Hi, I'm Crosscut! You may remember me from such threads as "How to cure Covid with this one weird trick" and "Stuck hitch pin? Free it in only weeks using these 37 simple steps".
Never really introduced myself at the old site except in scattered bits and pieces, I'm a privacy fanatic and don't like providing too much identifying information, but a more detailed and slightly sanitized introduction seems in order here at the new forum. I've left the dates out but I'm the oldest of the Gen-X'ers so you can guess the approximate years from that. Suppose I should start with my forum name, I was building some garage shelving when trying to decide on a name and thought crosscut sounded better than chopsaw. :)
Background / motivation: Survival/preparedness devotee since childhood, built my first FAK at age 13 (after taking a Red Cross First Aid elective class in jr. high) out of an old fishing tackle box and stocked it using money made from my newspaper route. Not really sure what interested or motivated me about preparedness, none of my family or friends growing up were 'preppers'. Outdoors types for sure, but not survivalists/preppers. I was a free range latchkey kid from age 7 (parents divorced), and no siblings around so I often had to take care of myself and solve my own problems so that likely played some role in it. College dropout, joined the Navy, and married my high school sweetheart. Money was short so the preparedness plans and projects were pretty minimal then - but we started the long term planning of where we wanted to get to, and it was as much about independence and self-sufficiency as about preparedness. Preparing in earnest didn't really start until after the Navy and just before we bought our first home a few years later, we agreed the home should be as self-contained as possible, and we found a pretty good one in our price range that had a well, basement, propane heat, and a septic on about an acre. With both of our careers starting to take off by then, and no children, we had more disposable income and made a lot of progress towards the preparedness and self-sufficiency goals.
Fast forward, our current situation, and our biggest project:The better half and I and our two dogs live in a passive solar offgrid ICF home that I spent 2 years researching/designing and then contracted to have built in the northern Midwest on a smallish number of acres surrounded by federal land. This project started after I purchased some wooded acreage that adjoined our small offgrid BOL/vacation cottage that we had acquired a few years before, and as luck would have it we sold our first home near the market top before the subprime housing crisis hit in full, and we were able to get good bids from builders in the remote area where our BOL (and new acreage) was because they were already starting to feel the pinch of the crisis starting there. Not that that made it easy, but it was less expensive in the end due to that timing. Building a custom home can be a very frustrating experience dealing with the architect, the bank, the county, and the general contractor/builder - and adding adjectives like "passive solar", "off grid", and "ICF" each presented their own challenges to the process. Long story, sometimes comical, but I learned a lot so if you're considering something like this I might be able to provide some helpful info and tell you where I think we screwed up so you won't.
But finally, after the builders were done and the inspectors were gone, I installed the solar/wind/generator backup power system and we moved out of the BOL/cottage we'd been living in for a few months and into our new home. The original power system plan sketch and working doc, yes it's small by today's standards, but still doing it's job nigh on 3 lustrums later :)
(https://i.postimg.cc/MKyVM2N3/powersys.jpg)
Now to brag a little, we're pretty self-sufficient here at the homestead. No public utilities or towns for miles. The sun provides about 30-40% of our winter heating needs and a woodstove on the lower level provides the rest; we cut, haul, and split our own wood. Propane refrigs, chest freezer, and kitchen stoves w/three 500 gallon propane tanks, one strictly an emergency spare filled to 80% and left shutoff. Three wells, one with a hand pump. 1kW, 5kW, and 9.5kW Honda generators and almost 100 gallons of stored gasoline. We're set up for an extended shelter-in-place if required, with multiple layers of redundancy for all the critical (water, food, shelter, heat, sanitation, fuel, comms, defense) stuff, and with room to house 10-12 family and friends and their pets comfortably. Home and property security would rate as "very good" from any objective review I think, much consideration was given to it during the home design/layout phase, when I selected and cleared the site for the home and the landscaping around it, and for the driveway/approaches. I've put in more than a few upgrades in the years since as well, some I've mentioned at the old site and I'm sure to expand on them here in the future, but listing them all in one place could defeat the purpose from an opsec/persec perspective. But suffice to say our fully paid off homestead meets, and in some ways exceeds, all the criteria of two complete survival retreats (https://www.survivalrealty.com/retreat-criteria/), and I've stocked it fairly extensively so we could 'survive' in relative comfort for a significant amount of time without any outside resupply or income. But it's not done quite yet either and we've still got a few good years left in us, so I joined (both here and the other site) to share what we've learned and to steal the really good ideas you ladies and gentlemen often have.
Crosscut, your trials-and-tribulations-of-the-hitch-pin were reminiscent of what I went through when trying to change out the spare tire hoist on my Suburban. I probably went under the back of it several dozen times to alternately soak in penetrating oil or to beat on the old one with a sledgehammer over the course of the week that it took to finally knock the sucker loose! All those of us with rusty old trucks could definitely feel your pain!
Glad that you made the jump to the new forum!
Welcome to the new digs.