Building your Own off Grid home
LaMar Alexander had the perfect life before things came crashing down around him and he had to find a new way of living. Sometimes it’s the things that life throws at us that make us into who we are actually meant to become. Such is certainly the case for LaMar. Read his story down below of how he went from a normal life to homelessness, then to off-grid self sustainable living. And more importantly, WATCH THIS VIDEO so you can learn how to build a cabin for only $2000!
… I had a teaching career, a big house with a pool, nice car and 3 car garage and all the bills and mortgage that goes with that lifestyle. By the end of 1998 after a sudden illness and divorce I found myself homeless and broke…
I had $200 to my name, an old truck and camper and a small piece of property I inherited from my families homestead and that is where I would start my life over. My vision was to be debt free and have no ties to the government or corporate slavery that had entrapped me before.
I lived in that camper for two years while I cleared the property that was badly overgrown… I was able to find part-time work and in two years I had saved up $2000 and I designed and built a 14×14 off-grid cabin that would be easy enough for me to build by myself…
I used a lot of recycled materials in my cabin and the windows and doors were free from salvaging an old trailer that was being demolished. Recycled cedar fence boards for trim and cheap green lumber from the local lumber mill was used for the porch. The building process was pretty straight forward and easy and I used a modified post and beam for additional roof strength for our heavy snow load…
I recycled all the appliances out of my camper for the cabin. Sink, shower, lights, water pump, propane system and the solar electric system went on to the cabin and the cabin was designed to be like a self-contained RV. I designed a solar assisted composting toilet system that utilized the old septic tank on the property but speeded up the composting through a greenhouse window effect since the old drain field no longer functioned.
Now that I had no house payments, rents, monthly utility bills or debt I was able to spend much less money on things I didn’t need and I started a small local pest control business…. I had also documented my cabin designs and kept a journal so I decided other people might benefit from my story and I published my first ebook “Simple Solar Homesteading” online…
This started me on a journey of designing inexpensive projects to help other people to build sustainable homesteads and inexpensive houses and I designed many more small cabins and alternative energy systems that would later become my book “Ultimate Off-Grid Guide”. I determined to keep my prices low so everyone everywhere could have access to these designs and I put the proceeds from those books back into new projects, videos and designs.
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