21 Years Living Off-Grid on a Remote Island in a Self-Built Cabin & Homestead

So this is an off-grid island in British Columbia. I'm on 20 acres and I've been here for 21 years now. One of the reasons I ended up here is there's no building inspector, and so this whole nine building project is a great big experiment. I wanted to explore sustainable living and alternative design, alternative power systems, and I wanted the challenge of being off-grid. Almost all of my electricity is generated by solar, but some is generated by a micro-hydro water wheel, and on rare occasions I run a gas-powered generator. All heat is done with a wood stove, and drinking water is coming from a ground-source well. It feels satisfying to be self-sufficient for all these things, albeit it was a lot of work in the beginning. I'm semi-retired, but... I built a dance studio and I'm running events here. I host, you know, not just dance workshops, but other people use the studio and I rent it out to them. And that generates an income. And sometimes I go off island to teach dance. I've also run the sawmill and sell lumber. So, you know, I work hard, but I can take time off whenever I like because of my lifestyle. Being on a remote island, it's hard to get here. And you don't just drive by and stop in. You're here for a while. This island is unique for a few reasons. There's no power coming to the island. There's no electricity coming to the island. There's no sewers. Garbage pickup is quite questionable. It's a lot of work. Yeah. There's no car ferry coming to this island. That changes a lot. It makes it harder to get here. And to get here, you have to be more determined. And relinquish control. Like I can't go get a slice of pizza whenever I want. So a lot of things are completely out of my control and you have to be comfortable with that. I leave the island about once a month, you know, there's so many, you know, little things I have to go and get, but I would definitely leave less often if I could. Most of the food is coming from a health food store. I place order so I get a box of bananas, box of potatoes, box of carrots, yams, apples, oranges. That's what's coming this week and I raise chickens for meat and eggs so I have fresh eggs every day and I am growing a lot of kale and other fruit. Sometimes I do canning but uh you know the fridges and freezers are the best way to go. I used to be a machinist, tool and die maker in the aerospace industry and also in the automotive industry. And everything has to be flat, square, perpendicular to within a hundredth of a millimeter. And I came here to defy all of that. And so I didn't use a level. I very rarely used a tape measure. This is mostly done with a chainsaw. I have tried to be as sustainable as possible, so mostly I'm using wood from here on the land, almost exclusively. I've used a lot of a cob, which is clay, sand, and straw, and horse manure mixed in to make a concrete-like product. I've been using a lot of rock in this building that was right here. I just had to move it by hand. And I use a lot of recycled materials like car tires. And, um... plastic bags from the recycling center. I stuff the walls with plastic bags as insulation. I get all the recycled materials from the island. I don't leave the island to get them. Everything is here at the recycling center. Yeah, this is my cabin in which I sleep and sort of my private space away from the studio. It's also my winter cabin. It's insulated and well heated. So this is the first room you come into coming into the cabin. This is more or less a boot room, a place to come in to take off your wet clothes and hang them up to dry. This is recently added on. That little room has been my living space for like 14 years and this only recently got added on. I did this very, very quickly. So this is a tree that I just cut the top off and peeled the bark off and built into the tree. It doesn't have longevity because it's still attached to its root ball. So eventually bugs will come up and I'll have to redesign this. And so there are four trees in this room. Now it was just where the trees were, that's what dictated the design. This is where I do often do food prep, especially in the winter. And so, yeah, this is, I had a limousine, an old limousine, and this is the couch out of the back of the limousine. Chunk of wood was a piece of log that I found in the forest. It was, I don't know, this diameter is huge. And this is the kitchen. It's largely an outdoor kitchen at this point. In this climate, you know, an outdoor kitchen just having a covered roof is fine for most of the year. There's only a couple of days of the year where this is uncomfortable, where the water lines actually freeze. So in the winter when I'm not using the studio, I'm down here in this kitchen just me prepping my own food and washing my own dishes. And this is my little room, little cabin. It's internet room, rec