Living Off Grid in Central Portugal – 2021 Year in Review

My ‘house’ and top terrace at the very beginning in August 2020.

Happy New Year! My evening didn’t go quite as planned due to a Covid encounter right before I left Canada and I had to spend NYE alone in Covid jail in case I caught it. I was bummed at first but as I settled in with a whiskey and Netflix I came around to the idea. Maybe 2022 will be a year of fewer hangovers and time spent more productively… who knows! I do know that 2021 was a very interesting year for me and it was great to end it with a long overdue trip home to Canada to see family and friends. I was busy catching up with everyone but I managed to maximize my napping time and feel like I had a wonderful rest.

Now that I’m back, I’m eager to dive into all of the jobs 2022 has for me! But before I think too much about next year, I wanted to think back on this past year and write a review of what’s been accomplished. One of my goals for 2022 is to write more consistently on this blog, so lets see if this is the beginning of something. Either way, it’s been fun looking back at all of the progress since September 2020 and, even though everything has gone much more slowly than expected, I’m happy with where I’m at and very excited to see what 2022 holds.

Projects Accomplished Since September 2020

This is meant to be a yearly review but I bought my place in September 2020, so lets start there, shall we?

• Cleared a Parking Area – When I took ownership of the land in September 2020, it hadn’t been lived on for several years. A local guy was keeping the grass short and pruning the olive trees, but that’s about all the attention the place got. The top terrace where my house is was all grassy and overgrown and the entire area was covered in dusty, loose soil which would have become a muddy swamp in the rain. I wanted to be able to park my car without fear of getting stuck so I spent my first couple of months shoveling endless amounts of topsoil and moving it down to the terrace below. Any normal person would have hired a digger, especially considering it was the hottest part of the year, but apparently I am not normal.

• Installed a French drain – This job was ridiculous. In order to stop water oozing into my house through the walls, I had to clear out a huge amount of dirt that had accumulated behind my building. Once I removed endless wheelbarrow loads of dirt, I then had to go down another half metre along two of my walls to put in a French drain to steer water away from the building. Once again, a reasonable person would have hired a digger to get through the rock-hard, sun-baked soil. I am not a reasonable person, it would seem. What started off as a fun challenge evolved into a lesson in perseverance, and then crushed my soul by the end. It took a couple of months and when it was done I was pretty proud of myself, I’ve got to say. This job still has a few little bits to do in order to be finished, but the drain is working well and I think I’ve solved the moisture issues so that’s a win!

• Built a toilet box – Many of my friends in this area poop into a bucket. Yes, you read that right. I figured I’d stick with what I know and do the same. The idea is that, at least for now, I poo into a bucket and then empty that into a larger bucket that lives on a different terrace. All of the poopy goodness accumulates and when the bucket is full, it gets sealed and sits for at least two years and turns into humanure. Then new bucket is started and the process begins again. It’s not the most elegant system, but it will work until I can build something that doesn’t require carrying buckets of poo around. In order to make the whole experience a little less icky, I built a box with a proper toilet seat as one of my first projects so I could pretend that I’m not crapping into a bucket. That charade only lasts until the next time I need to empty it, however.

• Extended my top terrace – An outdoor BBQ and hangout area is something I definitely want to build and I’d like it to be beside my house. Unfortunately the very top terrace was small and crowded by a fig tree. Luckily, I was digging a godforsaken ditch nearby for my French drain so I wheelbarrowed that dirt a short distance and dumped it out to extend my top terrace into a more usable size. I’m really happy now to have that extra space and I’m excited to come up with a design for a shady outdoor spot with BBQ, pizza oven, and a comfy seating area.

• Planted trees – November is planting season and I was hard at work getting a bunch of trees in the ground. I’d accumulated a small food forest while staying at my friend’s place and I spent about a month moving them over mine and putting them in their chosen spots. I sort of got carried away on a buying rampage and ended up with quite a few trees – two apple, two pear, two peach, loquat, Asian pear, cherry, neem, three avocado, two lime, two banana, two almond, two walnut, seven hazelnut, and a few blueberry and raspberry plants. I don’t exactly know what I’m doing, but I got them in the ground and most of them have stayed happy and alive covered with a generous layer of mulch. The loquat decided to die right at the end of the summer, my walnuts are dead, and my almond trees are barely hanging on… but the rest of them seem ok for now.

