Off-Grid Homestead

We have an accepted offer on the property and a private mortgage lined up, with all our savings, we just need another $25,000.00 for the down payment and legal fees.

**************************

We are Tom & Nicole. We met in 2003 through a mutual friend. We hit it off, and have been together ever since. We are currently living in Northern Ontario, in a 40-year old travel trailer. Let us tell you a bit about how we got here.

Tom grew up in Englehart with his Mother, step-father, and 2 sisters. His childhood wasn't an easy or particularly happy one; he was severely abused from the time he was 2 years old, by the people who should have been protecting him from those things. He moved out on his own when he was 15, and worked hard to put his childhood behind him.

He was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder in his 20's, and has severe social anxiety, which makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to keep any kind of job. So, he applied for Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) - a monthly benefit from the government for people who are disabled.

He wasn't happy just sitting back and collecting government assistance for the rest of his life though, so he started flipping real estate -  buying fixer-uppers (with the help of private lenders), renovating them, and selling them for enough profit to start again with another house.

Nicole had an easier childhood. Her father wasn't in the picture, but she had a wonderful, caring mother, and grandparents who were always there for her.

Her mother died of Hodgkin's Lymphoma at the age of 31, when Nicole was only 10, and her Grandparents raised her from then until she went to college for chef training, met Tom and they started their life together.

Tom had been living on his farm that he had planned on being his family home, when he and his then gf separated, so he sold it to move on. 

Nicole and Tom started out in a tiny apartment in Englehart while looking for a new house to flip. We bought one about an hour south, in the little town of Cobalt.

We stayed there for a couple of years, but with nowhere for Nicole  to work within Cobalt we decided that we needed to move to a bigger town. So we started looking for a place to buy where there would be a better chance for her to find a job.

We found a triplex for sale in Kirkland Lake, bought it, and fixed it up, one apartment at a time. We lived in one of the apartments, and rented the other 2 out.

Nicole got a job as a waitress at the Howard Johnson 3 blocks away, and worked there for 2 years, until they decided to close the restaurant for her shift. She continued to work the front desk 1 day a week, but it wasn't enough income to keep us afloat, and city life was starting to affect our mental health, so we started looking for a place in the country where we could have a little farm.

We ended up finding a hobby farm, about 90 minutes south, near New Liskeard - a log house sitting on 40 acres. We bought it, and moved over the course of about a month. We got some goats and chickens, started gardens and had plans to stay there for the rest of our lives.

Unfortunately, 3 years later Tom was diagnosed with stage 3 Malignant Melanoma and frequent trips to Sudbury for tests and surgeries left us falling behind in bills. Rather than wait until it was critical, we decided to sell the farm so that we didn't default on the mortgage. 

We walked away from the sale with $1000 in our pockets (after all bills and fees were paid), and headed south to North Bay, where we were homeless for about a week before we found a landlord who let us rent one of his apartments without paying first & last.

We lived in North Bay for a couple years, until Tom's mother's boyfriend got in touch with us to tell us Tom's mother had died, and he wanted to leave her farm in the country to us, because he was getting too old to handle it and he was moving into town.

So, we decided to try to replace the memories of Tom's childhood with some happier ones, and moved back to Englehart.

Instead of moving into town, the boyfriend seemed determined to stay there and objected to everything we tried to do to improve things. We ended up living in a tiny travel trailer on a separate piece of the property waiting for him to decide to leave, while getting ready to build a small cabin.

We stayed there for most of the summer, until one day the boyfriend came knocking on our door, in a drunken rage.

He called Tom a bunch of nasty names and then took off back to the house. Tom followed him to try and fix the situation. Nicole stayed behind, in an absolute panic (the boyfriend had multiple guns, and liked to brag about how good a shot he was), with 9-1-1 ready to dial, convinced that Tom wasn't coming back because the boyfriend would shoot him.