room, and so I can do yoga here in the winter. I like to do yoga while I'm watching a movie. I have satellite for internet. I insulated this with recycled plastic bags. And they do work as insulation. It's tiny, so therefore it heats up very quickly and doesn't use much firewood. It also has a very low ceiling and that keeps the heat down. Wood stove also has a water pipe inside. And so it also is producing hot water and there's a tank up on the next floor. And that's really helpful to have hot water when you want to wash dishes. There's another laundry machine out here, so having hot water for laundry. This is my office space. I need to store papers, and there's a printer. You know, running a retreat center, you have to have some kind of an office. When I set out to make this, I had no idea what I was going to do. This was all completely improvised. And, yeah, it's kind of hanging. It's like a tree fort effect. So it's supported by a chain on this corner and a chain on that corner and from up here it appears that it's being held up by two chains. From downstairs it appears to be held up by two posts but all four corners are supported. And there's, I also, this is where I dry the laundry. This is sunlight and this gets quite warm so even in winter it gets warm and dry up the laundry here. This is my bedroom. This is where me and the dog sleep. It's a very low ceiling. Again, it keeps the heat down low to the ground, so it's easy to heat when you don't have eight, nine foot ceilings. The stove pipe from downstairs is coming up through here, and also the hot water tank is there. So there's this residual heat all night long. So there's heat coming up from the floor through into this room. So this room isn't heated, but heat comes to it. Yeah, the construction, this is all Douglas fir poles. They are so strong. And it's a mostly, it's a flat roof. This roof has, there's a bunch of hay on the roof. And then I put a big tarp over it. And that that sheds the water because I keep it domed. The tarp has been taken off now in the summer months because it'll just hold too much heat. In fact, there's a risk of spontaneous combustion. Yeah, so I've got that set of solar panels. Oh, there's 12 of them. So on a sunny day, I'm getting, because there's so much trees, I'm getting six kilowatt hours of electricity off of those panels. This is the inverter, which is converting the power from 48 volts to your standard 110, 120 volts. This is a charge controller. So this is making sure that not too much power comes off of the solar panels and goes into the batteries. It's regulating how much power is going in there. The batteries are these new lithium batteries making a big difference in my world. So this battery bank has over 14 kilowatt hours of storage and because they are lithium and not lead acid you can deplete them completely. So this is half the solar panels. The other half are on the roof of that building. Yeah there's a built-in redundancy in case one of the systems breaks. These things are not infallible. When I'm running A business like out of the dance studio here then it's really important that I keep it going and I don't shut down for the day when people are here. So I still have to have water coming out of the well. Well, Yeah, fridges and freezers have to stay on. So this is a drilled well. My friend came and doused with rods and told me to drill here not here and to drill 65 feet deep and you You will get three gallons of water, and that was pretty much right. Yeah, I get my drinking water from this drilled well and the water is pristine. It's bottled quality. The electrical system is feeding the water pump which is at the bottom of the well. This is a cold storage building. It's got the fridges and freezers in it. We're mostly underground. This is all rock back here and this is to keep the machines cool. So the sod roof building also helps keep it cool. It keeps the sun off of the rubber membrane, which is the shingles. And so this room, yeah, it stays quite cool on a hot day. I have two fridges and a freezer, which is quite a luxury to have this much cold power. But it's worth knowing about that you can still have this when you've got, just because you're off grid. These things are readily available, the new equipment. They use a fraction of the power of something from 40 years ago. So here, I don't know if you can see inside here, it's not, but it's full. And it's full of... You know, beef, lamb, and there's the chickens that I raise, also there's a whole bunch of fish over there. But this is really quite necessary. I can't just go to the grocery store. It's more of a monthly experience for me. I can't just pick something up on my way home from work, like living in the city. So yeah, it is necessary to have refrigeration. This is the first building I made. It's a utility building, it's where the laundry is, there's a freezer, there's the other electrical