Description
Molly lives off-grid in a tiny yurt on a piece of land that she bought with her two brothers in New Mexico. She bought her yurt secondhand for $2,800 USD including the wood stove. It’s a traditional Mongolian yurt from Groovy Yurts that was handmade and hand painted in Mongolia with natural materials like wood lattice and cotton canvas. The yurt is a circular home that measures 13 feet in diameter so it’s a very tiny house but Molly has organized and decorated the interior beautifully with a small entrance drop zone, a tiny kitchen, a custom loft bed, an open closet space and dresser for storage, a small reading nook, and floating shelves for books, the battery for her solar panels, and her satellite internet. For water, they truck in water from a nearby spring and then use that to fill smaller jugs that they can carry around the property. For a toilet, they have an open-air outhouse. And for bathing, they built an outdoor tub that heats the water with a fire underneath.
Before moving to a remote property to live a simple life off-grid, Molly experimented with several other alternative lifestyles like long-term travel, van life and truck life, but after a few years she found herself craving some stability and a home base. She still plans to travel but is happy to have the yurt she can come back to.
The experience of living off-grid in this way has made Molly feel more connected to the land, and to nature, and it isn’t as hard as she feared it might be, although there are certain things she says would be nice to have in the future (like an indoor bathroom) and maybe even a small adobe home. The chores do take up a lot of time because everything is done manually, from gathering kindling, chopping wood, and stacking firewood to carrying water around the property to where it will be used, and making a fire to heat the bath water, and keeping an eye on the battery to make sure she has enough electricity. But overall it's been a positive experience!
