I have hit the wall. In our current RV, I’m not sure what more we can do to improve things. I’ve found that many newer RVs are even coming with builtin smart home technology, meaning much of what I’m trying to do is coming already installed from the factory. Add to it that we don’t want to live in any RV, let alone this one, for much longer, and well, the wall of inefficiency hits us head on.
We will likely move into an apartment when we are done with this RV, and much of the tech, though not all of it, will stay with the RV and its next owners. That doesn’t do anything for my need for projects and my need to tinker though.
I still want to eventually live off grid. I want to be able to build a small house away from people with good enough climate and land to be able to grow our own food and live self-sufficiently. I want to have tech that I know how to work with and repair when things go wrong. I want to be able to grow as much of our own food as possible. I still have an issue with raising animals and slaughtering them for meals, but there may be ways around getting meat and protein that don’t involve shopping at Walmart.
I would like to design our house to be comfortable in winter and summer. To have air conditioning when we need it, and yet hopefully rarely need it. I want to have water from a well that is reliable and repairable. I want to have internet access since that will always be our connection to the outside world. I still want to have media to consume, both new and old. I want to be able to wake up in the morning, have a list of chores I need to do them, and no one telling me what I need to get done. I’d like to just know what I need to do and just do it.
I would like our power to be 100% solar. That is a huge cost up front though. Well, not huge compared to some family’s budgets, but pretty big for ours. If could find land somewhere within driving distance in one day, I could load up a trailer, take everything up there, work for awhile, maybe a week, and then come back to the home base to recuperate. If I can plan everything properly, I can have everything cut properly so it jigsaws together when I get there and I can put it all together by myself. Or mostly myself, I may need help with something things that are too large to do on my own.
I can leave some items up there locked up, but much of it I’d probably bring home and store the trailer in a locked unit to keep it safe. Tools and a generator would need to come back and forth.
If it takes awhile, then that is fine. That would give us the opportunity to plant some items that will came back year after year as well as trees that need time to go to fruit. Then when its all done, we just up and move there and retire.
There are some things I cannot do on my own, mainly a well and waste water treatment. If we go the composting toilet route, we don’t even need a septic tank, just a way to treat grey water so it doesn’t damage the environment. As we transition to chemicals that do no damage, we wouldn’t have to worry about that either. No bad in means no bad out.
If we can make all our own food, then there is no garbage to speak of either. Just a compost pile for plant matter and we’ll have to figure something out for fauna waste.
This is not cheap, nor easy. But it is doable if we can plan properly and do it right. This is not the next stage of our lives, but hopefully one a few steps down the road.
