http://www.nwedible.com/22-signs-you-are-desperate-to-quit-your-office-job-to-become-a-homesteader/ A few really stood out to me: 1. You run the world’s tiniest farmers market. Out of your cubicle. 2. “Picking up chicks” means something totally different to you than it does to the 20 year old marketing intern with the greasy hair. 3. Everyone in the office is passionate about byflow conversion and you’re like, “check out the germination rate of these peppers!” 4. The entire office break-room smells like kimchi. It’s your fault, and you aren’t Korean. 5. You don’t understand why Carhartts and Muck Boots aren’t appropriate for Casual Friday. 6. During pointless conference calls you browse seed catalogs. During virtual staff meetings you browse seed catalogs. On hold to IT to reset your password, you browse seed catalogs. During mandatory compliance trainings, you browse seed catalogs. During new project stack sessions, you browse seed catalogs. 7. You bring your dairy goat kids with you to the office and bottle feed them in the Mother’s Room. 8. You openly mock your co-workers who play FarmVille on Facebook. Frickin’ tourists. 9. You put in for a week of vacation to repair your mini-tractor and actually enjoyed yourself. 10. While peer-interviewing a potential new hire, you grill him for a firm commitment on his stance vis-a-vis determinate vs. indeterminate tomatoes. 11. Your LinkedIn profile lists your professional title as “Senior Weeder, Back Garden.” You’re a software developer. 12. When you explain things like interactive visual analytics, you start, “Suppose you have two dairy cows…” 13. There’s an office crisis. Your coworker complains, “everyone is running around like chickens with their heads cut off!” and you respond, dead serious, “No they aren’t. Less flapping and squirting here.” 14. You stopped caring about the manure on your good office shoes 6 months ago, and the people in the elevator give you funny looks. 15. You bring your lunch in a mason jar. You keep the pens on your desk in a mason jar. You keep change for the vending machine in a mason jar. You keep business cards in a mason jar. You keep USB drives in a mason jar. You keep backup ethernet cables in a mason jar. You tried to keep your tablet, phone and charger in a mason jar but it didn’t fit, so you brought in a wooden harvesting basket. 16. Other people bring in donuts on Friday. You bring in growlers of homebrew, and upper management is still deliberating how to react. 17. When you took this job, you did so in part because it was only 5 minutes away from the local grange. 18. Co-workers know which boring commuter car is yours because of the bale of straw in the back seat. 19. You use the giant white board in the fish-bowl conference room to bubble sketch your plans for an off-grid homestead. People mistake it for the new highly redundant data center architecture and you get a raise. 20. You have a nice little side hustle selling free-range eggs to your co-workers for $8 a dozen, and this still doesn’t cover the cost of your chicken feed. 21. You’ve shifted from an 8 am to 5 pm shift to a 4 am to 1 pm shift. You’re up at dawn to feed the animals anyway, and wrapping up early gives you more opportunity to work on fencing while it’s still light out. 22. You know all about bullchit, and you see more of it in 20 minutes of office politics than on a 20,000 head cattle ranch.
love my job and have no plans to quit but...my 10 year old house on 1.5 semi-rural acres about 15 minutes from work is for sale and I'm looking at big tracts of land with or without 100+ year old farm houses some of which are more than an hour from work
1, 6, 9, 19...and would LOVE to do 21. I consider myself a homesteader, always have, even on my puny 1/2 acre. Every day, especially in the summer, I wish I could quit my 80+ hour a week part time job to do what needs to be done on the REAL j0b!! Also, add to list: You're the one running the free CSA for your fellow employees.
Young should see the looks I get from my white collar peers when I tell them how many chickens I have in my back yard.
Not quite a homesteader yet...but yes, Carhartts are my goto for EVERY occasion. I don't care if your gettin married or gettin buried. Expect me to be in a Carhartt shirt... and cargo shorts...and sandals.
Mrs, TD just got her first Carhartts recently. I'm proud of her... She quit her general manager job and took a job in the building/services department at the same company. (She got manager of the year on a Saturday and started in b/s on a Monday.) She loves it. She now comes home with a smile on her face every day. (And some dirt on her Carhartts)
Didn't I see something about 100 acres for sale next door...or was that another lukem on the FHC...you could grow a lot of cabbage on 100 acres
The reality is that you will need your office job to be a "homesteader" (I hate that term). Farming requires additional income. Another truth is that most people could have almost the same or the same results with 1/4 parcel of an acre. Heck, I'm experimenting with 4 mini-tomato plants on a table indoors. I produced as much product on a 10x10 plot and a small cement patio as I have on an acre of land.
I always like the idea of homesteading but only if I could have lots of hot water on call for canning, laundry, cleaning and especially bathing. Now that I am at the age where I like the computer, central heating, going grocery shopping just down the hill from the house, the thought of all the work involved in having property exhausts me. But now I know I could have unlimited hot water with the system Campinspecter put together.
That is a bold move. An hour drive, that takes you off the island. I don't know if I could leave that island if I had the chance to live there. I had my house build about three miles from where I worked. I really, really dislike commuting.
Well I can tell you this we live on 55 acres. That is a huge job, we have cows, horses, pigs, ( building a chicken coop now) big garden, cats, 18 dogs ( most of the are working dogs) three are not. The idea of being a homesteader is great but you would need more land than I have. I raise my own hay. I farm one side of my place and hove my cows and horses on the other side. We live in a 65 year old farm house that is always breaking down. We have three kids. With all this my wife and I both work full time. Do not misunderstand me I would not trade it for anything but dang its a lot of work. When you work on your tractor with your head lamp and feed your animals at 11 pm because your daughter wants to color your nails before she goes to bed well hell now my nails are different colors. I got to my day job working for an oil company to rest up for my night job.