system is in here, and it's not insulated, it's not for the winter, it's to stay cool in the summer. That was the first summer I was living in a tent, and my butter was melting, it was so hot. And I realized I needed to find a cool place to store things. And so this is largely, it's underground, it stays very cool in the summer. But it was where I first started with experimental design and so this is a sod roof and the roofing material is six mil plastic. The roof costs fifty dollars and I was told oh you can't do that it'll it'll it'll degrade and okay so here we are it's 20 years it's not degrading and as long as it's covered and protected from sunlight it does just fine. I was very much wanting to do it, you know, as much natural as possible. So when I found out about Cobb, I was like, wow. And I happen to have a lot of clay on this property. So it just made sense. It's labor intensive, but otherwise it's free. Well, here's the other electrical system. This is the inverter. The batteries are just around back here. This is the switch that goes from one system to the other. I pull this, you know, dryer or oven switch, pull it out and plug it in here and then the other electrical system will be in play. The capacity of this one is only about five kilowatt hours. It's not nowhere near what the other one is, which is over 14. Yeah, the batteries are back here and they are lead acid batteries. Still have some life in them, so I'll switch them out and get lithium batteries, you know, in a couple of years. And there's distilled water, which you need. You have to check these things every month to make sure they're not boiling away. And so you have to keep replenishing the water. And I think those things Those things are $500 each, so yeah, it can be really expensive. you know mistake if you forget to water your batteries. Compared to the lithium batteries which require no no maintenance. Washing machine real game changer for living in the woods. This is a front loader uh you know very efficient very easy on water and very easy on electricity. I happen to have this hooked up there's a solar panel on the roof for heating hot water and there's a water tank Up here. So on a sunny day, this gets very hot and I get to wash the dish towels with hot water. This is my second set of panels. It's up here on the roof of the studio. And this is the highest point clear of the trees. It's an A-frame. There's a set of panels facing that way, which is east, and these ones are facing west. So these get the morning and evening sunlight. And I have a micro hydro water wheel and it gives, in winter time when there's a lot of rain, gives me three kilowatt hours a day. On rare occasions I run a gas powered generator. We're on the roof of the dance studio. This is covered with a rubber membrane. That's what I use for keeping it waterproof. Originally I planned to have this as a sod roof and I did have a lot of weight on here once upon a time but now it's 15 years now since I've wheelbarrowed all that material onto this roof and it's now since either evaporated or washed away. And then whatever I wanted to grow up here if it was vegetables and keeping it hydrated was next to impossible. It was a learning experience. It was one of the design flaws. I didn't think it was going to be that complicated to grow vegetables on the roof. The roof needs to be flatter than this and much deeper. This water tank is, the water is coming out from a well in the ground, pumps up to this tank and then it gravity feeds back down into the, well into all the other systems, including my cabin, but into the studio kitchen which is just under us here. So this sprinkler and there's another one on the other side of the building are connected to like a high-powered Wayjax water pump and so they can cover the entire roof and then some. It's to keep the roof wet during a forest fire and the water tank is big enough it could last me a week. This is the dance studio I call Leviathan Studio. What was I after? I wanted a covered floor. All I wanted was a dance floor that was covered from the elements. It's a very rustic feeling building. I was experimenting and this is a great big experiment in design, method and materials. And whether or not you can do this with these materials. But now it's standing 15 years and it's doing just fine. It's seen storms and minor earthquakes. Yeah, all is going well. This dance floor is 2,000 square feet or 200 square meters and it's important when you want to dance on a dance floor that you don't have poles coming up the middle and so that was what dictated that this building needed strong arches. Building it by myself, without a crane, I needed a series of scaffolding to make that happen. And so what would happen is I would put the scaffolding in place, and then I had these strong 19-year-old guys, they would put the logs onto the scaffolding for me. They would do that in about