Off-Grid Voices - A Chat with Elaina

Life in a yurt in Northern Wisconsin

Hi lovely reader 👋

Welcome to Off-Grid Voices, a series of written interviews with others who are out there living their best lives, living lives that are a little outside the norm, a little different. I’m hoping this series will inspire some of you who may be thinking about living a life off the grid, homesteading, travelling the world, doing #vanlife, or anything else that you may be considering. Hope you enjoy exploring these lifestyles with me. 😊

This week we’re talking with

Elaina

from Hobby Hour. I’ve been reading her Substack for a while and love her stories about living off the grid in a yurt. Before we found our shipping container, we considered buying a yurt for the same reasons Elaina mentions below, so it’s definitely something that still really speaks to me. Hope you all enjoy learning a bit more about Elaina as much as I did!

This is Elaina - Photo supplied by Elaina

Hi Elaina, let’s start with learning a bit more about you! Tell us a bit about yourself and your Substack?

I started my Substack publication, Hobby Hour, about 2 years ago and it was mostly an exercise in accountability to my goal of carving out 1 hour of free time every day that was just for me. At the time, I was living in a near suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and teaching special education. I was exhausted all the time. I started with sharing knitting, sewing, and quilting projects. My husband and I started to talk about moving and I began decluttering and downsizing, which I enjoyed writing about. It's fun to look back on all that has changed for me in the last 2 years. My writing is all over the place and evolves with me, but lately I've been sharing about my experience living in an off grid yurt, and I always have themes of both physical and mental sustainability.

So you live in Northern Wisconsin in an off the grid yurt. Tell us a bit more, first about the place where you live. Have you always lived in Northern Wisconsin and how did you find the land that you’re currently on? I loved reading your article where you wrote about finding your piece of land by the way.

Yes! I live in a small rural community in Northern Wisconsin, about 3 miles from the border of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, which isn't too far from the Canadian border. My husband and I are both Wisconsin natives, but we grew up 3.5 and 5 hours away from where we live now. Before moving up here it was a camping spot for my husband as a kid and then we enjoyed visiting for cross country skiing. We wanted to live in Northern Wisconsin to “cut the commute” to a playground where we can do all of the outdoor rec that we enjoy.

We considered moving internationally or to the mountains in Colorado but ultimately chose Northern Wisconsin because of its lakes, greenery and the snow in the winter! Zach and I both remember enjoying snow when we were younger but with climate change it seems we really need to be closer to Lake Superior to get great snow in Wisconsin.

Finding our land was pretty difficult. We moved north and then spent 15 months looking for land. There is a lot of land in our area but not much for sale. Zoning was a whole different issue of figuring out what area allowed what we wanted to do. We ended up looking for land in 3 large sized counties and of those counties, 1 was ruled out completely because they required a minimum home requirement of 500 square feet. Not many townships within the other counties allow full time dry cabins, which we are considered. Over the course of our land search, we whittled down our options to 2 towns that would work for us. During that time, only 2 properties were available. Fortunately we got an accepted offer on one of them!

Now on to the yurt part of your living situation. My husband was obsessed with yurts for a little while and we considered it too, but then the opportunity came up to purchase a shipping container so that’s what we ended up going with. How did you decide you wanted to live in a yurt specifically, and not, for example, a tiny house?

We were attracted to the semi-nomadic approach to living in a yurt. We liked that it was something that we would be able to do ourselves and that it could be taken down with little impact to the property.

We considered a tiny home but we figured that by the time we would have finished building a tiny house we could have built a “small house” that we could have lived in forever. We would have wanted our tiny house to be fully plumbed and thus heated in a more standard way to avoid frozen pipes and/or winterizing the home when leaving for a weekend or even a long, cold day.

We had a turning point where the yurt seemed like the direction for us when we visited with friends who were living in a yurt made by the same manufacturer that we ended up purchasing our yurt from. We immediately fell in love with the wool interior and the beautiful ash beams.