• Planted grape vines – My garden has been pretty charmed since I moved in but I haven’t had much luck with my grapes. I planted 43 grape vines in February (40 wine and three eating varieties) and it’s been absolute carnage ever since. It was hard work on a miserable, rainy day and things seemed pretty positive at the beginning but quickly went downhill. Some of the vines never took from the start, but most of them showed signs of life into early summer. But as summer dragged on, most of them died and now I’m left with one healthy eating grape variety up by my house, and one or two other vines on the lower terraces. Not ideal. My grapes have been the biggest failure so far and I don’t think I’ll try grapes again in any big numbers until I can sort out some irrigation.

• Built and installed ‘The Bezzanine’ – Aaaah, the Bezzanine! Is it a bed? Is it a mezzanine? It’s both! This four-poster bed with extended storage consumed my life for four full months while I worked on it. It was such an enjoyable project but when it was finally finished and installed it was a relief to move onto something new. I decided to build a timber frame using joinery and hand-carved wooden pegs instead of screws or nails and I learned a huge amount about the design process and the actual building of a structure like this. I don’t have my next timber framing project planned yet, but whatever it ends up being, I can’t wait to get started!

• Had solar power installed – I spent a lot of time agonising over my solar power setup. I don’t really understand electricity and I don’t have the time or interest in learning about it so this is definitely an area where I’d rather hire someone and not electrocute myself. It seems like a wise choice to stay electrocution-free. So I had a long, back-and-forth conversation over several months with the fine folks at Sparkpoint Solar and they set me up with a system I’m really happy with for €4,500. It’s a 48V system with three 375 watt panels, a 1,600 watt inverter, and a 2.4Kwh lithium battery and it’s been amazing so far, even though I don’t understand a thing and don’t really want to.

• Built raised beds and planted a garden – After clearing an ungodly amount of loose dirt from my top terrace, I had giant piles of what I thought was crappy soil on the terrace below. Ever hopeful, I ended up shoveling it into a few mounds, putting cardboard and compost on top, and planting tomato, cucumber, and jalapeño seedlings. I covered it all with thick straw mulch, kept it watered, and that was that. Well, it went berserk and was giving me garden goodness all the way up until mid-November which was amazing to me given my lack of any planning or effort.

• Installed gutters – Installing gutters sucks. It’s at least a two person job for sure but I foolishly attempted to snap it all together and get it up on my roof myself which probably would have been hilarious to witness. I failed, but my friend came to my rescue and helped me lift the six metre section into place and I did the rest. I needed to keep water away from the back of my wall and I also wanted to collect rainwater, so it was a necessary evil and I eventually got it done.

• Picked and processed olives – Some friends and I, for the second year in a row, worked as a team to pick the olive trees on our quintas. My trees were loaded with olives this year and after four days of picking and sorting, we ended up with almost 30 litres of oily gold each. I also put a few olives in jars to experiment with brining them, but I won’t know how that turns out until April. Olive picking season is four or five days of solid work and it’s tough, but working alongside friends makes it bearable and I actually look forward to it!

• Set up a very basic water system – Water can be your best friend or your worst enemy when you live off grid. When a great system is in place and everything works, it’s amazing. But when things go wrong it’s terrible, especially when you have a garden full of plants to keep alive during a hot, dry summer. I don’t yet have a good water system in place but at least I finally have a water pump that works which feels like a major accomplishment after wrestling with a crappy pump for a several months. I’ve got a super basic setup where I pump up to a 1,000 litre tank next to my house and fill buckets for cleaning and building. I also water my garden from the tank using hoses and I hooked up hoses on my other terraces for watering the trees down there. It’s early days and my water system is rather crappy, but it’s way better than it was and I have big plans to make it suck less in 2022.

• Installed most of my insulated floor – I could have decided to whack tiles directly onto the existing concrete floor and call it done, but I wanted something with a bit more of a cozy feel so I decided to make my life more difficult by building an insulated floating floor. This meant buying stupidly expensive plywood, cork boards for insulation, and wood to frame it all in place. It also meant having to spend a huge amount of time putting it all together which has been a slow and frustrating process. Eventually I’ll put tiles or hardwood on top of the plywood but, for now, I’m very happy with it. It’s mighty cozy already and it’s not finished yet!

