Preparing the Site for Our Off-Grid Tiny House

Moving Off the Grid: Part 1

Welcome to the premiere of our new video series, Moving Off the Grid! This series documents our off-grid adventure from the very beginning. We hope you find this series both educational and entertaining. In this episode, you’ll see how we cleared and leveled our land with nothing but hand tools so we could put our 12×24 tiny house on it. Thanks for watching!

Transcription

We bought 13.12 acres in the Arizona desert.

This is what it looked like…

We had 4 days to get it ready for our house.

We setup camp for the night and then got to work in the morning…

We started by clearing the brush…

It was not a fast or easy process by any means.

We soon discovered the mattock was a far more effective tool than our machetes…. Desert plants are tough. Very Tough.

We worked through the afternoon then then decided to break for a late lunch…

During our lunch break, high winds destroyed our tent by causing two rods to snap like twigs. We duct taped and glued them back together, and then prayed to the desert gods for our crude repair to work.

We worked until the Sun set… The glue and taped worked… for the night.

The next morning we began raking the land and cleaning up the mess we made… while the wind continued to break our tent, and our dog tried to catch flies.

We started to a form a makeshift driveway so the delivery truck would have somewhere to pull in.

The road was in terrible condition… full of pot holes and deep trenches.

We did our best to patch it up and smooth it out so the driver would at least have some chance of actually pulling an 8,000 lb building up it.

We began putting stakes in the ground to mark out where the house will sit… turns out hammer wood into rocks is pretty hard.

After forming a basic outline, we began softening the ground so we could level it.

It was an unenviable task that took all night.

The next morning we spent some more time fixing up the road, then we put the concrete blocks for the house in place.

Lastly, we covered the ground with diatomaceous earth to get rid of insects.

Maggie stood guard and watched for the delivery truck.