DIY Project - Photo supplied by Elaina

What is it like living in an off the grid yurt? What is one thing you enjoy the most about living this way?

First, I'd like to assert that living in an off grid yurt isn't that radical of a lifestyle. It's not much different than living in a studio apartment in a city. The biggest differences are that the bathroom is outside of the living quarters and that we are more engaged and involved with where our water, power and heat are coming from.

The one thing that you really can't replicate in traditional housing that you have in a yurt is that you can hear everything outside. Because the walls are thin (just canvas and felt in our case) instead of wood, drywall and insulation which would be more traditional in our area- we are much closer to the outdoors with our sense of hearing.

I knew it was going to be loud when it rains, but I didn't anticipate that we would be able to hear the wind, and sometimes even snowflakes. I love it. It makes me feel like I’m effortlessly more connected to my surroundings. We have heard wolves, coyotes and owls among other birds. It's pretty interesting to hear wolves instead of ambient city sounds like we used to hear living in Milwaukee.

Beautiful yurt in the snow - photo supplied by Elaina

And of course, we know life isn’t only about the good times, life can be challenging as well. What is the biggest challenge about going off the grid and/or yurt-living that you have experienced?

One challenge that we face that we wouldn't in traditional housing is heating our yurt after being gone for a longer period of time. We haven’t encountered this often, only when we’ve spent a weekend or longer away. When we return, the yurt is typically only a few degrees warmer than the outdoors. In our climate this can be significant because we see temperatures into the low -20⁰F. It's not difficult to heat the yurt, but we can't use our Google Nest (which we don't have!) to pre-heat before we get home. It doesn't start warming up until we start the fire. Fortunately, even when it is very cold, it only takes about an hour to heat to a comfortable temperature.

Cozy by the fireplace - Photo supplied by Elaina

Let’s talk about all things “off-grid” - tell us a bit about your living situation. I always like to say there are “degrees of off-gridness”, so where would you situate yourself? I want all the details, like what do you use for heating, where do you get your water and what’s the toileting situation?

We are 100% off grid. We use a solar generator, which we have to power with a backup gas generator in the winter. The solar generator is silent, which I only mention because people ask. We use it to power everything we have, including our very efficient solar fridge.

We use wood for all of our heating, including our dreamy wood-fired barrel sauna. We purchased wood locally this year because we didn't have enough time to season the wood we excavated to build. We are hoping that we will be able to use our own wood next winter, but I'm not sure it will be ready yet.

We have a hand pump well that we got drilled right next to our yurt. We were really lucky to hit water at only 57’! We had a couple of weeks before our well was drilled this fall where we went to a trailhead that has running water and would fill up there. We are glad that was short lived.

We are technically a dry cabin, so we haul our water into our yurt and haul it out to our compost pile.

We have an outhouse and use a composting toilet. Manufactured composting toilets don't work correctly in the winter, so we are using a 5 gallon bucket for now and compost our waste using methods learned from the Humanure guide.

We take showers at our gym and use the local laundromat. We will most likely install an outdoor shower in the summer.

What would you recommend to other people who are thinking about making a big lifestyle change, maybe thinking about moving off the grid or moving into a smaller living space ?

I'd recommend putting down your phone and starting small! Get rid of your TV! Think about how all of the little things you do compound into big changes. Then, take the leap! Read Atomic Habits by James Clear for help to get the ball rolling.

What is your most favourite resource about this type of lifestyle? (could be a book or a youtube channel or another Substack or a podcast, you choose! Can be about gardening, homesteading, tiny house living - anything related to living/lifestyle)

I really admire and look up to Laura Fenton, the author of Living Small. She writes about the sustainability of living in smaller spaces, features people living inspiring lives in smaller spaces, and always addresses important topics at just the right time. Laura has definitely inspired me to believe that my life could be better with less.

The sauna - Photo supplied by Elaina

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