Living Off The Grid

As some of you may know, my wife and I have been looking high and low for the right place to buy land. We both want to continue working our good “city jobs” for awhile because our ultimate goal is to move into a home on some land debt free, and the only way to do that is for us to make good money where we’re at now and save every penny for an eventual move.

BUT, we wanted to secure the land for several reasons. First of all, property is cheap right now and interest rates are low. Secondly, aside from a few volcanic eruptions in the pacific and some engineering feats in Dubai and Japan, we’re not making any more land. There is only so much land and it’s getting chopped up and subdivided and developed and polluted… and we just want that little piece to call “home” even if we’re not going to move there yet.

Our search first took us to the Rocky Mountains (in our own backyard) but having lived in Denver for several years we are acutely aware of the pending water shortage in this part of the country. This throws a serious wrench into the gears of any wannabe homesteader (My meetup.com group).

So we moved our search for property on to Oregon and Northern California, but the prices were too high and I’m not a big fan of forest fires. Also, property taxes were a bit oppressive for what we want to do.

We then set our sites on the Ozark mountains because land was super cheap there, but in the end decided that we didn’t quite fit into the culture and, more importantly, it was way too darned humid during the summer.

Then we found Asheville, North Carolina and fell in love. It had the perfect mixture of Bluegrass roots, self-reliant mountain attitude and urban, progressive, tolerant culture. We took a week off of work each and spent the entire time looking at properties, but couldn’t find anything that would make a good homestead for under $10,000 an acre – WAY too expensive.

Feeling a bit bummed about the whole thing, we dragged ourselves back home and sulked for a few days. Then we picked our heads up and decided to continue our search in the Appalachian hills of Tennessee, Northern North Carolina and Southwestern Virginia, where we eventually found Floyd, VA.

Research online told us that Floyd, home of the annual Floydfest, could be a match for us. So we booked a flight to Roanoke for the weekend, rented a car and headed down to look at some land. But not before spending the day in Roanoke and checking out the great shops, food co-ops and museums. We liked the city and could see ourselves coming into town every once in awhile for a night out or a day walking around.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much on the market in Floyd proper while we were there, but we found a diamond in the rough that we fell in love with down near Hillsville, VA. The town of Hillsville isn’t has diverse as Floyd, but our property is conveniently located between the Blue Ridge Parkway and Interstate 77, and the town hosts one of the biggest flea markets in the country twice every year. And when I say “big” I mean BIG! Check out this picture.

Long story short, we bought the property. It isn’t “off grid” technically, but I’ve always said that living off the grid is more a state of mind than the literal interpretation of being disconnected from the electricity grid. We will be looking into solar and wind, having both a hilltop and a southish-facing property.

We don’t plan on moving out there within the next year or two (we want to save up enough to move out Debt Free / Mortgage Free) but it’s there and it’s ours. We just need to find a caretaker and we’re good to go.

It has 15 acres, a 1,200 sq foot 1950s farm house, a huge barn, a well, spring, brook and trout stream, 9 acres of fenced pasture, a 1 acre fenced in yard, and a 5 acre wood lot. There is a small 10-tree apple and pear orchard on the property and several usefull outbuildings. The house is in decent shape, although it could use a bit of work here and there to bring it back to it’s full glory.

So there you have it. After traveling all over the world looking for the place where I belong (living in Australia, Hawaii, Indonesia…) and searching all over the US for a little slice of freedom, I’m coming home. My entire family on both sides of both sides comes from Appalachia (From TN, KY and NC) and in fact I’ll be heading off to Southeastern Kentucky this Memorial Day weekend for a Sizemore Familiy reunion. Driving around the hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, I couldn’t help but feel that we made the right decision and, even though most of my family is from Kentucky and Tennessee, the geography and Blue Ridge Mountain culture had a visceral effect on me that I can’t quite explain, except to say that it just felt like… home.