Sawyer Showcase:
Amy, the British Columbia off-gridder, took her dreams to the mountains of B.C.
This sawyer says she's fallen in love with being self-sufficient, cutting her own logs and making her own food
When Amy first sought to develop her property in the mountains of B.C., she didn’t originally envision herself creating an off-grid homestead.
“At the beginning of COVID, we had this property,” says Amy. “The funny thing about when I came here and started off-griding was that I didn’t entirely know I was doing off-grid. I wanted to be on the land and out there.”
It wasn’t until she put up her solar panels and started to build up her property that she realized she’d formed her new home.
Using her Woodland Mills HM130MAX portable sawmill, Amy says she’s been able to craft her dream homestead and created a self-sufficient life for herself with her off-grid home.
Going into the wilds of B.C.
Going by Amy_m_J on Instagram and Facebook, Amy has been sharing her journey, showing how she built up her property from nothing. When she started her land was barren, without any structures, solar power, power systems, a hot water heater or anything else.
"We started with a 20-foot shipping container home and framed that all in," says Amy. "Now it's grown, it's grown a lot. I'm sitting in a front room addition that's made entirely using the mill."
Everything in the container was made using lumber milled on the sawmill. But that's not all she's made.
"Now things have escalated to a barn and bunny hutches and a wood shop," says Amy.
Establishing her own off-grid systems is essential to Amy's goal of self-sufficiency, being able to rely solely on her land for all her needs. Because of this, all the lumber used in her building projects is made from trees felled from her property.
"It's pretty remote and fully solar," explains Amy, noting her renewable energy makes her that much more efficient at living off the land.
She's also farming her own food, raising pigs and goats and other animals on the property too.
While her off-grid lifestyle may not appeal to everyone, Amy says it's something that brings her a lot of excitement.
What is off-grid living?
Off-grid living is a lifestyle choice where individuals or families opt to live independently from public utilities like electricity, water, and sewage systems. This means generating their own electrical power, often through renewable energy sources such as solar panels and wind turbines, collecting and purifying their own water, and managing their own solid waste.
For Amy, this meant setting up solar panels and creating a self-sufficient off-grid home in the mountains of B.C. The goal of off-grid living is to achieve a high degree of self-sufficiency, reducing reliance on external resources and minimizing environmental impact.
It’s about embracing a simpler, more sustainable way of life, much like Amy has done with her off-grid homestead.
Why live so remotely?
"For me I wanted to try living off-grid and try getting away from the usual amenities just to see if I could. It was a personal challenge," says Amy.
Self-sufficiency ended up being one of the core goals of her homesteading project, just because of how remote the property is and how difficult it can be to bring in materials.
Because of that, it was a challenge to learn new skills and figure out how to do off-grid living.
"When we started I was very very novice, and learning as we go," says Amy.
Thankfully she says she's had a community of sawyers, both online and in-person, to help teach her how to live off-grid.
Online, Amy says she's found the Woodland Mills Product Owners and Community Facebook group incredibly helpful, able to ask others advice about how to run the sawmill and see all the great projects others are working on.
Amy says she loves looking it up to "get inspiration too from peoples projects and ideas and what other people are doing."
There's are also a few other Woodland Mills sawmill owners nearby, which Amy didn't know about before buying the same type of mill. Now she says she has a little community to rely on for knowledge.
Living off-grid like Amy
Trying to do off-grid housing like Amy's can be a challenge, but she says she loves every part of it despite its difficulties.
The air is thin in the mountains, their property is so remote that it can be challenging to get anything in or out, plus all the wood Amy fells needs to be dried before it can be used.
But regardless, Amy says she loves living off-grid and being able to use the natural resources of the land, using her green thumb to create a completely self-sufficient environment for her and her farm animals.
"For me it is a kind of freedom, for sure. It's wild and I love it," says Amy.
But plenty of people in the Woodland Mills community of sawyers will recognize what's so exhilarating about the lifestyle, because it's all about troubleshooting and problem solving, which is something sawyers excel at, adds Amy.
"It just rewires your brain to think outside the box all the time, you could almost feel it happening in the beginning," she says.
For those who want to try and live the off-grid lifestyle like Amy, she says you shouldn't "intimidated by what you don't know." Feel free to make mistake and learn lessons and figure things out so you can do a little better the next time.
"Just go ahead and do it," she says. "Don't be afraid to try and fail and try again and figure it out."
And if you want to learn more there are plenty of places online where off-grid communities and sawyers chat and share advice, so tapping into that knowledge can help you on your journey to off-grid living as well.
Subscribe to the Woodland Mills YouTube Channel for more more stories from seasoned sawyers and landowners as they share more awesome projects and provide inspiration for new ideas.