two hours. I would spend the next three weeks cutting the ends of all the boards and getting them all in tight and sinking the spikes and then moving the scaffolding to the next location. Then the boys would work for two hours and then I would work for three weeks. And so the main building and the dance floor went up in 11 months. You know it's all done with wood. There's no steel involved. There was no crane involved. This building is not to code, I did not even attempt, but it can hold many, many tons of snow. Each truss, I estimate it could hold 3,000 tons. There's three major trusses. I've had peer reviewed by, you know, engineers and architects, and yeah, yeah, it should do the job. Let me introduce you to the floor. Let's explore. It's sprung, it's built on car tires, and it has a bounce to it. It's made with Douglas fir, it's a soft wood, and there's a certain feel to that. It's not as crisp and hard like the oak and maple. It feels great. The dance style that I do is called contact improvisation. It's a dance form, started in 1972. You know, two people have a point of contact and then they improvise. And this roll, this continuous point of contact around their bodies. And it can look very acrobatic, it can go very fast, and it also can go very slow and sensuous. And it can be anywhere in between. This is a main destination spot for this style of dance. And I run workshops in the warmer months, because this building is too big to heat in the winter. So I only operate in the summer. Sometimes it's nice to just relax and not, especially in the middle of a long workshop, but also it's so we can watch what we were working on. What would we be doing if we filmed ourselves? So I like having couches right next to the floor. So if you need to just sit down and relax for a bit, go and take a chill. Dog bed, Ananda's bed. That's what the sign says. It should say Ananda, Dandelion and Ruby's bed. They have a place to go during class, a place to relax. And they're social. They want to be with us. It's really quite wonderful having them around. I mean, they are always joyous. That was the best thing I've ever done, is get dogs. This is the rock. The island is a solid rock at some point. And this is it. And this is as far as you go. You can't dig any deeper. And as we go around, there's beds all around the studio. There's beds in the studio because people, they don't want to stay in tents. They want a place to sleep. And this was built as scaffolding so that I could build this wall and I've just never taken it out. It doesn't need to be here. It doesn't really serve any great purpose. Okay focus. We're over the garden. Yeah I wish I had more time to hang out and work on this garden. That's a lemon tree that it needs more light and I want to put a skylight up there so that lemon tree can get more more sunshine. Continuing on up here. I'm walking up into this bedroom up I built this because I needed another place to sleep and this was usable space. For people coming here, they don't necessarily want to be in a tent. This is an actual bed with blankets and you can be very comfortable. Welcome to the kitchen. Thank you, Christian. This is the cook stove. This is a wood-fired cook stove to cook all the meals all summer long here. One summer I served 8,000 meals from this stove. Here's the fire you can see. Another thing that's going on here is there's a pipe in there that's generating hot water just using thermal siphon. So this water system is using the you know the heat from the wood stove to make hot water and so yeah that's a 50 gallon water tank hanging and so this now is pumping hot water to the sinks for washing dishes instead of having to heat Heat water up on the top of the stove. This is, I use three double sinks. This one sink is strictly for washing food. Hand sink is outside. Moving along, blenders, coffee grinder. This is the primary dishwashing sink. That's the secondary dishwashing sink. And here's the table. There's, depending on how big the group is, if there's only eight people, this works just great. But if there's 15, then we have another table. Yeah, and this is a cob bench. I've got a cover on it because it's a little bit hard, but cob, as we said before, is a clay, sand, and manure mixed, and then it hardens. The studio has been like sculpture, and it's still not done 15 years later. I would like to be finishing it, but I just, there's so many other things that have to happen. You know, I'm looking at, I would like to be more retired than I am, so hence the desire to maybe pass this on to someone Someone else let them take over. Yeah, we're just outside the chicken coop, and there's about 40 chickens, so I get either meat birds that I'm raising or eggs, and I'm getting three dozen eggs a day. When I've got events going on here and there's guests, it's great to have eggs, but when I don't have anything on, I have surplus eggs, so I sell them