Well Worth the Troubles
February 19, 2025
One day, a friend who had been curious about our progress asked me why I had only shown photos of beautiful end results, and only wrote about positive outcomes of our projects.
I was, on the contrary, convinced that I had shown a good balance of both; the beautiful and the ugly. I had only realized after our intense conversation, that perhaps I had left out some details that would give you the right lens—or more accurately “prescribed” lens, to see our life unfold each step along the way.
A Sought After Lifestyle?
House flipping and off-grid living blogs and videos, as a whole on the internet have a much romanticized following. For the sake of attracting views and interests, house “flippers” and “off-gridders” often give the impression of a glorified life (intentional or unintentional). It remains to be true that there are elements of this lifestyle that do make it very enjoyable—even exhilarating for some.
When the focus is primarily on choosing colours for your walls and furniture; creating spaces custom to your personal taste and style; and envisioning your happy family—your children gawking over the new, brightly lit living room where the whole clan can lounge in the big comfortable couch—scarfing down handfuls of popcorn while enjoying a family movie (this is really not the norm here).
Planning Our Days
The reality is, and it still stands to be true to this very moment, apart from the exciting side of colour choosing and space designing, we are in the midst of keeping warm with a pellet stove that hums 24/7 at its maximum capacity. We are manually pumping water into containers from our well for all household use (aside from drinking). We are watching the weather diligently to plan our days accordingly.
More Than Just an Inconvenience
Whichever category our current life adventure falls under, as the question has been posed to our kids: whether or not they will choose to live a life like this again? They have vehemently answered NO!
NO to not having clean laundry at the convenience of running a load at a need-by-need basis at the push of a button; NO to having their belongings being stored away in a semi to non-organized fashion in one of the temporary, less than ideal storage options available to us; NO to a predictable routine where our pre-planned schedule has remained stable. NO to living in colder than average temperatures during winter, stormy days.
Perhaps it is the combination of off-gridding and house flipping that makes the challenge as formidable as it has been for this family during the last two years. Or the fact that we have been doing major “live-in” renovation projects, non-stop for the past four years. Renovation fatigue is a real phenomenon.
Winter Off-Grid Challenges
Living on electricity reserved from our battery bank, which has been sparsely charged between heavily overcast days (sometimes almost week-long ones) from our solar panels. By consequence, we run our generator to supply the demand of running our home—after conservatively turning off all lights unused; unplugging all plugs in the home other than those essentials such as our pellet stove and and gas cooking/oven stove (which is surprisingly a beast on electricity when in use).
In such times, we also by-pass taking showers and opt to using paper plates, plastic cups, and disposable utensils to off set the need to use our jugs of emergency water to wash and clean. As we’ve been blessed to have great friends in the neighbourhood, when we are at our wits end and need dishes cleaned, and a nice hot shower, we call our sweet friends and they accept our request at the drop of a hat!
Inclement weather in our area, especially high winds from the north and west, have plummeted our interior temperature to below 10 degrees C in the main living area (bedrooms on the second floor are even cooler) while still having our main source of heat running at full blast. As our home has not been fully insulated, the driving, howling wind pushes through our walls causing icy draft to be felt as we sit on the couch doing school work.
The windchill factor further compounded our discomfort by freezing both the pipes from the well to the pump, as well as freezing the water pipes below in the crawl space that is still open to wind tunnelling—a problem we have already acknowledged our first winter in this home, but have not gotten to the stage of our renovations where we could permanently resolve the issue.
By-Passing Certain Comforts
As a home-maker, it has been disheartening to turn on the faucet after having made breakfast but have no means of washing hands or dishes—or for that matter, doing the mountain piles of laundry neglected weeks prior. I have lowered my standards of running a home efficiently during winter—based on the recurring incidences of no running water (or running water but no hot water).
It would not be far from the truth to mention that I’ve also by-passed cooking special meals for lack of motivation or means; I’ve abandoned bread baking while it still being in the oven—and our power suddenly cut-out, and we had forgotten to run to town to fill our Jerry cans of gas in order to run the generator to power our oven.
Some days are simple and straightforward. Other days are full of house emergencies and all my attention is focused on getting us out of trouble. It is the reality my family faces in exchange for the alternative life of a husband leaving the house for work at 6am in freezing cold temperatures for construction work and coming home past 6pm to only find himself completely tuckered out on the couch for the rest of the evening. Come summer time, his work is even busier.
The kids used to get up at 5:30 in the morning to see their father off to work before heading back to bed for another two hours, and getting up and out the door just in time for the school bus to arrive. However, during that season of our life, rarely did I worry about being behind on laundry piles; even more rarely did I worry about frozen water pipes even though our winter temperatures often dipped below -20 degrees C.
The days in a row of freezing temperatures in the south shore of Nova Scotia has sent our family on a frenzy of bottling water (after having our pipes frozen yet again) from friends’ and neighbours’; sleeping as a family of six on our large sectional (sometimes with our winter jackets and hats still on and under thick duvets); and cooking and baking as often as we have clean pots and pans to do so while, running the generator for such a task—leaving the oven door ajar after baking to let the heat raise our average room temperature to a half degree.
House Emergencies
As these pictures reveal—some of the inconveniences of being in mid-project during a major rainstorm, is the result of roof leaks just before 5 am one Spring morning last year.
We woke up to one of the kids complaining about drips over their bed. The driving wind with a heavy downpour of rain overnight, caused water to leak through crevices along the roof beams. The kids got to work immediately scrounging for buckets and containers to place under steady drips along our ceiling beams and pod lights. Some threw towels and mopped the large puddles accumulated on our living room and kitchen floors.
Meanwhile, Michiel and I exited our living quarters to go out and around our house, upstairs to quickly and urgently contain the waters streaming from various locations. I spent a few hours vacuuming as much of the water on the floors as possible while Michiel continued to examine the structures, looking for new leaks. It was an exceptional day for us. The kids spent the rest of the morning fast asleep on the couch.
More recently, upon returning from a family trip, we found ourselves in a frigid house with sad-looking and dead house plants. Fortunately, we arrived in time to save most of the plants. It so happened that, if we had returned a day sooner, we would have kept our home from plummeting temperatures below zero.
Counting Ourselves Blessed
These have been just a few examples of day-to-day living in the adventures that is ours. As much as it is daunting and unpredictable to live a life like this, we count ourselves blessed and well-taken care of.
The struggle is definitely there, but the end result will be well-worth the effort—and more so, our kids will one day tell the tale to their kids: the life they’d never dared to live (willingly)—yet the best life they’d dreamed to have lived as a family.
Please keep us in your prayers, dear friends and family.
Stay warm and safe during these wintery storms.
Good night and sweet dreams to you all.
