Tour of the Off-Grid Tiny House Built from the Land

Welcome to the off-the-grid tiny house built from the land and from second-hand materials here at Le Rêve de Gaia in southern France. This tiny house serves as a demonstration site for sustainable and simple living to help you be able to live more sustainably and simply wherever you are in the world. Today I'm going to give you a tour of the house and the setup and show you how you can adapt these things at home wherever you are to live a more simple and sustainable life. In my last video I already showed the whole building process from tree to tiny house. You can watch that video just to recap on that a little bit. All of the wood for this tiny house was actually from trees that were harvested sustainably right here on site and then milled right here on site as well. The other aspects are all second-hand. So the doors and the windows, those were left over. Companies that install new doors and windows throw out the old ones when they replace them. Everything else pretty much is second-hand material. Stuff that was laying around at the farm. Stuff salvaged from the landfill. And this entire thing cost under a hundred dollars including the little bit of materials that we did need to buy. The gasoline and the screws. Just some very basic stuff. I want to take you inside and show you everything else. So here I am on the bed inside the tiny house and the lesson here is that we don't need a lot to live sustainably. In fact the less we need the more we can simplify the easier it actually is to live sustainably. So this place is about really stripping back to the basics. Showing a way of simplifying and being happy with what we have rather than always wanting more. There's a simple comfortable bed here and then on the other side here there's going to be a second bed as well. The shelves are all made from wood here on site. Really simple. Just screws and wood and some small shelves here as well for some basic items. Just next to the bed here we have a little seating area and then you can see how the storage works. Just comes right out from underneath the bed and it's the perfect size for some simple crates to go under. Here you can see the shelves that were built on both sides. Very simple to be able to store basic items. And then above me here we have spots for hanging clothes. Some clothes hangers here and if it's raining outside and you can't hang dry your clothes outside this is a good place to be able to dry some clothes as well. It's a comfortable place. It's designed to have great lighting because this is off the grid. There's actually not electricity here. So for light there is a headlamp which this one light lights up the place quite a bit and then that can be charged back at the community and then there's candles as well. So that's the inside of the tiny house. As you can see very simple but very comfortable and a wonderful place to just work on living simply and connecting to the basics and just being happy, being outside, being in nature, loving the world that we live in. Continuing on with loving the world it's about the way we interact with the world. So next I'm going to take you outside to show you what we do there. Most of the food here is grown on the farm in the big fields where a lot of food is grown. But here next to the tiny house we have a simple raised bed garden and I wanted to put this here to show how simple it is to grow some of your own food. A raised bed is as simple as a couple of posts in each corner and then some planks, some basic wood. All you have to do is be able to hold the soil in, have soil, have water, have sunlight and some plants. We can all grow a little bit of our own food whether it's herbs on a balcony or a windowsill or turning our whole front yard into a garden or if we really don't have any space joining a community garden. And if not any of that then seeking out local food and supporting the people that are growing food locally. Here we are in the outdoor kitchen and this is constructed from wood harvested here on site as well as scrap materials, things that were salvaged that would have gone to waste. Which is one of the great lessons here is utilizing wasted resources as well as sustainably harvesting from earth that we live on. I use a plant-based biodegradable soap so this goes into what's called gray water. Here we just fill up the water from the spring or from harvesting rainwater and then the water that goes into the sink doesn't go to a wastewater treatment plant. It goes down, it's collected in a bucket and then that water can be used for watering plants and growing food. If you're at home you can actually unscrew the p-trap under your sink and put a bucket there. Also when you shower when the water's heating up you can fill a bucket and use that for watering. You can set up your laundry to go directly to your landscape. That's called laundry to landscape. So at home whether you're on the grid or off the grid there's a lot of ways to use your gray water. We also harvest rainwater so I want to show you that. Here is the rainwater harvesting system and it's extremely simple. Rainwater harvesting is not complex, it's not difficult. We have a gutter collecting the water that falls onto the house and then it goes into a bucket. Rainwater harvesting is as simple as that. You can use small buckets, you can get large 55 gallon drums, or you can have giant cisterns. Of course the kitchen would not be complete without a place to cook. In communities one of the keys is actually cooking together in central location and that drastically reduces workload. Here we just have a simple stove using rocks here from on site and then also wood from here on site. We have the wood that comes from the spruce trees and then the leftover wood from building the house. This is a very simple stove that's designed to be pretty efficient with just using a little bit of wood for basic cooking. That's the stove. Here I am at the outdoor shower and this incorporates multiple things. First of all it incorporates solar heating. So these black buckets can be put out into the sun and then the black absorbs the heat and if you put out the water from the spring in the morning, by the afternoon or the evening you have yourself a nice warm shower or even hot shower depending on the weather. This works really simply. There's holes screwed into the bottom of the bucket. This bucket comes off the bottom and then it's able to come out. Something that you can do at home is build an outdoor shower for the summer months. You can save water from your shower to water your garden or even redirect your shower to your landscape. Here I am at the compost bin and composting is very simple, not complicated. The earth has been doing it for millions and millions of years. This compost bin is just built from wood and screws and in cities you can collect pallets. Put three pallets together and then make a front and you've got yourself a compost bin. Chicken wire in a circle is another really easy compost bin. You can also buy closed rotating containers as well if you want to spend some money or find them used. One key to composting well is to make sure you have plenty of carbon. For beginner composters, if you have any smells, if you have a lot of insects, just make sure you have two to three times more dry carbony matter than your wet matter like food waste and things like that that create smells. Composting is something we can all do to reduce waste to the landfill. If we don't have a space to compost ourselves, in cities a lot of times you can bring it to a central location like a community garden or some farmer's markets collect it. So this is a great way to keep stuff out of the landfill and not turn our waste into someone else's problem, but instead make fertile soil for growing our own food right here on site. This is the compost toilet and this is definitely more advanced sustainability for the average person, but I want to show it to you. As far as building the compost toilet, it's so simple. Just some wood to make a box and then have a lid. For me the key is a raised stool, also called a squatty potty, to actually raise up your legs when you're pooping in order to have a more natural way of sitting and flowing. Underneath this there is just two buckets. This one which I just emptied collects the poop. You put a couple scoops of sawdust onto that poop. Amazing how well a compost toilet works. You would be amazed the first time that you use one. And here the toilet paper that we use is called mullein and it's super soft and it's a perennial plant that grows in abundance here. If you want to learn about composting human poop you can check out the Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins. Humanure stands for human and manure. You can get all the information that you need there. I hope that you learned a lot from this video. Things that you can do to live more sustainably and simply. Keep in mind you don't have to live in a tiny house. You don't have to live in a farm in order to be able to do a lot. To live in a more connected way with the earth that gives us life. In the description I have links to many useful guides to help you live more sustainably and simply. Check out Le Rêve de Gaia. Their website and their social media is there so you can actually visit this place if you want to. I spent about five weeks here. Five lovely weeks and it's an incredible place to be able to visit. I really enjoyed giving this tour to you. I hope you enjoyed it as well and if you did make sure that you subscribe to this channel. Help this video get out there by liking it and commenting and sharing it with friends. On that note I'll see you again real soon for another video. I love you all very much.