eight dollars a dozen. It helps cover the cost of the feed. But the main reason for having chickens is their manure for fortifying the soil. So this is more of a soil factory than a chicken coop. This is a bog. This is rainwater caught in a bog. First priority for this is to have this water for fire protection, if there is a fire. And then secondary is watering the gardens. Yeah, it's quite the luxury having this much water on the Gulf Islands. Yeah, here we are in the garden. Uh... Mostly it's kale because I can't put enough kale on the table. On the roof of this building are some solar panels and they're hooked up directly to a 12-volt water pump and that'll turn on these sprinklers. This is a plum. I only put this in a few years ago. This is another plum. This is the first year that I'm getting any fruit off of, any significant amount of fruit. There's quite a few pieces. This is a fig and I have a blueberry patch over there. This is just another pond. It's a low-lying area. that would dry up in the summer so I had it dug out. You really can't have enough water. Again this is for fire protection so yeah I want to have sprinklers on that building if there's a again if there's a forest fire. Yeah okay so this is a water pump for fighting forest fire. It has a forest fire fitting for fire hose. There the suction hose is already in the water and when we get closer to fire season I'll have this in the like ready and ready to go. I've got six pumps like this all together and 400 liter tank of gasoline at the ready. You know I don't have fire insurance. I can't get fire insurance on the building that I've made because it's not built to code. So this is my fire insurance. This is the sauna. The ground floor is a sauna. Above is a dormitory. There's like six beds up there. Like everything else, it's a state of, you know, it's under construction. I'm just doing some renovation work on it this past week and next week. More cob work. In this case, I'm using manure from water buffalo and clay. And here's a pile of clay. It's blue clay dug up from the bog over there and so there's enzymes in the manure. The enzyme reacts with the clay and so you mix it and after three days there's a hardening to it. I think people have been in all cultures have been using some variation of this. So I'll let that set for a couple more days just to for the chemical reaction to continue. I've already got some that I was working on from last week in here. I'm working on Replacing the wood stove on the sauna. So this is a cob layer on the outside which is great for fire prevention but what I've done is I've cut the wood quite a bit wide and then filled this area with rock and now I'm patching in the holes with cob. By the weekend this should all be filled in. So I'm applying this in layers. I'm trying to build up the wall and so the idea is If you put too much on, it'll just fall off. So you put on a little bit each day. Let it dry out and like that I will keep building this out. This is the change room of the sauna and here's the sauna. There's a step up to go into the sauna and then you sit up close to the ceiling and then you walk out here and jump in the pond. And like these wood walls, it goes all the way around. It's a great insulator. My neighbor milled these for me. All these trees are from right here, right around this pond. They didn't travel far at all. When I built this, like I can reach the ceiling. And I didn't want to be lifting up like on a ladder. So I made it as simple as possible. I only went up as high as I could reach. So here's my sawmill. A very simple, easy machine to operate. All the logs are piled up. And I can easily pull those down now with my tractor, put them on here, process the wood. Finished lumber goes that way. This is so simple. It's just, you know, hand-operated. This is how you set the height, the thickness of what you want to cut. There's some things I need gasoline for and this is one of them. I love them. Yeah and I also have a tractor that runs on diesel and a Ford pickup truck that runs on diesel. I will get electric when I can, an electric car, but right now I'm using gasoline. My favorite thing about living here is that I can have the freedom to choose. Like if I want to make a building that looks like this and in this direction and over in this location, I can do that. That's where I take most pleasure in. Yeah, you do this and it's satisfying. I've been here for 21 years and it's still awkward. I do not want to go back to a city life. I don't think that'll happen. When I came here, this was the lifestyle I was looking for. But you have to want this lifestyle because it's work. But the struggle, I feel, is worth it. And there's so much benefit. This is my job. I love my job. Subscribe to Exploring Alternatives and please share this video if you liked it. You can also find out more about Mark and Leviathan Studio online. Thanks for watching!