When Tom returned and saw how scared Nicole was, we decided we couldn't stay there any longer. Nicole reached out to her uncle (in Alberta) who had a house a few hours south to rent. He agreed to rent it to us, and we lived there until the uncle decided he was going to move back to Ontario to help take care of his Mother (Nicole's Grandmother).

We managed to find a place we could rent-to-own with payments we could afford, 10 minutes from Nicole's uncle's, and moved there.

We stayed in this new place until Tom got sick from drinking the water from the well that was contaminated with fuels, oils and old machinery parts from a previous occupant. He spent 6 months only being able to keep down instant oatmeal; he threw up everything else. With no way to fix the well, we let it go back to the owner's.

At this point, we thought if we moved south to a city, we might find it easier to find doctors and moved into a co-op in Kitchener.

We stayed in Kitchener for about 2 years, until rent became unaffordable, at which point we became homeless and ended up living in a cube van until it got too cold. At that point, a really good friend took us in for about a month, while we again looked for a place closer to Nicole's Grandmother, so that Nicole could help her out after her uncle moved back to Alberta.

We reached out to our former landlord in North Bay, and it turned out that our old apartment was vacant so we moved back in 3 days after Christmas.

While we lived there, Tom was assaulted by the superintendent after Tom called him out for abusing a woman he had rented a room to. The woman escaped, but the landlord decided that the best course of action was to evict us. So there we were, looking for another place.

We found a house with an empty lot beside it, about an hour south of North Bay, and moved again. The landlord there was wonderful, and we stayed there for 2 years, until he sold the house to a renovicter from Toronto who started harassing us trying to get us to move out so she could renovate and jack up the rent. That harrassment included having the 1984 Bluebird bus we were converting into a tiny home, towed away and scrapped.

We couldn't handle it anymore, and facing a choice between staying there and having a total nervous breakdown or finding a new place to live, we started looking for something - anything - to rent, anywhere in Ontario.

The only thing we could find was a piece of vacant land 4 hours north of North Bay, near Shillington.

We made arrangements to buy an RV from a guy in Matheson, who agreed to have the RV brought out to the property by the time we got there the next week. We packed up all our stuff and headed north.

When we got to Matheson, the guy who agreed to sell us the RV ghosted us, and we were left, in the middle of November, with nowhere to sleep - so we rented a hotel room for the night, found an ad on Kijiji for the travel trailer we are currently living in. The owner was willing to take payments and could deliver it the next day, so we agreed to buy it.

We got the trailer to the property, and started to set up the inside so we could live there through the winter without freezing.

We had planned to stay there and get some animals and start a hobby farm again, but we discovered that the road wasn't plowed for the winter, and got trapped for 2 weeks over Christmas and New Year's as we weren't prepared for that. We started asking around about places to rent in the area on a maintained road.

We found our current landlord, who had some vacant land in the country, and he agreed to rent the land to us. This winter will be our 4th winter here.

We don't have running water - we have to carry our drinking water in from a dispenser in town. We get our water for dishes and summer showers from the tap in our landlord's office. In the summer we have an outdoor shower set up and in the winter, we have sponge baths.

We've been improving the trailer and gathering tools we needed to live like this. That includes solar panels, wind generator, batteries as well as firewood processing tools and a tractor.

As we had on all our other properties over the years, we offered to help people when we could. We invited a woman who had been renting land from our original landlord up here, to move her trailer here in exchange for help around the property and $50.00 per month. She stayed here until last spring, never helping around the property and only sporadically paying the 50.00 until we finally asked her to leave, to open the spot for someone who would actually keep their word.

Being a rented property, we are limited in what we do here, such as not building anything permanent.

We have found a property with a beautiful log house on it, that feels very much like home, and now we are asking for your help to raise the money to purchase it before someone else does.

If we do get it, we'll be renting part of it out for a trailer/tiny home for someone else who is struggling.

~*~ If we do get the property, every person who donates any amount will have their name put on a Plaque of Funders, which will be displayed prominently on the side of the house.