Category: Cabin and Car living

There was a green fair in town this weekend. Saturday there were talks on different subjects like solar and wind power and alternative housing.

One speaker pounded his drum and told us about his plan to make affordable hogan style huts for people. He brought a cardboard replica of his hut. They are six sided and come in pieces. They sport a dome roof with a skylight in the middle. The walls are thick foam, sandwiched between two-by-fours. You spread chicken wire on the outside and stucco it. and on the inside he recommends sheet rock. The kits will cost 5000 dollars–10,000 by the time you have them all finished and come with a party that helps you put them together; then you help the next people put theirs together.

On Sunday we went on a tour of alternative homes:

This is called an earthbag house. It was made by filling bags with earth and stacking them up. ( They also added a little cement to the earth because they didn’t have a high enough clay content) Every row you move in a little bit. Then they plastered the outside with dirt, straw and flour paste. Next coat they will add lime to the plaster mix for the bottom but the top will be planted like a big Chia-Pet.

This is what it looks like from the inside. They haven’t plastered the inside yet so you can see all the bags. They put a plexi-glass dome on the top. To make a loft they stuck logs across a section while they were building and then piled the bags on top of them.

This is the outside of an unfinished straw bale house. It’s a six sided round house that is being built to code and will include a bathroom. To build a straw bale house, you frame it then pile straw bales between the beams. Next you wrap it in chicken wire and plaster it.

This is a 1800 square foot, built-to-code, straw bale house with the first coat of lime plaster over it. This was a very beautiful house with naturally colored plasters and tile floors inside.

The 1800 sq ft house runs off solar power. This is their closet for their storage batteries.

This is a hard sided yurt with a soft top. He got the outer soft top from a place that makes yurts. He sewed the inner canvas top and between the two layers he added two layers of reflective bubble wrap. He built an addition to it when his daughter came to live with him. He hauls water, heats with wood and has a couple of solar panels for power.

This is the inside of the yurts. The dome skylight in the middle of the roof lets in lots of light.

A reader of this blog has been asking for a tour of my cabin. I was going it do a you-tube video but decided it would take to long to upload with a dial-up connection. The cabin measures 19’X 11″. I didn’t build it. I talk about two different cabins, one in Coastal BC and one in North Central Washington. This is the one in Washington– the one from which I blog from.

This is the outside. The cooler on the porch is where I keep my food cold–probably not a good idea because a bear might come and find it and then I would have troubles.

Two couches–good idea if you ever have company or if you just want a change.

This couch is a chest that my brother-in-law and I made out of tongue and grove pine. Inside the couch/chest are the batteries and the the regulator for my solar system and some clothes.

This is the kitchen.

This is the wood stove. The pot holds my hot water. The tub next to the wood stove is used to bring wood in, wash my clothes and sometimes I take a bath in it.

This is the loft. There is a bed up there and a 55 gallon drum of water that gravity feeds to the sink below it.

This is what I cook on. Sometimes I also cook on the wood stove. There is a small propane grill out on the porch if I want to grill or bake something.

This is my composting toilet.

I also have this outside toilet that sits out in the woods. It is a plywood box with a toilet seat lid that sits over a hole in the ground.

The basin hanging on the wall is usually full of water. I use the same water over and over to wash my hands during the day. When the water looks dirty, I start over with new water. I can keep clean (enough for a person who lives alone and seldom sees anyone) with just this basin.

Here is the solar panel soaking up the rays so I can use my laptop.

That’s the whole complete tour.

This is how I make my coffee: I put some ground coffee in a one liter Nalgene bottle and add boiling water. When the coffee grounds sink to the bottom, after a few minutes, I pour some of it into a cup and drink.

This works really well for me because my cabin is often literally freezing in the mornings and the hot Nalgene bottle serves double duty as a hot water bottle to warm me up while it brews my coffee.

Don’t worry about the Nalgene bottle getting soft and a little deformed; it will pop back and regain it’s original shape later. I have poured boiling water into Nalgene bottles hundreds if not thousands of times and have never had one fail me.

Related post: The better Nalgene 

The best napkin is a dish towel or hand towel. It’s big and absorbent and much nicer and cheaper to use than paper towels. I use the same one over and over for weeks, before I wash it out. A dark towel is best because it doesn’t look dirty for a long time and the stains won’t show as bad.

When I first abandoned my life in the city for the simple life of living in a cabin, I also abandoned having a phone, and since my cabin was in the middle of no-where, it didn’t even have an address. Life is more beautiful and serene without a phone or an address. There is a peacefulness to a life where no one can contact you, but when you want to interact with the world of people, it makes life more difficult and frustrating.

My son had a family plan with his cell carrier that I could get a phone for 10 dollars a month, so, even though I don’t have cell service at either of my cabins, I have had a way for people to contact me and leave a message for the past 3 years.

One day, I was driving down the road and I saw a man getting mail out of his mailbox. I enviously thought, “Oh, look at him, getting mail out of his mailbox.� I thought to my self, “You know, you could probably have a mailbox if you really wanted one.� That’s one of the reasons I bought this cabin: because I wanted a mailbox.

After I had been at my cabin for a while I started looking into getting a land line because there is no cell service here. I was excited to get a phone at my cabin. I can lie on my couch and call someone and I can use the Internet anytime I want.

Lately, I have been using a free service called Grand Central. It’s run by Google. Apparently Google bought all of these phone numbers. You ask for a phone number in whatever area code and prefix you want. They didn’t have my town but they did have a town nearby that is toll-free. Then you list all of your numbers–work, cell, and home–and all of your numbers go to one “grand central number.” Then you have one local number that you can give people that won’t change when you do.

Since I have a dial up connection, when I’m on the internet (which is often) I can’t get calls. So, what this service does is record a message from the caller and sends me an e-mail that I have a message at Grand Central. I then go to the Grand Central web page and listen to the message.

When I cancel my phone in the spring and restart it in the fall my number changes. With this service, I can keep the same number. I’m not sure what Grand Central gets out of it.

I got to thinking; would a person really even need to have a phone to use the service. Say, you are moving around a lot and you don’t have a phone; you could get a Grand Central number and check your e-mail at the library to see if you had any messages. I asked technical guru LaenFinehack about this. He said that for most people they want it tied to a phone number. But if you are homeless they have a program called “Project CARE”, where homeless people can get a number.

It was really windy today. In town, there were tumbleweeds blowing everywhere. I decided to buy a string of 12 volt LED lights from the guy at The Solar Shop and decorate a tumbleweed for the holidays.

The lights are hard wired to my storage batteries and only draw 1 amp hour all day. They look pretty, but I was hoping they would give off more light. I might wire them to a cigarette lighter plug so I can unplug them.

Update: Once my eyes adjusted to the darkness these were okay. Giving off at least enough light to find my headlamp.

Once I had company. They objected to not having their bread toasted. I bought this camp stove toaster at Wal-mart. You can toast a bunch of bread all at once. They came again. I made them toast.

Cautionary note: It comes flat and is supposed to fold up flat. I did something wrong in the begining; I can’t get mine to fold flat. It’s a bit of a puzzle so be mindful when setting it up.