Hi!
Several years ago I was sitting in an office behind a computer and reached one of those personal moments that so many of us homesteader/permaculture/back-to-the-land types have: the moment of, "I hate this, I need to change my life and live in a cabin in the woods."
I did change my life, deeply. I quit my job, spent a year travelling and doing WWOOFing-like things on natural building projects, dove deeply into eco construction online, I bought books, and even changed my line of work to working in construction so that I could build things full-time, even if I was in the world of 'normal' construction.
But I've done all this without ever buying land or really making any concrete steps towards living that dream. The biggest reason is just that I got deeply spooked by the number of people I'd met who bought land, went into debt, and then failed to set up a viable life, usually because they knew little about building and/or hadn't worked out a way to make a living. The number of half-completed projects I'd seen that were so similar to my own caused me to pull back and resume a regular life, though I now work in construction full-time and not in an office.
I'm posting here because I'm getting impatient again and I'm wanting to move forward somehow with this thing. I've got savings, but I've never bought land in my life and it's daunting. I've researched a lot of eco-building techniques, but most of the things I want to do are fairly unconventional by the standards of building inspectors, and things like building permits and inspections give me the willies. I really like the idea of earth-sheltering, but that automatically means that the usual code-dodging trick of making a 'temporary building' on wheels won't work.
I'm feeling discouraged and overwhelmed at all the problems attached to this thing, so I'm reaching out hoping for positive examples of success, specifically in Nova Scotia or New Brunswick. (I'm from Nova Scotia and have no ties at all to New Brunswick, but land is often cheaper there and I've heard the inspectors are more favorable to us permie-types). Anyone out there living the off-grid dream? How did you get set up? How problematic/expensive is it to deal with the government? Anyone making a viable living doing this, ie, not constantly going into debt?
Above all - how did you get land to do it all on, without running into any traps?
Thanks for any and all replies. I'm really hoping to make this kind of lifestyle my future.
