Running water would be nice
And a sewer system
In the winter you freeze your ass while in the summer the smell will floor you.
Solution is to settle in the tropics. No winters and you will smell all year round, all other smells will be masked.
Which only exists in a city
Septic tanks exist, yo.
Source: I live in a forest
Technically a septic tank is not considered a sewer system. A sewer system is a network of pipes, pumps, and other infrastructure designed to transport wastewater for central processing…a septic tank processes the waste on-site.
You are the best kind of correct, buuut yeah, if I flush and the sweetcorn goes somewhere that I don’t have to look at it then that’s enough for me :-)
If I put my septic tank on an adjacent property and also hook up my shed/barn to it (in addition to the cabin), can I call it a sewer system then?
Primitive Technology hasn’t done that yet?
And solar panels and a big battery for electricity. And a good sceptic system so i don’t have to crap in a hole in the ground outdoors 500 feet away from my house. And a good general store in easy driving distance. And a powerful 4x4 vehicle that can get down to the main road even when the giant driveway path is very muddy or covered in 5 feet of snow. And a decent medical facility not too far away so when a health problem arises i don’t lose a limb that could’ve been saved. And a post office not too far away so i can get packages delivered. And and and …
I’d rather have a store within biking / fat biking / skiing / hiking distance to be less reliant on a car. Maybe some electric mobility option like an e-skidoo / ebike.
A poo bucket is not nearly as bad as it sounds. (Saw dust and distance keep the smell down.)
Otherwise, great list.
Counterpoint; a poo bucket is actually exactly as bad as it sounds
Saw dust or whatever, those things stinks. The best part is having people over and mixing all their crap in an enormous bucket 🤢🤮🪣
I have a quite good experience with these, and was surprised how little they smell (but it was an outside toilet with an incredible view)
Mine were always indoors, from those old ones with place for two, to modern ones with a sort of spanner to mix it all… They stink in various degrees up to like impossible. Outside it might be totally okay I guess (if it’s not in the winter or the muskitoes are not on a war path).
Not sure if you have control over it, but the ones I’ve used didn’t even smell when directly smelling over them. Not sure if there was something mixed in there too, to reduce the smell further. The owners used the resulting humus as fertilizer too.
I wonder if there’s some sort of oil you can pour over it so the scent molecules can’t escape into the air
you eat bismuth subgallate and it neutralizes the scent when you digest. it’s for people with missing digestive tracts.
Haha TIL!
at least in statesia the brand name (i swear i’m not going hailcorporate, just some people could use some and personal experience it works a hell of a lot better than poopourri) is devrom and it tends to run 20 to 40 usd for 200 pills. OTC, of course.
Petrol maybe 😁
And the Molotov Crap-tail is born. We did it.
Dry saw dust does a whole lot of work in these toilets.
Wait what? Like you poo in a bucket inside your house?
Yes. Though a dedicated room is very nice.
A “nearly safe for lunch” link (as far as images are concerned). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composting_toilet
you have not smelt my brand
Sounds like Jackson Hole would be perfect! Hope you’re a billionaire…
I think that comes from the roof.
(water incursion is a huge source of anxiety; this place is NOT for me)
That roof looks very modern though. I don’t think there’s any more of a risk of water incursion from the roof than any other house
and air conditioning
Find a stream, dig a well, set up a rain collection system, have a cistern / pump / filter.
Yep, its difficult, but not impossible.
People have been doing that for tens of thousands of years… though I will grant you this is increasingly, unrealistically difficult for an average person to pull off these days, even if you basically learn how to properly do all of it yourself, lots more legal restrictions, and construction/materials are costly.
Just don’t touch the book or listen to the audio tape you find in the cellar.
I absolutely recommend touching the book. The flesh binding and esoteric runes are metal AF and look good on the coffee table.
Just remember that you must say these words exactly when removing the book from its cradle: Klaatu barada nikto.
Okay, I’m drawing a line in the fucking sand, here. Do not read the Latin.
Do not read the Latin.
Counterpoint: you used to be lonely, but now that you have summoned your “friend” you will never ever be alone (now matter how much you try)!
Don’t tell me what to do! 😤
Nah, I still want to live in a community. Just not the fake community we have now.
Also, log cabin homes are bad. The one pictured has the internal space of an efficiency apartment, but uses far more logs of wood to get a much draftier result. You could get a lot of 2x4s out of this thing.
Yea but if a tree falls on it, its going to survive the impact. Which is kind of important in the woods.
Tree falls on your log cabin — now you just have more house.
