18 Years Living Off-Grid on a Remote Island in a Solo-Built House & Homestead

I came to this remote island to go back to the land, to live closer to the land. Yeah, I came here to build a model and to act out dreams that would not be realized in the mainstream. My name is Tim Kurtze. I was born in South Africa, and I've lived in Canada since 85 on these Gulf Islands, and off-grid on this remote island since 2007. It's definitely my preferred way of life. So being off the grid, I make electricity with solar panels. I get rainwater off the roof and capture it in a tank. I do all my own firewood. I form my own trees. It's all about burning firewood. Greatest source of heat. And I try to grow as much food as I can, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and I have Thai river water buffalo for buffalo milk. This is a very fulfilling way to live, but it can be an inconvenient lifestyle, and that's part of keeping it real, keeping your feet on the ground. So we're in the Strait of Georgia, and it's a special island because there's no car ferry, and we're off-grid. Walking onto the island creates a whole different energetic feel, and the logistics of moving freight here, food, setting up here becomes more expensive and more complex without a car ferry. But we're remote enough here that there is a building code, but there's no enforcement, so there's no time limit on completion date, etc. Hugely freeing for creative building. The piece of land I live on is 12 acres, and I built this house by myself, and that was part of the challenge. So in building a house by yourself, you design every piece to be manageable by one person. And building alone, you've got to slow it right down because you've also got to eat and wash and sleep and garden and money to pay for everything. I'm 62, I'm not retired, I still take on the roofing jobs, but I'm trying to get away from the heavy stuff and trying to get more into having a crew and pointing them in the right direction. I've done so many different jobs over my life. One of my first jobs in 1983 was working at sea, and we were traveling south of India, and we came upon garbage islands. Seeing those garbage islands absolutely threw me and changed the course of my life, and I decided to resign from the job and try to find somewhere clean and remote where I might have a family. That was a dream that's realized. I have grandchildren, I've grown food for the last 40 years, I've built several structures, I've lived slowly, and my music is alive. I've built probably 10 places that are being lived in right now, but this one is the most me. It's unfinished, I'm building it while living in it, and it is difficult, but essentially if you want to build something that suits yourself, your specific nature, this is the only way to do it. The type of building this is, it's an aedicula, A-E-D-I-C-U-L-A, and it's essentially 4 posts and a roof. The building philosophy of this place is repurpose, recycle, reuse what is here as much as possible to avoid having to freight it over, because you're immediately looking at maybe a third more in cost than bringing everything over by barge. Well, this is my cabin, and the thought behind it was solo build, recycled, repurposed, safe and warm and cozy, but didn't cost me an arm and a leg. And to enjoy doing it. It's just that I'm getting old and I'm running out of energy. I should have started earlier, but I think I can finish it, I think so. I did the major of the work while I still had a lot more juice. Now the painting and the trim and the tile work can be done in my dotage. So the first step when I started this building was to put the 4 posts up. I'm talking about a post standing on the ground at each corner, supported by diagonals. Then I loaded my truck up with roof rafters, drove it straight into the space, and using my truck as a scaffolding got the rafters up onto the roof. The building was low enough and I felt safe enough to do that alone, and that's a huge consideration in a solo building. For the wall, I used beech wood, cut to length, fastened together, pinched into a foundation at the base, and ultimately those walls get stuccoed in. OK, so we're on my 12-acre property in my gravel pit. Here I get all the rock I need for foundations. I get all the sand I need after this is screened for stucco work. So this is an incredible resource. I'm just managing it by hand. I don't like using a cement mixer. I mix by hand. From the truck it goes straight through a screen. This is the raw material. That's screened with diamond mesh and rebar. From this raw material I get an aggregate for foundation work, varied size of rock for interlocking tooth, a real nice pour. Most important. This stuff is very fine and easy to trowel on. It doesn't interfere with your trowel work. So I've used largely sand from my property and cement. All the wood is locally milled or recycled from other projects. There's a tin roof, and the glass is all recycled and secondhand, single-pane. So I've purchased as little as I could. I haven't thought about the cost of this because most of it is labor and what I've scored at the free store or from other building sites or wood that I've milled out of the rough. But yeah, the tin cost me, the cement has cost me, and the mineral rock insulation cost me. Otherwise it's pure labor. OK, so this is my house. This is my retirement cabin. I started building it when I was 55, thinking it would take me 5 years, and I was 62, so one slows down and the thing also mushroomed. It's meant to be 600 square feet. I think it's more like 900, and growing. The staircase is made up of driftwood, but this part is going to be closed in with willow, which I grow, so that one can sit here with a book or a computer in the winter. It's the most comfortable zone. Your feet aren't cold, and you're not overheating like one does in the loft. It's an intermediate