a half million on it. So, why are we doing that now?

When you are designing a custom home, you are emotional. Especially when you are a perfectionist, living in an RV off grid and so many obstacles come up.

But in re-centering that this cabin is a GUEST HO– USE and releasing my perfectionist nature and putting on my entrepreneurial hat has helped me keep the big picture in mind.

This lead us to Avrame. An A-frame cabin kit company based in Estonia. I mean, if you decide against custom, an Estonian cabin is the next best thing! They can easily do off-grid designs, add anything (we are customizing ours), can be built with as little as 2 people in 4 weeks, and the kit can be dropped by helicopter (I asked this morning) so we won’t have to worry as much about our road issues. And…. they start at $70k for 1,600 sq/ft. ???

We’ll definitely be doing most of the upgrades offered but even with those extras, we will still be saving hundreds of thousands.

As my wise friends say, “a dollar saved, is a dollar earned”. So by discovering this Aframe company, we basically paid ourselves at least $250,000 and decades of time freedom. Which is a huge deal!

Over the past 101 days since buying this land—so much has changed. New jobs, new apartment, new cabin plans, and more time freedom to pursue our passions and take on new experiences. And yes—you better believe Todd and I want to build most of this house ourselves (the instructions say 2 people, so why not?)

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