Category: Building

Planning With Pennies:
Building A Dream Home Off Road In Alaska

by KatieBuilding3 Comments on Planning With Pennies:
Building A Dream Home Off Road In Alaska

Planning with Pennies: Building a dream home off road in Alaska

Planning With Pennies: Building a Dream Home Off Road In Alaska

One of our goals for this year is to start breaking ground on our dream home, aka the forever cabin. That means we’ve finally decided on a plan for it! We had a lot of things we needed to consider, from foundation to plumbing to electrical wiring, just like building in town. Except our goal was to minimize costs, materials we needed to haul out, and minimize future water and electricity use. We’ll be building most of this ourselves, without being able to get contractors to our property. Though we do have a lot of friends who are excited to help it come together  😀

This is our hand drawn design for what we finally decided on:

Please excuse the spilled coffee and eraser marks. It took us a long time to agree on how everything would go!

Because this is the dream home, it won’t look like the average cabin in the woods.

Continue reading “Planning With Pennies:
Building A Dream Home Off Road In Alaska”

Homestead Goals For 2019

by KatieBuilding / Family / Goals / Homesteading8 Comments on Homestead Goals For 2019

In keeping with the trend since I started this blog, I wanted to lay out our goals for the homestead over the next year. Even though we spent most of this year away from Alaska, we are excited to return to what we think of as our “real” lives. So here are our homestead goals for 2019!

Homestead Goals for 2019 - SledDogSlow.com

Homestead Goals 2018-2019

We had a total of 8 goals we wanted to accomplish in 2018. I will move a few of these over to 2019’s goals as well, like purchasing a fishing permit so we don’t have to go to town for work. Others will be expanded on or completely removed for this coming year. Our goals for 2018 were: Continue reading “Homestead Goals For 2019”

Building On A Budget – The Alaskan Way

by KatieBuilding / Homesteading1 Comment on Building On A Budget – The Alaskan Way

As anyone who has read my previous post about our finances knows, we are on a serious budget out here. But just because we don’t have money doesn’t mean work on the homestead stops! With winter fast approaching, we knew we couldn’t let our water reservoir freeze. Last year we hauled all our water in 5 gallon buckets from a nearby creek, but this year we have running water in the cabin and we pulled from our reservoir for that. So how to keep it from freezing? We thought about burying it, but it’d need to be 8 feet down and that is a lot of digging by hand. Continue reading “Building On A Budget – The Alaskan Way”

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Winter Prep On An Alaskan Homestead

by KatieBuilding / Canning / Garden / Wild Alaska2 Comments on Winter Prep On An Alaskan Homestead

Winter is nearly here in our little slice of Alaska. Trees are barren and we’ve already had our first frost. Seeing as winter is our longest and harshest season, we use the rest of the year to prepare for it. So what does preparing for winter on an Alaskan homestead entail? Continue reading “Winter Prep On An Alaskan Homestead”

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Pros And Cons Of Tiny House Living

by KatieBuilding / Family / Homesteading3 Comments on Pros And Cons Of Tiny House Living

Update: Check out our interview on tiny home living in The New Pioneer magazine Winter 2020 edition!

We live in a tiny house. It’s not the smallest I’ve ever seen, but it’s pretty small for two adults and a growing baby. Including our storage-only loft, our house is still less than 300 sq ft (Tiny House Living, Amazon link). I think it’s a mansion compared to what we started without here, which was less than 100 sq ft. As much as I love our little cabin, it has always been a temporary space. There are lots of reasons to love it, and just as many reasons to be excited to start our larger forever cabin. Just like every aspect of life, tiny house living has its pros and cons. Continue reading “Pros And Cons Of Tiny House Living”