space I call the mezzanine space. So this is largely where I sleep. I like to change my sleeping place often, just to change it up a bit. It's almost like taking a holiday. This is just the second double bed. This is a real comfy spot to sleep because you've got quite a bit of space between your nose and the ceiling. The key with this house to get all this extra space was to have the walls 12 foot high, so you've got a lot more vertical space and gives you the potential for loft. The ceiling is spalted alder and spalted maple that I dropped, let lie for 2 or 3 years, and then milled with my friend Peter. It's lapped. There's no tongue and groove. There's a huge saving there. This is a masonry stove, a Finnish stove. It's also called contraflow. This is a clean-out for ashes, and this is air intake, but from the back of the stove. This is the firebox, and it's a good 4 foot deep, so I can cut long lengths of firewood. Minimizes my amount of chainsaw time. You don't even have to split the wood. In she goes, and this stove, you fire at the highest temperature possible at all times because you're capturing the heat. This is the secondary combustion chamber. It's also where one can bake bread, and this is the heat dome where I have my stainless steel coil for hot water. I use stainless steel rather than copper because if ever you don't have water in your pipes, the copper will melt. There's 10 feet of 5-8 stainless coil in there. Cold water sinks through the coil, and then it's forced up through thermosiphon into the storage tank. So through thermosiphon I can get all the hot water I need in the winter. Once the fire is going strong, the smoke is going out of the stack, we come to this and throw the baffle that closes the pipe leading the air from the firebox up the stack and redirects it laterally and then down. And it's here where the heat is given off because you're forcing hot air down. At this point it goes laterally and then comes up at the base of the stack and through the chimney. It's all about delaying the exhaust fumes for long enough that they dump their heat into your thermal mass, your concrete thermal mass. This masonry stove heats up the house in a radiant way, which heats up the building but not the air. I can dry my laundry with this, I can bake bread, I get all my hot water. And so this hot plate can be used for boiling water or frying. This is a warming chamber for making yogurt, rising bread, getting yeasts going, sprouting fresh sprouts through the winter. And they love this area because it's not only out of the direct light but warm. The stove is made of concrete. I like to use the word monolithic. It's a contiguous, continuous pore of concrete, the reason being there's no chance for gases to escape. The inside shell is refractory concrete that is resistant to high temperatures, also all locally made. Okay, the couch I got at the mailbox, someone had thrown it out, and I don't have TV. So I play DVDs. This is a vent for lateral cross-breeze through the house. A little game of correspondence chess I'm playing with my friend on Hornby. I play chess as often as I can, and I also have games going on which are conducted by text with friends who live on other islands. I guess it's correspondence chess, but it's a lot quicker than mailing a postcard, which is how I used to play with my father. By living off-grid on this island, yes, you're remote, but there's all kinds of community gatherings, and there's no need for solitude unless that's what you choose. As an individual, I can't do everything, but within this community there are skills, and by bartering my time or paying in cash, whatever it takes, I can get most everything done locally. I leave the island as little as possible, and yeah, it's to get groceries like coffee. Probably on average, probably once every 2 months I would leave the island, get a car rental on that side. I found it way cheaper than having a car in a parking lot somewhere waiting for me. I try to avoid going to the city. I was last in Vancouver 10 or 15 years ago, I can't remember when. I guess you could say I'm in retreat. In my ideal days, waking up and not having anything specific to do, and yet there's a thousand things to do, but having the choice, the choice to always feel inspired by what I'm doing. Okay, well, this is a subfloor. It's 8-inch Douglas fir that was milled in the 70s, and I took it off an old barn. I had to get up on the barn and pull it down, but that's free. I'm going to cover it with spalted maple I have milled already. This piece of copper forms a wall, but it's also, I feel a nice way to, rather than investing in the stock exchange and having money in copper, I've got copper, and I like having copper around. This is the greenhouse, bath room, shower room. The yellow is all a concrete foundation or support for the tub. It also is a wood-heated interior bathtub. Firewood goes in there. The internal is refractory concrete, so it can take heat without breaking down, and the mass of coals is pushed beneath the tub, and as long as one is on a duct board or a little bit of wood in the tub, you don't get burned. But you can basically cook yourself in there. If you need more heat, you need a 2-hour tub, a couple, literally an armload of older twigs like that gives me a boiling hot bath. It's an incredibly efficient way of heating water. This is all still in process, but the idea here is that if you have a downpour, straight off the roof, fill a tub. It doesn't have to go into my tank and then get pumped. Just a bit of a whimsical idea. That's the tailpipe of my Toyota truck. So on the theme of repurposing, I like that kind of thing. So after one has a tub and pulls the plug, the water first goes through this little growing area before it drains out. What I've started here is a bunch of hazelnuts. They all go outside eventually, and that's a shade tree, a horse