• Built shower area – My previous system for showering was me sitting in front of a bucket wrapped in a sarong, using a USB-charged shower head thing to spray myself while trying to keep wrapped up in case the very old neighbours should happen to walk past. I’m not sure what sort of impression I’d have made should boobs or ass have happened to pop out in their midst. This method, though somewhat risky, was fine when the weather was crazy hot but as things started to cool down, showering outside became more like a strange form of torture. Knowing the doom that awaited me in the cold weather, I built an indoor space in my house to shower. This basically meant putting a drain through the bottom of the wall and laying a concrete floor around it. I was very intimidated by this project but the water goes away as planned, so I guess I did things right! I now have a place to shower inside and don’t need to threaten the neighbours with unsolicited nudity.

• Did some interior building work – Right now my place feels more like a building site than a house, but I’m working towards making shelves, cupboards, and internal walls and I think it’s starting to take shape. I constructed a mini cob wall with shelves inside my shower room and I also extended the Bezzanine timber frame out to create a dividing wall between my living space and shower and bathroom sink area. I also put a wooden frame in place for a future cupboard to go around my solar power stuff, but there’s still a lot of work to do on that. Everything is only partly done but these things help me visualise the final design a bit better and make the place feel more like a house.

• Built a hearth and installed a wood burner – One thing I decided fairly early on was to have a wood burner custom built from a local-ish blacksmith. I wanted a style that would work with the aesthetics of my place and I also wanted to design something of a specific size to fit nicely into my tiny space. I started the conversation with The Off Grid Blacksmith sometime in the summer, but I let things drag on for ages and by the time the cold weather rolled around, I was still without heat. My wood stove arrived in mid November, but I still hadn’t built the hearth for it to sit on and I had no idea of what to do about the flue pipe and installing that. Well, living in a freezing cold stone building in November is one way to get motivated! The thought of freezing each night meant that I figured it all out pretty quickly and my wood stove, Mr. Burns, was installed by the end of November on a sexy stone hearth with a flue that probably needs some improving, but does its job. I was intimidated by this whole process, especially because I had to make a 45-degree hole in my half metre thick stone wall, but it all worked out and I was feeling toasty by early December.

The Best Parts

I feel like 2021 was challenging for all of us as Covid crap dragged on. I feel so grateful to have my little piece of property to work on so I can just put my head down, get to work, and ignore all the crap. It was a wonderful year and here are the highlights…

• I love living here – I sort of felt silly buying a piece of land without ever having explored elsewhere in Portugal, but when something feels right I usually go with my gut and it usually works out. I feel like I chose the right place because I love my little piece of land, I love the building I’m turning into a house, and I love the community I’ve found myself in. There are so many people in this area doing interesting and creative things and I find it very inspiring!
• Getting to design and work on my own land – I’ve been dreaming of owning my own little piece of the world for around a decade and the idea of being able to put my hard work towards goals that I design is just such an amazing thing to me. I’ve spent a lot of time as a volunteer working on building projects for other people and I’ve loved it, but there’s something magical about designing the projects and buildings on my own land and knowing that all of my hard work goes towards accomplishing my own goals and dreams.

• Eating food I grew myself – I have to admit that my garden surprised me in 2021. I didn’t put much effort in but it still magically kept producing food for me well into November. I can’t take much credit for its success since I mostly neglected it, but I did enjoy reaping the rewards and nipping down to my garden to harvest food on a regular basis. I think it’s such a cool thing to be able to plan a garden and grow my own food and I’m looking forward to working on this in 2022 with more of a plan in place.
• Seemingly endless jobs and tasks – For me the enjoyment of this whole thing is the process and I love that there will always be something to do. I love waking up with a list in my head, working through it, and seeing results. It sounds sort of corny but when I’m working on a challenging building job or in the garden or something else that’s fun, I’m excited to go to sleep so I can get up early and get cracking the next day on my massive list of jobs.

