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The False Dream of Cottagecore | How the problematic romanticization of Western rural life reveals our discontent with the modern world
(beneaththepavement.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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@[email protected] Tagging because I thought you might not get a notification from me replying to my own post instead of yours :p
Finally have some downtime to flesh this out a bit.
We are in our mid-40s.
Thinking ahead about the systems we use is paramount, as I have crohn's and other immune-related problems surface as debilitating gout and/or iritis, and my wife suffers from hip issues. Everything is being planned on single floors, with as little stairs or walking as possible. We both know how hard it will be in another ten years.
We use a standard woodstove mainly due to the fact that we live on a bunch of acres of trees, and there is enough standing dead to get some 'free' firewood every year, and I truly enjoy dropping and splitting trees.
Our main water source is a creek about 200 feet from the main house. In the winter I have to keep 200 feet of hoses and the gas-pump in the bathroom to have it thawed when I need to run it and fill our two 1000litre totes. From there we have a 12 volt pump that is connected to a small charge controller with two 100watt panels and a lithium battery (cannibalized from the 5th wheel we lived in while building our tiny house)
This system is working 'ok', but if a well company would actually show up we would probably trade it for a well in a heartbeat. Especially my wife, who is very tired of driving to the city to do laundry.
The actual method of getting hot water to the kitchen tap might drive some folks nuts, but for us it has just become part of life. it goes something like:
Our water heater is one of those propane driven camping units with the propane bottles stored outside. And our cookstove/oven is also propane (shout out to unique appliances for their sweet offgrid models!)
For lighting we primarily use solar string garden lights due to the fact that it took us over 13 months to get grid power which gave a lot of time to get used to minimal power from a little all-in-one bluetti power bank and a couple of 750watt panels. And now we just enjoy the light they give off, and the fact that they just turn on and off in conjunction with the sun.
We have since switched most of our internal things like computers, pet lights and a small emergency space heater to 110v, but being out in the boonies means a lot of power outages and glitches, so we also have the bluetti ready to serve things like the fridge, snake light and heatpad, and our internet, when the mains go down.
We are always finding little things to help, like installing a usb fan above the woodstove to supplement the anemic air movement from the little stovetop fan that we bought, or improving the efficiency of the small heater in the bathroom to also warm the incoming water lines when they are hovering around freezing temps so we don't get frostbite on our fingers under the tap.
I dug a septic tank and field myself last year, and moved the toilet from an outhouse to an actual flusher. That was like moving from the slums into a palace for us! No more 3am runs to the outhouse at -30C!
I am starting to feel like we are getting less work than our old life, but the truth is probably that I am just more used to the work I do every day, and can even enjoy some of it.
Oh yes... A snowblower. I blew the bank on a used commercial 48inch blower last year after we got stuck in our driveway by a plow piling literal 100 pound ice blocks at the end of our driveway on christmas eve. I'm a strong guy, but those bastard blocks were just impossible to move by hand. NEVER AGAIN. Now I run the big blower every time I see even an inch of snow. And I go out past our driveway so the plow doesn't have anything to push in my way.
I won't even start on thawing the incoming water lines every morning as that has just become part of life, and/or the removal of snow from the roof of the house or the outbuildings.
Spring is coming. And this year is the year of 'improving, not building' so we shall see what comes out of it.
I'm sure I missed 100 things here. But I have to get back to work now. Thanks for giving me a reason to type all this out :) I sometimes forget how far we have come from carrying buckets of water from the creek, and digging an outhouse...
Thanks for tagging. I would have missed it.
It sounds like you're on the right track. Unsurprisingly, we have some substantial differences, some based on the fact that we live in a park.
We are not allowed to have a septic field, so we just have septic storage tank. Getting an off-season (winter) pump-out is very expensive, so we do a lot to keep pump-outs to once a year.
We are not allowed to have a well, so we put in a freshwater cistern. I haul water from a very good well. Our household use is about 180 litres a week. I pump from the cistern into jugs that I bring inside. Most gets poured into a highly rated gravity filter. Laundry and showers use unfiltered water.
We got used to living out of jugs before we had a cistern, so giving up on plumbing after the 3rd freeze-up was a no brainer.
Laundry water gets warmed up either by the pellet stove or sitting in the sun, depending on season. All other hot water comes from a kettle on our propane range.
Depending on the season, our laundry either gets hung outside to dry or hung on drying racks in front of the hot air blowing from our pellet stove.
Irrigation water comes from the season water distribution system that the park has. It's just raw lake water.
Our power used to be just 30 amp service, so we're quite accustomed to low power living. Up until the last couple of years, our grid was so unreliable that our standby generator ran about 100 hours a year (probably closer to 400 hours if we didn't ration how long it ran). Grid upgrades mean that we've only used it about 4 hours in the last 2 years, and mostly during planned outages as they continue to work on the lines.
My plans for this year are:
Install an interior water tank against the ceiling, filling it manually via a permanently plumbed, self-draining line. No more jugs! Then I'll hook up our hot water heater and bathroom/laundry plumbing to make showers and laundry easier.a
Crawl under the trailer (a mobile home) and remove the axles. This means it'll no longer be classified as a mobile home so we can take advantage of subsidies for energy efficiency, heat pumps, etc.
... and then there is drainage.
Our lot is positioned to collect all the runoff across a few acres. In itself, that's manageable, but the septic holding tank is sitting under the trailer with insufficient height above the ground. Even that wouldn't be a problem, but a new neighbour did some perfectly legitimate landscaping that causes a pool to form where runoff used to make its way directly to the creek behind our lot.
So now, every spring, I have to take a shovel and do drainage management to try to get the water running down the road instead of into our yards. It's kind of fun in its own way, except that I cannot get people to understand that they have to stay to one side of the road, even if that means taking turns. Every time someone drives in the wrong place, it creates ruts that direct water to the wrong side of the road.
I just got in from trying to break up an ice dam that is causing water to run into our septic tank.