chestnut. What I want is this to be like there, and it'll cool the space in the summer. I get rainwater off the roof, I capture it in a 800-gallon tank, and that provides all my shower, drinking, domestic use. It definitely rains enough here for me to have enough rainwater because I only collect from a quarter of my roof at this point. So the roof to this cabin could provide for a family of 4 if all of your gutters emptied into tanks. This is my kitchen. All of these surfaces are scratch coat. They're all going to be covered, including the wood stove, and this entire yellow kitchen stuff will get a second layer. Kitchen sink, I've got my pump that is in the domestic water tank. Turn it on, and I've got water pressure. Turn it off, and the pipe drains, so I've no freezing problems. And all my plumbing is open. I have a propane cooktop and propane on-demand water heater for the convenience and speed. If my wood stove is damped down, then I'll use the propane to make a quick cup of tea or meal for the evening. It's important to vent it to the outside. When propane burns under these conditions, it can be quite toxic. The gray water leaving the house goes through a system of baffles to gather the fat and hold any large particles back before the water leaves the house. That water still needs cleaning, but it doesn't toxify the immediate environment. There is no black water. I have a sealed anaerobic compost outhouse for human waste. It was very important to me that this alternative system be odorless and maintenance-free. The book I got years ago was Stop the Five-Gallon Flush, and I chose a combination of three systems, the Twin Vault Anaerobic Vietnamese Composter, the Clevis Multrum, and then the Mexican Basson. So it's essentially a single-vault anaerobic chamber that runs vertically and empties into a single-vault composter where kitchen waste goes. If you focus in on that, you can see how the tires are stacked. They form a chamber. The inner tube is the single chamber. Both the human waste and the compost are sealed from the air using wood ash. If it's not connected to our air, there's no odor. It also allows the microbes to heat up sufficiently to destroy pathogens. In the kitchen waste section, I have red wigglers. It's a worm that devours waste, and so the volume is reduced. Nothing is ever removed from there. The system I've designed, it's been in use for four years now, and it has needed no maintenance. So I load this up until I have sufficient volume of organic matter, and here the human waste combines with the organic mass. The red wigglers are kept alive in the kitchen waste, then feed off the human waste and break it down, keeping the volume diminished so that this is what it looks like after four years of use for one person. This is basically a passive air conditioner, sort of like a wind tunnel to have cool air moving through my house. So as you can see, it's unfinished, but this is on the east side of the house. Cool air comes in and travels through the house from the shaded east side of the building that's out of the noonday sun. This is your typical airtight, and it's a nice big one that cooks beautifully. The top surface gets up to about 500 centigrade. These are designed to heat the air in your house, and then depending on how well your house is insulated, will be how long it stays warm. For this square footage, either of these stoves, the cast iron airtight, or this masonry contraflow, either of them heat this place up. Absolutely cozy. I do all my own firewood. I form my own trees. I select my trees. There's no need to cut a live tree. There's plenty of standing dead and windfalls. Living in this environment for me is a joy. To me it's not work. Running a chainsaw is an honor. And if you're going to live out on the remote islands, you have to run a saw. It's all about burning firewood. The greatest source of heat. And when your firewood's in and the sun is shining, you know you're not going to get a hydro bill. It feels pretty good. I almost forget how valuable that is, after 40 years of heating with firewood that I've collected. We're in my little library. Mainly they're reference books. A beautiful book I discovered. It's on the beauty in architecture and the relationship one has with the building. Is it feeding you? Is it energizing you? Does it inspire you? That's the type of building question I ask before I build. I think in today's prefabricated construction, there's very little consideration around that. This door is a fire escape. It's also to my outhouse. I had my grandchildren in mind when I built it. You can't have too many escape hatches in a house that burns firewood. This will be built up, of course, and insulated. That's the basic shape of the door. There'll be a set of stairs leading to this little garden. Or you go to the outhouse. That will become a root cellar. I might go down 8 or 10 feet there. I can dig all of this soil out until my head is at this level. This will be the most amazing root cellar in terms of temperature, light, moisture level. What you're looking at here is a wall that contains most of my building waste during this project. Over the months of building, garbage is stuffed in between these two walls of the crib, which is then sealed with concrete. I get a wall insulated rather than having to transport the garbage off the island and have it end up in a pit somewhere it gets put to use. I tend to use this as outbuildings because something worried me about a person having in their mind that they have garbage in their walls of their house, whereas if it's in an outbuilding, it serves its function, but one doesn't really care. So being off the grid, you have to make your own electricity, and in the past, people have had diesel generators, gas generators. Nowadays, with solar panels so cheap, it's not that huge an investment to put up front, but it's incredibly efficient