- Mitch Hedberg
Native Americans came up with plenty of dwellings using the same materials in the same environment. Most of those were far less wasteful. Trees falling are not that common.
Were they permanent dwellings? It’s fascinating how different cultures come up with different construction techniques, if you have any links with more info could you please share them?
Funny enough, a tree just fell on my water tank at camp.
1000$ damage or more are common with tree falls I guess
My case won’t take money to fix so much as all the other pain points. Gotta clean the shed so I can drag the genny out, so I can dump the old gas, put it all back together again, get on a ladder with the electric chainsaw and go to work, in the Florida heat and humidity, hope I don’t get crushed to death like my great uncle. LOL, just not motivated right now! It’ll hold till fall.
Drafty? You know they put isolation between the logs right?
By not opening the logs, you don’t invite moisture to the wood either. If you made them into 2x4’s and didn’t treat them, you’d have rot within a few years. It’s not exactly a coincidence that log cabins where the norm where you had enough wood to support them.
Absolutely not. I was doing Spanish learning on an app and laughed at the guy who moved from “una casa oscura en las afueras” to “un apartmento soleado en el centro” (from the dark and gloomy house in the outskirts to the sunny apartment in the center of town) and raised his spirits because that is also the way I feel about living.
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Honestly, I’d be ecstatic with owning any property right now…
The fact that I’m not only not alone in this, but the sentiment is held by a statistically significant percentage of people… That is the problem.
too many spiders
We all just want to be left alone, in some form or other. Ironically, in order to be left alone, we need to ban together.
You are absolutely right. Our world is imbalanced.
We are a social creature, we are such a social creature shaped by millions of years of cooperative survival, that we literally fall apart and die without social identity. We have “loneliness epidemics” while being more connected to each other than we could have ever imagined.
We desperately need social support, not just from friends and family but from communities. The whole “single family home” is a brand new concept in human society, we used to all live in villages where we knew each other, before that, huge tents and dugouts where we piled together and talked and cooked on fires together and shagged like animals day and night. We raised our kids as a community and nobody ever felt alone or adrift, and in fact being expelled from your community was one of the harshest punishments anyone could do to you.
So why are we all retreating to discord chats and AI text predictors? Why do we want to avoid our neighbors so desperately that we want to remove ourselves even further from our societies?
We are sad because we are alone, and we are alone because we are sad, and we have massive corporate machines pouring every placating, dopamine-numbing distraction down our gullets so we don’t actually start hanging out and socializing and forming communities again. If we did that, we might start sharing ideas and motivations and we might start changing systems… can’t have that! So best to keep reinforcing isolation. Show big, empty minimalist homes with huge TV screens as your “peak” goal in life, having isolated cabins in the woods with all the amenities as a measure of success. We run from people who think different instead of trying to convince them to be better and we argue with people ostensibly on our side and we get so stressed by it all that we do everything we can to turn off actual conscious, narrative thought.
Nah, this and a laptop with 16TB.
Ans offline backups for different wikis and game roms for many gens of consoles and handhelds.
dont doxx my mind pls
Dpending on your definition of ‘fast’, you can pull this off with those newfangled 5G base station/routers.
Just gotta find a place near enough to a city, not too far into the boonies.
Cheaper than Starlink.
Fast enough to game to game on, unless there’s some kind of serious servicd outage or massive weather storm of some kind.
I am using 4G today for internet and its totally fine.
As someone who lives out in those boonies in the middle of a forest, (groceries are a mere 100 mile round trip. I did that yesterday), the internet has had a funny journey here. We pretty much went from dialup to fiber, sometimes it’s good to be last. We’ve had fiber now for 6 or 7 years. While it’s only 2.4G, still fast enough for most people. But weather can make internet and electricity somewhat spotty as winds can blow trees over and the lights go out.
But we still very much behind on cell service. Due to the trees and and hills, towers can be far and few between. Many places have poor to no service. I can sometimes get a text message out in my yard, but making a phone call isn’t happening. And most places I forage or hunt in have no service at all. If I have a heart attack, ain’t no one dialing 911 for me unless they use the land line in the house. Weirdly enough there is one spot one the lake I live on that I can get 5G. It seems to be about a 200 yard circle.
What all of these swaive, 'fisticated, and urbane Ubanites will miss is the “quality of life” they are used to. “Fun things” like movies, concerts, plays, shopping, fine dining, are either miles and miles away or non-existent. Best we can do for you is Brodini being in town for a one Saturday afternoon comedy magic show in the summer. And for shopping, you can always use Amazon and wait a week or two for the shipping.
