Delivering 20,000 lbs of Off Grid Cabin Building Materials

Ever thought about kicking society to the curb and building an off grid home?

We did! And today we just got all the building materials delivered.

We’re about to take you on the adventure of a lifetime. OK, in reality it’s OUR adventure of a lifetime but, it’s our hope that it will inspire and educate others to do what we’re doing and that’s buying your own piece of land, building an off grid home, and living a nearly zero cost, safe, happy and healthy life as possible!

Welcome To Delivery Day

After planning the cabin floor plan,shopping for land, trail blazing and ordering we finally get the building materials delivers. Getting the building materials for our off grid cabin “area” is easy enough. Getting it down to the build site… whole other bag of worms. It’s been months in planning and preparation and finally, the process has begun.

We got off to a slow start and in fact, delayed 10 days. The snow this year in Halifax has been historic and that caused a domino effect that resulted in changed flights for my folks, who are helping us with the build, to having to purchase an ATV and a folding utility trailer to get the building material down to the build site, to having to use a hand blazed trail to access the build site. We ended up transporting most of the building materials by hand/ATV down to the build site.

But finally… we’ve begun.

We Have To Carry All This Where?

Rule #1…

Nothing is ever as easy as it’s first seems on paper. Ever!

So to quickly bring you up to speed and give you a little history…

We’ve been planning this build for well over 6 months now and we’re sharing the entire experience with you in order to teach who ever is interested in exactly how we did it. At first it was just a way to log our build and look back years from now. Something our family would be proud of for a couple generations to come. What happened when I started sharing these posts on Facebook was astonishing. First hundreds, then thousands, and now tens of thousands of people are following along with our cabin build. Welcome to the digital era of blogging!

The Build Site….

You can see more of the land here and read how we saved $20K off the price as a result of a typo! True story :)

Our build site is directly off of a 650ft off private gravel lane (which came with the property we purchased) then then another 650ft further down a shallow slopped, thickly forested hillside to the edge of a small lake called Dark Pond.

We did a complete post detailing the cabin floor plan here.

Below you can see how “rough” our first attempts were.

This went from a discussion in front of a white board, with dry erase markers in hand, to a completed cabin!

Building A Temporary Workshop

In order to accommodate me and my Dad during the build, we put together a 10ft X 18ft wooden floor in order to set-up a 10 man tent that will house the temporary toilet, some electrical and hand tools , nails and the interior doors. We also have a smaller tent in case of a surprise down pour for somewhere to toss the tools we’re using.

Getting Materials to the Build Site

The new Yamaha Grizzly 550 and folding utility trailer that we’ll use to bring all the building materials down to the build site.
Yes, this is the trail we will be driving all the materials down.
Here’s a VIDEO of that trail.

A 75 cubic foot storage shed for the tools/generator. Will make a great place to store dry firewood when we’re done!

A storage box like this or the one below has been a lifesaver for storing the generator, tools, gas & oil, propane tanks, tarps, and even wood!

We are still using this box long after the build and I have to say.. this is one of the things you cannot do an off grid build without. I imagine some people try and keep all their tools on site under a tarp and that will rust your tools out faster than anything. This kept everything in excellent condition, dry, and safe.

Keter Extra Large Deck Box

Home Depot Arrives 

Home Depot finally arrived with roughly 20,000 lbs of building material.

Here’s a glimpse into Day #1 of getting the materials to the top of Hidden Lane.

Home Depot used a pretty cool forklift called a “Moffit” to bring our materials to the top of Hidden Lane…