Welcome to our new quiz: Hipster or Survivalist? It beats me; everyone’s making pickles. The not-at-all-artisanal bread makes me suspect there are a lot of leftover Y2K rations under the beds, but I’m so very out of touch with what the young people are doing these days.
This 30-acre farm in Idaho was found by me. It’ll set you back $185,000, a price that makes me cry.
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Young people? Young people don’t know how to can (jar?)(preserve?) stuff. This is definitely someone’s grandparents farm.
Oh, no young people can now. It’s hipster/ironic/green, so there’s all sorts of 20-somethings doing it. The solar panels make me think of crunchy young people, but the listing says they live “off-grid” so now I’m thinking crazy conspiracy theorists.
I just canned a dozen quarts of pickles last night and am not even 40 (yet).
Also live offgrid with a wood cookstove, though I managed to can in an old RV since its still too hot in the house to run the woodstove all evening.
Look closely, and you can see Stephen Gross and Reba McEntire reflected in the jars. Kevin is still six degrees away.
Hipster. Off-grid is the way to go for environmentalists, and yes, young people can can. (They can dance, too, but that’s another story…)
Hipsters who don’t know anything about financing an off-grid, self-sufficient home dream, though. To anyone thinking about buying this and doing the same thing–YOU NEED INCOME to pay the mortgage, the taxes, the food you can’t raise yourself, and the clothes you can’t make yourself. And it’s hard, hard, hard backbreaking work at times.
Been there, tried it, and failed, probably for the same reason these folks did.
But it’s still oh, so tempting!
LOL As someone who grew up on a farm, your absolutely right. I look at this and wonder if I should head that way.
Yeshanu writes: “To anyone thinking about buying this and doing the same thing–YOU NEED INCOME…”
Yes. Yes, you do.
And gentle dreamers, what he means is “income FROM AWAY.” Do not for an instant imagine that any rural area (e.g., that “small town … wonderful country neighborhood) will somehow shuffle you up a job, or commence buying things from your new business venture. If there were a job or trade there, it would already have been allocated to the folks who were born there – in a delicate dance of survival that most emphatically does not include you. For at least two-three generations.
Instead note the “commute to a larger city,” and ask yourself why that didn’t work out for the seller. Answer: “Not large enough. See above.” Unless you’ve got a right tight offer from a large, new employer coming in on expansion (and a right tight golden parachute clause if it doesn’t work out)…
You had best have enough gelt on hand not merely to buy and build out that dream, but to yield sufficient investment income afterward to render you *at least* semi-retired.
You will still have an extremely educational experience – but done “the hard way,” you are going to lose your dream before you are done with it and may even emerge grieved or angry at the “insiders” who wouldn’t “help” you. It’s called, “Scarcity,” and it lives out there.
Idaho? Likely that Mormon keep-so-many-years’-worth-of-supplies-on-hand thing.
No, no, no, the Mormon thing is more Utah. We here in Idaho are known for our white supremisists!
Now, now, don’t sell yourself short. You also have your world-weary, resigned state song. And here we have Idaho… sigh…
White sumpremacists to the North – Mormons to the South.
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
That ‘bread’ looks more like chunks of wood to me.
Yep! That’s firewood right up front, but it does look like there is bread on the wood stove. It’s not an abnormal amount of canning, either. Just what you might get from a summer garden.
If only I could find that much land for that cheap in CA.
Seriously, you can’t buy a burial plot in CA for $185K these days.
30 acres for $185k. Not bad I guess.
I WANT THIS ONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
it is everything I want in a homesite.
The kitchen/pantry is where I keep my loveseat and persian rug. Aesthetically, that’s where they work best.
mormons! run! their food storage will eat you alive!
you can tell by their home made bread (to the left, on the stove), hand-me-down loveseat, and frequently used dutch oven, cowering in fear that there will be a disaster and all the carefully canned jars of you-figure-it-out will come crashing down.
That is a good stove, though – looks like a Pioneer Maid. But these youngies need some rules. 1) don’t put the flammable chair and flammable rug next to the wood-burning stove. There’s a fire in that thing. 2) It’s dirty and nasty to chop your kindling in the kitchen. 3)Get those preserves in a dark place like the pantry or the root cellar if you want them to keep. These got to be young ‘uns, cause the old folks know these things.
*high five to Magdalena* First thing I thought when I saw all those jars of food was that they need at least a curtain over than shelving unit! Good griefy, imagine the SPIDERS in that kitchen, at least make them work a little to get inside by putting your wood on the porch . . .
For just a little bit more you can get 10,000 acres in Montana http://www.survivalrealty.com/2008/12/agent-jim-kozlik.html
My bad, the 300k was for only 160 acres of the 10,000 total.
For my part, I can’t believe there’s anyone who’d pay more than $185, without the other $184,000 and change, in order to live in “a shop” with a pair of deep but apparently untested wells from which to drink and 15 acres of trees you’ll have to fell yourself, by hand, in order to heat your hovel during the winter in the middle of freaking Idaho. And that’s before you get botulism from your dodgy looking jars of pickles.
Good thing not all our ancestors felt that way, or the United States would still be east of the Appalachians.
For that matter, without basic skills of growing and preserving food, recognizing drinkable water, and obtaining fuel/ fire, the human race most likely would not have survived at all. Don’t be too quick to despise your ancestral roots.
I’m from New York. I have no problem with the idea of the United States being east of the Appalachians. Or outside of the original 13 colonies actually.
We natives didn’t either.
Wow, what a pessimist! This looks a bit like paradise to me.
As a transplant New Yorker, originally from Florida, and country Florida, not Miami, let me take each charge in hand.
$185,000 for the chance to live in Idaho, on property that would take up several NY city blocks, in a “shop” that is easily three to four times the size of the typical NY apartment, and you want to say you can’t see how anyone would pay it? I can’t see how these fools pay $5,000/mo. for these small apartments just so they can say they live in the Financial District, or SoHo, or Tribeca.
Wells did not say they were untested, just a little trouble with them that could easily be corrected.
You don’t have to chop the wood for heat, as the property does have solar panels it undoubtedly has other forms of heating. Not all heating comes from a radiator by the wall, or from the gas line on the floor. The wood is in all probability for the stove, not for heat. Besides, snow is a good insulator.
As for felling trees by hand, have you never heard of this great invention called a chainsaw, they can be powered by gasoline, with no cords! And the ad said the wood was marketable lumber. Likely, whoever you sell the lumber too would come get it themselves.
Dodgy looking jars of pickles? Have you taken a real good look at some of the cans in some bodegas up here lately? Some look like they’ve been on the shelf since the Carter administration. And you don’t even want to know what a typical NY restaurant kitchen looks like when the inspectors aren’t around.
Just goes to prove my theory that native New Yorkers don’t have what it takes to live a normal life. I’ve seen grown men jump and squeal like schoolgirls just because a roach or a rat crossed the sidewalk in front of them. Big guys.
They could make things out of grass and rocks and sell them on Etsy, then get snarked on Regretsy… but that’s another site….
I question the decision to share the cannery and bakery facility when clearly on the page they have a full radar installation masked as a solar panel and most likely surface to air missiles on the advertised “shooting range”
That actually looks like a basement. Is it? Or is that a strange looking, fire-prone house?
I like the comment about how “one of the streams is year-round!” With an exclamation point! Because it’s so unusual and exciting!
If you look on the state listing on the right side of the site, you will see an unusual state–”Georiga.” That must be the 51st one that no one except the CIA knows about…
umm. The reason the “bread” is “not-at-all-artisanal” is because its chopped wood.
99 bottles of preserves on the wall, 99 bottles of perserves…