But I get to sit here this morning, breathing in the smoke from the Canadian forest fires, (we are not quite in the promised orange yet today), and drink my tea over looking a quiet lake and listen to the loon out in front of my house. I think it takes a special mind set to live like this. And most people don’t have it because they don’t know anything different.
Thoreau comes to mind.
Yep… its a different way of life.
Slower, more intentional, less frills, less impulsive, different kinds of worries, different kinds of joys.
I myself am this… really weird sort of person that more or less grew up quite close to that, but alsi loved tech from a young age, went to uni, went to work as a corpo…
And I saw that all this ‘high falutin’ fast life was fun, very engaging, very rewarding in novel ways… but also, just… not ultimately sustainable, not the way we do it in most of the US… too much debt, too much consumerism, too much greed.
“Too many men, too many people, causing too many problems… not much love to go around.”
So, now that … well basically the economy is totally collapsing… well I at least am adaptable, and know how to live lean, do the long term planning I can afford to.
I forget which Bond movie it was, but Desmond Llewelyn’s last line as Q:
Always have an escape plan.
It’s been 50 years or so since I read Thoreau. And honestly, it was a bit of a slog for a teen. Some of what I read I didn’t understand in the moment of my age. But I vividly remember being disappointed in the end that he packed up and went back to town and all things he thought he didn’t want. Why go back? But his words and view of the world did resonate with me and I still think about ol’ Dave now and then.
So come on over this afternoon. I need to pull the grey water pump out of my septic tank to replace the burnt out motor. At least it’s summer and not -10F. And tomorrow we can pull the left rear wheel off the big tractor and drop the fuel tank so I can replace the sender unit for the fuel gage. At least I don’t have fluid in the rear tires and the tank ain’t full of diesel.
These are the types of things most people from the big cities who think about the “idyllic” life tend to not understand are a part and parcel of this life style. If you think you would be fine with those kinds of days, then come out! This is the life for you. And honestly, we also need you.
I’d honestly love to join you, unfortunately, at the moment, I am crippled, doing PT everyday.
It is grueling but it is working… but yeah, at the moment, I couldn’t hack it, I’d just be a drain.
Another 3 or 6 months?
Maybe re-evaluate then.
Like I said, I am familiar with that kind of lifestyle, and… it seems much more appealing, and also rewarding.
…
I am… more or less doing the hermit thing, just in a shitty, but very cheap apartment, spending basically nothing, taking a sabbatical, just slowly building up savings and paying off debt…
Credit Karma tells me I have a better than average credit score for … my age group… which is basically horrifying, as I literally spent a year homeless following bring fucked up in an assault, got my identity and all ids and cards stolen, lost my job…
But somehow, I, really only not literally homeless for about the last 9 months…
Somehow I am doing financially better than average?
Either that’s CK lying, or the US is completely fucked, outside of billionaires.
That’s what I mean when I say… this whole way America does urban society just largely does not work, the economy is currently imploding into Great Depression 2.0, but this time, instead of Hoovervilles, we’re gonns have concentration camps for the homeless.
I just barely escaped the cutoff point on being in that statistic, but, if SSDI gets pared down… well then no actually, I didn’t.
Fun stuff to live in ‘interesting’ times.
…
EDIT: Well shit.
You are apparently in Minnesota, apologies for ‘stalking’ / browsing your entirely public comment history.
My plan for uh, not dying in the next decade actually has been to get to Minnesota as soon as my legs and back can actually handle it…
Lots of fresh water, not a deep red state, seems to be the … least likely to get completely fucked by the coming widespresd increase of climate disasters, also has a pretty reasonable CoL, as well as a reasonably stable and varied economic mix, half the country is doing a housing market nose dive, not MN, seems like it avoided a good deal of speculation.
I guess if you’ve got any general… relocation tips, some fairly quiet town or neighborhood for me to land in MN, maybe end of this year, maybe next year, I’d appreciate it.
Best I can say is if medical care is an important need for you, then you will need to look at the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area. Rural areas lack much of the health care you might need. As a retired medic that worked in rural areas, I’m not lying when I say if I were to have a heart attack at home, I’m probably very dead before help can arrive.
While Minnesota shows as a mostly blue state, that is because we have one large metropolitan area that dominates the rest of the state. And outside of that metro region, the rural 80% of the state skews from purple to red.