• Helping friends with their projects – Everyone who lives here seems to have 10,000 things on their to do list and I really enjoy helping out here and there on work days. It’s a lovely opportunity to offer much-needed help, see how other people are doing things, explore other bits of land, and hopefully to try something new. I’m incredibly busy on my own land, but rarely with something that can’t wait until the next day and I hope to do more work days at friend’s places in 2022… it always comes with an amazing lunch, after all!
• Learning new things regularly – Every day is a learning opportunity and I absolutely love it! It helps that I’m interested in practically everything to do with living on an off grid homestead (except electrics) and so I’m always trying to figure things out and I love that I have the time and space to experiment and learn.

Challenges

I came into this whole off grid living thing with a plan and I don’t think the lifestyle is as difficult as some people would lead you to believe, but this year did come with some challenges…

• Financial struggles – It’s been a definite challenge for me getting used to be very careful with my finances. I’ve never made loads of money, but I’d always had enough because I don’t spent a lot. Now I’ve found myself spending a lot while I build my place and having to balance that with a drastically reduced income because of Covid. Turns out people don’t buy travel maps if there’s no travel. It’s taking a bit of getting used to and it’s sort of stressful but at least, when things are really tight, I have a place to live and plenty of materials and jobs to keep me busy.
• Overwhelm – I’m the only person working on my land and nothing will get done unless I do it myself. That’s sort of a scary realisation! I actually love this because I want to do all of the work myself, but there are moments where I feel quite overwhelmed, especially when there are things that should be done as each season ticks over. The overwhelm comes in waves during busy periods and then it passes, but I should probably work on being better at asking for help. The good news is that few things are actually that pressing so if something doesn’t get done when I planned, I just need to accept that it’ll get done later and everything will be ok.

• Living in a building site – I moved into my place as soon as I had electricity installed and a place to sleep but the space is basically just a shell of a stone building. Living inside a building site (that’s also a tool shed) is though and moving through the space can sometimes feel like a game of Tetris as I shift things around to be able to cross to the other side. It’s a challenging living situation but the good news is that, with each job I finish, the space feels less like a building site and more like a house.
• Living on my own – I’ve never lived on my own for any extended period of time, which seems bonkers for a 44 year old, but it’s true! So when I finally moved into my own place, it was a bit weird. I love time on my own and I definitely love having my own space, but I also really enjoy having people around, cooking and eating with others, and all that fun stuff. So it’s sort of weird spending so much time in my own company and there was a bit of an adjustment period while I got used to things. It’s easy to get caught up with work at my place but I try to make an effort to do something social every three or four days so I don’t get too stir crazy.

Lessons Learned

I’ve quickly discovered that living this off grid, homesteady type life is filled with lessons and I definitely have some advice to pass on, even though I’ve only been at it for a short time.

• Everything will take way longer and cost a lot more than expected – Portugal is a slow-paced sort of place and, while I really love that part of life here, it can be frustrating when I’m waiting on a delivery to show up. The price of building materials also keeps going up and up and so a trip to the wood yard or hardware store always means a huge dent in the ol’ wallet. Now I know that, if I’m hoping to get wood ordered for a project, I’ll need more money than expected and I’ll want to place the order way before I want to start the job.
• Don’t plant anything that needs to be watered by bucket – I got a bit carried away with my tree planting in the first year and stuck them in the ground before I had any sort of plan set up for watering. While it does rain a lot over the winter months (hopefully), there are still stints where it doesn’t rain and tree babies need extra care. Though the previous owners put pipes and taps to each terrace, I didn’t get around to figuring out the rest of the plumbing and how to attach a hose until later. This was probably dumb and should have been the first thing I did because watering by bucket is horrendous.
• Plumbing-related tasks are very frustrating – Water and plumbing will cause much frustration when it doesn’t work and joy when it does. Plumbing-related tasks always seem to require multiple trips to the shop to get that thing I forgot or the other thing I bought in the wrong size. I’ve accepted this, there’s no point fighting it.
• Don’t go too crazy growing a big garden unless you have time for it – My garden was super small in 2021 but it kept me incredibly busy! I guess I should have considered that having a garden means a lot of time spent watering and when it starts producing, it also means finding time to process the food. I wanted to spend 2021 on making my building livable but I ended up spending way more time than I expected on my garden.
• You can never have enough buckets – No matter how many buckets and how many different sizes you have, you can never have enough. I always need more buckets. Always.

New Skills I Learned

One of my favourite parts about this lifestyle is how many new things I learn along the way. I got up to all sots of different things in 2021 and I feel like I was able to soak up a good amount of new knowledge and experience.

