The Campfire Trail: September 4 - DIY Homestead - Starting With Nothing (Part 1)

September 4, 2022

Day 338 of the Adventure

If we have ever gotten anything right on our move to the Cabin in the Woods Homestead, it's the idea of figuring out how to do it in steps. Most of that probably came from our experience building resort businesses from basically nothing. When you start with nothing or almost nothing, by necessity, things have to be done in steps or stages. That's true with research, finding, funding, buying, building and developing. The very same things can be said for making a move to a homestead or off-grid type property when you are faced with starting with nothing. Starting with nothing is not the worst thing there is. In some ways, it simplifies decisions and focuses priorities. I'll explain in a little bit.

If you aren't familiar with our story, we actually started a resort business completely by accident while looking for a cabin to use as a "Get-Away" destination for ourselves. Without going into the whole story, what started as a couple old run-down resort cabins ended up becoming dozens of cabins and treehouses and a full-blown business. It also became very complex. Much more so than my intentions for it ever were. Had we simply wanted to stick with our first couple of cabins, life would have been much more simple. It's that first couple of cabins that I would like to use to illustrate my point. Whether you would ever decide to take things further would be a decision you would need to make. For us, that decision was made simply because of the need for extra income. (Sound familiar?)

LBJ (Little Black Jeep) looking on

When we decided to make a cabin part of our future back 12-13 years ago, we planned for the process of finding and financing it to be a two year process. That decision required some research to figure out exactly what we needed to prepare for in regards to making a purchase. Without taking that first step of researching property, what happened next would have never taken place. We intended to look for up to two years, but because we committed to look, a strange thing happened. within two months we stumbled across a foreclosed, abandon, run-down resort property with four cabins on it. The price was unbelievably low. So low, in fact, it made getting financed for it almost effortless. The trade-off was it needed an incredible amount of work.

I plan to go into further depth on this process in days to come. In the interest of keeping these posts short and manageable to read, I'll simply say "What an Adventure it was". We moved a tiny camper onto the property for a place to live temporarily while we fixed one of the cabins. Using basically free and cheap supplies and materials, our cabin lifestyle began to become a reality. That first cabin provided us a place to live and within a few months of arriving on the site, it also began providing income to our project.

With that said, (and yes, I'll explain in detail how we did it) I'll end today's post. I'll pick it up tomorrow and continue. My part of this is that I am happy to share our experience, story and details on how we started with nothing. All I ask in return is that you consider Subscribing to our YouTube channels. We will never ask you to spend your money on them. We do add product links in the descriptions but I PROMISE, you can ignore those and we won't be offended. More Tomorrow!

Carry On

Adventure Quote: “A blank page is no empty space. It is brimming with potential... It is a masterpiece in waiting -- yours.”

― AA Patawaran,

Base Camp Coffee of the Day: B-52 (Kahlua/Irish Cream/Amaretto flavors)

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