Otherwise, plan on long cold winters that can grind some people mentally and what to us is warm and very humid summers. We are an outdoors people that enjoy the 3 months of summer and spend as much of our time outdoors as possible. Preferably on a lake in a boat, we own a LOT of boats. Even in winter we find snowmobiling, skiing, and ice fishing as popular hobbies. We are all about the outdoors for sure.
As far as the denizens of the state go, we are Minnesota Nicetm to everyone, but as individuals we are mostly stoic and often wary of outsiders. And the farther you get from the cites, the more that becomes apparent. So it can be difficult to build friendships. You can live in a town for 20 years years and still be considered the “new people”. Or you can be accepted and welcomed immediately. YMMV for sure.
If you decide to move here, I wish you luck. As a whole, we are a good and helpful place to live. But there can be bumps on the road of life here also.
Best I can say is if medical care is an important need for you, then you will need to look at the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area. Rural areas lack much of the health care you might need. As a retired medic that worked in rural areas, I’m not lying when I say if I were to have a heart attack at home, I’m probably very dead before help can arrive.
Makes sense, I believe you.
My idea is to make the move after I am more mobile, more healed.
At the moment, I am doing PT at home, after getting some inital PT sessions and them giving me printed out worksheets.
No real point in paying for more visits when I just do exactly the same thing at the PT center, as what I do at home.
While Minnesota shows as a mostly blue state, that is because we have one large metropolitan area that dominates the rest of the state. And outside of that metro region, the rural 80% of the state skews from purple to red.
Yep, I’ve seen the county level voting maps, who runs city governments of Minneapolis, St Paul, Rochester, Winona, Duluth, St Cloud, Brainerd, Bemidji… and I’m originally from the Seattle area, pretty much exact same region political pattern.
Otherwise, plan on long cold winters that can grind some people mentally and what to us is warm and very humid summers. We are an outdoors people that enjoy the 3 months of summer and spend as much of our time outdoors as possible. Preferably on a lake in a boat, we own a LOT of boats. Even in winter we find snowmobiling, skiing, and ice fishing as popular hobbies. We are all about the outdoors for sure.
All sounds amazing to me, again, grew up in the PNW, lots and lotsa outdoorsy culture as well, particularly boating, hiking, hunting.
Though, our winters are nowhere near as harsh generally, but I know what a lot of actual snow is like, the Cascade foothills and towns often get around as much snow as what ya’ll just get generally, and I’ve spent a few winters in 3 to 6 feet of snow up there, know how to dress and drive in snow.
As far as the denizens of the state go, we are Minnesota Nicetm to everyone, but as individuals we are mostly stoic and often wary of outsiders. And the farther you get from the cites, the more that becomes apparent. So it can be difficult to build friendships. You can live in a town for 20 years years and still be considered the “new people”. Or you can be accepted and welcomed immediately. YMMV for sure.
And we have the ‘Seattle Freeze’ or ‘Seattle Chill’ over in western WA, basically the same thing.
Whole lotta Fins and Swedes and Norweigans seem to be the reason for that, were the first large groups of white people that settled in both MN and western WA, set the sort of cultural norms that largely still persist…
… and I already am that same way too, hahah.
…
Not to be too blunt, but geographically, Minnesota basically seems like western WA, but flat, with harsher winters, and a lack of salt water giving that lovely smell… that also corrodes everything metal more quickly.
Plus tornadoes.
Less volcanoes though, less earthquakes.
Roughly same amount of forest fire and smoke either in the area or coming down from Canada.
…
If you decide to move here, I wish you luck. As a whole, we are a good and helpful place to live. But there can be bumps on the road of life here also.
I appreciate it, and your rundown here.
Lets just say in terms of moving, all I’d really have to do is … find an apartment to move into, pack all my shit into a rental uhaul, and drive something like 3-6 hours east on I 90 / north on other highways.
I just have to get to the point where I can physically manage the packing all my shit into a uhaul part.
Well, and/or figure out just some kind of rental situation that’ll actually allow me to do a cross state lines, fairly long haul move, that doesn’t wipe me out financially.
I guess starlink is your only choice then? Or some other ISP that can extort you, since its your only option in the countryside?
I live in the city and still only have one option that extorts me. Yeehaw.
Could meshtastic reach 56K?
Nah, fuck this. This isolationist mentality from larpers is what lead us to this fucking mess. This is fucking terrible, and people shouldn’t be living in this shit, and 99% of those who tried know it.
Damn. God forbid people romanticize having some peace and quiet.
I mean yeah… cities aren’t loud, cars are loud.