and reliable. My solar panels are rated for 3 kilowatts. My battery bank is minimal and has liquid lead acid batteries. I don't use much power, but even on a cloudy day like this, I can run a bread maker. I can run a vacuum cleaner. I can boil a kettle. I can make toast. I've got a small convection oven. I choose not to live with a fridge. I have an ice maker and an ice box. I have a freezer. It's a very small freezer. And living without a fridge, I eat cleaner, and I have been living without a fridge for 10 years now. So this is the building that carries my solar panels, and I decided to build cribs for the walls to store all of the garbage that I create or that ends up on this property. I use old feed bags to collect my garbage, and they go straight into the walls as a single unit, or the garbage goes in loosely. It's all going to be behind wood, stucco wire, and stucco. And this represents 7 years of garbage. After seeing those garbage islands as a young man and then moving to these remote islands, I came upon the idea that anything I brought onto my property would stay here. I would process it. I do process it. Nothing leaves the property. I collect all the tires I've used over the years driving on these islands. I've managed to use 10 of them to build myself a composting outhouse. So what I've done is repurpose. This is the stable, so sort of a milking parlor, hay storage. So this is all wood that I milled off my property, and the layout is for hay storage, small animal, large animal, and milking parlor. Yeah, I also use it to dry my lumber. Here's some of the flooring I'm going to be putting into my cabin. It's spalted maple, half inch. Over the years, I've usually had a milk cow, and we made a nice hard cheese, like a cheddar. And I intend to do that again, but using buffalo milk rather than cow milk. So the Latin for these water buffalos is bubulus, bubulis, and they are bovide, so related to the cow, but a separate line. The one I have is the Thai river water buffalo. The advantage of water buffalo is that they are not under the control of the dairy board. Their manure has more nitrogen. They eat more broadly, they're less picky. They have no hoof problems, and the milk has 7% butterfat. So you're getting a little bit of milk, but it's mostly rich, creamy. These are only a year and a half old. I got them at 6 months. She should be covered by now, and in 10 months she should calf. So I intend to milk the female, but so far I'm getting manure from them, and that's a great barter tool on this island. I trade for eggs, I trade for plants, I've traded for old 2-volt batteries, anything going. I can trade for money probably. Having big animals, you really need good fences. They're big, but they're not aggressive. They're very kind, very affectionate. They love being around people. They love being groomed. And if I want to milk her, I've got to bond in some way. It's only half the battle. Once she's had the calf, I've still got to have her accept me milking her. Their ears are definitely designed for swimming. They swim very well, they can hold their breath for 6 or 7 minutes, but their ears turn laterally to keep the water out. I try to grow as much food as I can, the food that I like, but it's a hell of a lot of work, and I can't do it all. As my building projects complete, I'll be focusing more and more on growing quality food. So I largely grow potatoes and tomatoes, peppers. I'm trying to grow sunflowers this year for the oil. We're in my garden, and to my left and right are hugels, or berms. So berms or hugels are stacked up logs tight on each other, which are somewhat rotten. They're covered with soil. During the rainy season, they take on all the rainwater like a sponge, and you get a bit of a cushion against the dry season. They create a bit of privacy, because they're about 3 or 4 feet tall, and they're also full of nutrient. To improve the quality of the soil here is important. The island's rock makeup is igneous basalt, and it produces a very weak soil. But with amending by seaweed or animal manure, lime, beautiful crops can be grown in the weakest of soils. I have lots of currants growing, plums, oak, elm, ginkgo, and goji. But I like to establish the local bracken, the black-capped raspberry, the creeping blackberry, the thimbleberry, and salmonberry. This is the white Italian oak. The acorn, when ground, has 20 or more percent protein. And this is hops, YPA. This is a clay dugout so that water stays put. I have a one-fifth horsepower pump, submerged, and it just provides a nice steady trickle of water to irrigate my food and orchard around the house. And when it gets too low, I replenish it from the lower area where there's a huge amount of water. I pump it up so then I can irrigate my garden. In terms of fire hazard, stucco is incredibly fire-resistant. And I have my own fire pump, and I have a suck hole. A suck hole is a hole in the middle of the field where you can drop in a sump pump or a fire pump and get the water pressured and available. Living off-grid is more than I expected in that you become acutely aware of your environment. You know that on a sunny day you can do a laundry. You know when it rains that you'll have water coming into your tank. But what I love most about living off-grid is the silence. The challenges one faces, I face living like this, is every day having to turn your own wheel to stay motivated, to stay focused, and to complete. There's no one telling you what to do, when to do it. Every day it's a challenge, but I'm in here for the count, to live in a healthful way until I go. I feel like I'm making a few good choices, otherwise I wouldn't have ended up here. And all my choices have been towards life-giving. I hope, you know, that's been my intention. Subscribe to Exploring Alternatives and check out our playlists for more off-grid stories like this. Thanks for watching.