• Timber framing – I was fortunate to sneak over to Costa Rica to take the most wonderful course on timber framing right before Covid shut our lives down. The course was taught in a way that gave me the tools and confidence needed to make my own design and I also got loads of practice laying out and cutting the joints. Then I took this knowledge and spent four months designing, laying out, and building a timber framed bed with a mezzanine on top. It was a challenging and time-consuming project but I learned a huge amount and now I feel quite confident for whatever my next timber framed structure will be.

• Building and plastering with cob – I’ve got some experience working with cob but in 2020 and early 2021 I had an opportunity to really hone my cobbing skills working on my friend’s extension. I used cob to plaster massive straw bale walls, inside and out, and I also built a 40cm thick cob wall at the front of the house, almost single-handedly. I feel like I perfected my cob mixing and learned a huge amount in the process and I can’t wait to get a hold of my own supply of clay for some cob structures on my own land.

• Making light clay straw bricks – I’m quite interested in the idea of pre-making adobe and light clay straw bricks and stockpiling them to use on future builds that I haven’t dreamed up yet. I had an opportunity to experiment with brick making at my friend’s place and I really love the versatility and insulation properties of light clay straw. It can be used in wall systems using form boards or made into bricks in whatever shapes are useful (I even did triangle bricks… madness!) and I had a lot of fun being creative and learning about this material.

• Slaking lime – Around these parts, the only type of lime we can easily get our hands on is something called HL-5 lime and I’m told it has cement in it and therefore isn’t ideal for plastering and pointing. I don’t exactly know what I’m talking about, but I wanted to point my building instead with lime putty and that meant I’d either have to spend loads on small buckets of the stuff, or learn to make it myself. The process of making lime putty is called ‘slaking’ and it involves a somewhat terrifying chemical reaction that causes the mixture to heat up, bubble, and spit. I’d been quite wary of the whole thing but once I got over my fear and just did it, I learned that it was no big deal. Now I know how to slake lime and I plan on getting loads of it on the go ASAP because it should age for at least four months before use.

• Lime pointing – The second half of 2021 for me was packed with lime pointing work. I couldn’t get away from it! I had my own place to work on, plus I found three jobs doing pointing on other people’s buildings as well. I still have a lot to learn and I think my methods are a bit unorthodox, but I’m getting better at it and I feel confident doing work for others. I think the pointing on my own place has improved loads since I started and I’m excited to work on the parts of my building that people will actually see, not just the bits hidden at the back.

• Canning food – A successful garden is great, but I didn’t really give a lot of thought to what I’d actually do with the ridiculous amount of food that grew in it. It seems like a logical thing to take into consideration but, alas, I did not. I was left with an ungodly amount of cherry tomatoes and a seemingly endless supply of jalapeños and cucumbers. This was good news since I planned to make dill pickles, tomato chutney, and pickled jalapeños… but I definitely underestimated the amount of food each plant would produce. But this isn’t a terrible problem to have and I quickly learned how to process everything into shelf stable jars. The jalapeños and pickles have been a hit and my plan is to make even more in 2022, so I’m happy I’ve got the canning gear and knowledge and I’ll be a bit more prepared this time around.

• Using an angle grinder – I have to admit to being a bit of a snob about using power tools. I just really love hand tools and the time and skill they take to use properly. Well, I’ve since learned that power tools have their time and place and now I’m on board! One of the most useful tools of all is the mighty angle grinder, but it’s always been one that’s intimidated me so I’d always try to find some other solution rather than using it. After several projects, I’ve finally become a confident grinder of things and it’s made my life a zillion times easier because of it.

Summary

This whole living off grid on my own piece of land thing has been challenging, rewarding, and incredibly fun. I really can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing right now than waking up each day and digging holes, because they’re my holes! Plus all those other glorious and less glorious tasks… I mean, it can’t all be hole digging. Going onto each new day with an endless list of jobs is something I love. All of these tasks contribute to the improvement of my little homestead and many also challenge me to learn something new or help me improve my skills and knowledge. It’s sort of perfect.

A more recent photo of the front of my house.

Now I just need to figure out how to fund it all. But I love a challenge and I’m excited to see what 2022 holds! Happy New Year everyone!