I live in a village but between semi-trucks, loud motorcycles, and trucks with mufflers modified to be louder that you can hear from miles as they motor away… it’s too loud for how much nowhere there is here, particularly during midday.
Isolated hut in the woods is about the farthest thing from peaceful and quiet you can get.
Counterpoint: I tried and I want to leave this broken society even more now (especially since societal enshitification seems to even accelerate).
Though you still need social contacts (that you really like) to avoid loneliness, so in case you have that, it’s a wonderful, peaceful and healthy way to live more in harmony with nature, but it’s a lot of work nonetheless.
Take it from someone who actually experienced living in a remote isolated place. It’s as far as peaceful, healthy, and quiet lives you can imagine. You’re not a druid from a larp, and you’re not an animal born in a ditch, you will not be in “harmony” with nature, whatever the fuck you mean by it, you will be in a constant opposition to it, in a fight for your life, and “the nature” will consume you in the end. I know you’re not one of those people who actually thrives in that environment, I know it because we’re talking on the internet, and weird forest isolationists don’t talk to other people on the internet.
All that remote hut bullshit is a sham perpetuated by antisocial weirdos and scammers that sell buckets of prep food you can shit in.Ok, right the details are a lot of work to “survive”. In case you’re really completely isolated from society. I agree with that. Definition of harmony is what I probably missed (I did not necessarily mean the romantic understanding of it), you’re a lot more dependent on it. I did though in fact live somewhat remote for some time (as volunteer) and did indeed thrive there, I like hard rather primitive work in nature. The exact circumstances are also important (i.e. does it rain a lot, is climate mild, is winter hard (heating etc.)). But… you actually do stuff that makes sense, as your survival depends on it. Not like having to fix zillions of bugs in an overabstracted frontend, having to deal with incompetent but arrogant and power hungry bosses and all that artificial stress we have put our lives in. Or having to read the non ending negative influx of idiocracy that Trump produces everyday.
I rather like to keep things more fundamental. And I think if you’re up for it (i.e. active/fit, craftly etc.) it can be fullfilling. Obviously it’s not as romantic as you probably imagine most of the time. But I rather like to deal with this than having to get angry about society not seeing that our probably most important problem is climate change and not migrants etc. and not caring enough about it.
😂 poor little guy. What would you even do without DoorDash?!
There’s no way you could hack it, so there’s absolutely no way many, (MANY) other people could!
Oh, a bunch of people really believe they can and should live in isolation from society. Some of them really are. Most of them have or about to have a mental illness that is exacerbated by fearmongering from all the weird groups, and isolation transitions them from kinda weird guys that need a bit of help, to full on psychos. Just look what a little bit of covid isolation did to so many people, and they had zoom.
Of course I couldn’t “hack it” in social isolation, but neither do you, and your doordash comment only shows that you actually have very little idea what you’re talking about.
I legit almost had that dream. Used to live on the KY/TN border. Had 50 acres, half mile off the road and no neighbors. Right as I determined I was moving the local power company started their own fiber ISP. Brought fiber right up to the house.
Well that and food. Might need food to survive.
Theres food in the forest, I’ll need a oversized soaking tub.
You gotta pick a fuckton of berries and hunt a lot of squirrels unless you have both the acres and knowledge to actually farm and homestead.
Depending on where you are long pork is an option, people go missing in national parks all the time what’s a few more?
While I was going to make a point about diseases being transmittable through human meat, it did remind me that CWD, or Zombie Deer Disease is raging across now a third of the US or so, and a huge swath of Canada as well. It’s a prion disease, not a virus or bacteria, there is no cure or antidote, cannot be cooked out and can even survive autoclaves, and it’s 100% fatal over time, and we have no real good idea how it’s spreading or how readily it can be transmitted to humans. (There have already been some infections.)
If you do ever end up in the woods, do not eat the deer unless you’re starving and even then, avoid lymph nodes, brains and organ meat generally. Even still they think it can be spread from blood.
I’d spear hunt the boar I don’t like deer.
Fishing if you are near the sea is an option too. Stick a few pots out in the morning, go check them in the afternoon for your dinner. Even with string I have managed to catch some big spider crabs in just a few minutes. A pot should get you loads. Seaweed for some veg on the side.
If the waters here were not so polluted I could be eating crab/lobster every day!
Been living like this for over a decade in south east asia and its incredible. Got all of my tech gadgets, 1gbps, jungle, beach, rescue dogs and occasional road trip to the city. If you can earn 3k usd/mo remotely you can have all of this too!
