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Couple live in a MORTGAGE-FREE SHED in Alaska
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10/12/2023
Credit: SWNS / Lia Cleveland
Meet the couple who quit the rat race to live off-grid in a shed and now live mortgage-free with their own supply of water, gas and electric.
Lia, 27, and Trevor, 31, left home behind in Phoenix, Arizona, US, and moved 3,680 miles to rural Alaska last year.
After buying a plot of land for $35k, they had a custom $18k shed built and a well dug for their water supply.
They get their electricity from solar panels, use a propane tank for their gas - which they only have to fill twice a year - and prepare and can food.
Category
🛠️
Lifestyle
Transcript
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00:00
Hello and welcome back to our off-grid property here in Alaska.
00:02
We still have so much left to do before winter settles in.
00:05
We're not really aesthetics type of people.
00:08
We just want things that work and function the way that we intended them to do.
00:12
Some of this stuff is from our well house,
00:14
as well as that old structure that we had built in the middle of winter to
00:18
replace our shelter logic. And no surprise,
00:20
we still have more stuff that I need to sort through and add to this storage
00:24
section. And we still have so much left to do before winter settles in,
00:27
and it's definitely getting cooler and it's probably going to soon be time to
00:31
use a rocket mass heater.
00:32
I had gotten these Chuck roasts on sale at the store for buy one, get one free.
00:36
So of course I had to make some beef stew.
00:39
It's one of our all time favorite meals.
00:41
And then I cut up all of the onions I purchased as well as the russet potatoes
00:45
I'm using for this recipe. So then I just layered in my meat, potatoes,
00:48
carrots, onions, garlic puree.
00:50
And then I did salt pepper and time for my seasonings.
00:53
I cleaned the rims with white vinegar,
00:55
put on the flats and rings to finger tight,
00:57
put it in my pressure canner and these pressure canned for 90 minutes.
01:01
I only added broth to about the three quarter mark because the meat will also
01:04
make its own juice. And it turned out so good.
01:06
I cannot wait to have this during winter. Like I said,
01:08
it's our all time favorite meal. We had to cut down more trees.
01:12
We are trying to stay with the already dead standing pine.
01:16
That way we don't have to let them dry out,
01:18
but we are running out of accessible ones.
01:20
So we might just have to deal with some shrinking wood and just call it good.
01:24
Make sure that they're nice and thick and build with them and hope for the best,
01:28
which I don't think will be honestly a very big deal at all.
01:30
We milled all day yesterday between cutting down all the trees that we wanted to
01:35
cut down and then milling them.
01:36
We were outside all freaking day and we were absolutely exhausted last night
01:41
and we only ended up milling like three or four of them because we were just so
01:45
tired. So we definitely have more to get through. So stay tuned for that.
01:48
And hopefully we can start building later this week.
01:51
We are going into Wasilla to pick some things up to help us build.
01:54
We cleared out that huge area behind the house and once we got the skid steer,
01:58
we also pulled out a giant stump that was in our circle drive in order to make
02:02
that circle drive a little bit smaller and give us more room to turn around.
02:06
Once that was done and we got all the gravel done there,
02:09
we started working behind the house. But here is the kind of during phase,
02:14
we ended up adding a lot more gravel as you'll see in the end,
02:17
but the skid steer seriously did a phenomenal job getting everything done that
02:21
we needed to get done. And then next to the well house,
02:24
we also cleared out some stumps and gravel to add another small outbuilding
02:29
there next to it.
02:31
And that'll be probably about twice the size of the well house.
02:34
And we also extended next to where the house is in order to have more room.
02:39
And that's where we're going to put the sawmill.
02:42
And this is what it looks like after now we are so excited.
02:45
It looks amazing and we've gained so much more space and we cannot wait to start
02:50
building the garage. That's going to go back here.
02:52
Thanks so much for watching. I hope you guys enjoyed it.
02:54
Don't forget to follow for more and we'll see you next time.
02:56
[Inaudible]
03:01
(upbeat music)
03:04
[MUSIC]
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