We Built the Dream Homestead House TOUR

Happy day, y'all! We're about to go inside the ultimate homestead house. Starts right out there in the backyard. That needs— that's the front yard, y'all. 6 raised beds, 30-something-odd chickens right outside the door. Open porch, broad and generous. In this video, I'm going to show you all the things about this house that make it the ultimate house for growing, processing, and preserving most of our own food. It starts with a generous porch. Come outside, open in the air, get some sun, get some fresh air, get that morning light in our eyes. Then a covered porch, very generous porch. These are set up so that we can actually pull a vehicle in. When you have a homestead house and you're growing a lot of food, sometimes you need to drop off big loads. Uh, sometimes we get big bulk order from Azure Standard or something like that. We need to get our food right in there. We'll have a strip here for a driveway to be incorporated into our yard. Morning sun comes in right here, so in the winter this could be a great place to come and eat. You'll notice a lot of things we're going to talk about orientation. Here we go, let's turn around here. South, that's where your sun's going to be in the winter. So that's why you'll see when we go inside, all our living areas are on the south side, our sleeping areas on the north side. We have a fan out here for taking meals in the summer. The sun has gone over, then we've created shade. Right now we have morning sun, so this, uh, that would be good in the winter, but in the summer we're going to take evening meals out here, hang out out here. A fan to keep it cool. Rebecca's grandpa's table. I don't think there's a nail in it. They don't make them like they used to. Oh, probably one of my most favorite features here, you know, didn't even come with the house, it's an add-on. Well, outlets outside, outlets outside everywhere, but we have one of these retractable extension cords, an electric leaf blower. All done. Don't have to worry about batteries, don't have to worry about fuel, just retracting extension cord. Before we go inside, 8-foot doors. Key opens like a normal door. Sturdy. That's not going to do for a homestead house hauling in big things. I've took wheelbarrow loads of stuff in the house, you know, after a chicken harvest or something. All you got to do is pull this over. Give me a minute, figure figure it out at first. And there's a button here, unlock it, this swings out. Oh, it gets better, it gets better. Okay, so not only can we get big things through here— homestead house, you want the fresh air in, healthy house. Day like today, don't need to run the air conditioning. We got a nice screen and you can see the screen. The kids aren't going to actually run through here thinking it's an open door. You ever done that when you were a kid? We try to bring the outside in whenever we can. Inside the living area. Now note, this is the homestead tour. I told Rebecca this is not the HGTV tour. That's why she's not here. She'll be here when— well, when we get curtains, when we have decorations on the wall. We're gonna recoup some of our costs first. Probably have a carpet there. She can break down the furniture for you. I'm here for the stud muffin. That is our patriarch, establishing our farm, establishing our herd. Stud muffin was our first bull since we got back from the Great American Farm Tour in 2017, and we got super serious about the homestead. And he did great, he lived up to his name. And there, there he lives on. One of his offspring lives on right there. Hamburger was his name. He's our rug. Another special feature in here, the wood stove. In Italy we didn't use it over the winter, but it's there. It's redundancy. We are on gas heat furnace, primarily wood boiler, so then the gas and electrical heat is our secondary. And then this would be our Katie by the door heat source. Wood stove, or if we want some ambiance, have a party, Christmas party. Really cool feature here. We used to have a— this is a remodel. My dad built this, um, 30 years ago, and there was a huge fireplace here. But if you really know, fireplaces are not that great for heating the house. We pulled the fireplace down, and now look at this generous window letting in light. But we can see what's going on across the street, we can see what's going on in the yard, we can see our beautiful garden. And chicken run. This is the south side, sunny side. A sunroom. This used to be a covered porch and now it's a sunny sunroom. Look at the light in here. Am I just not lit up? Oh, it's so good. The light in here is so good. Got a ping pong table in here. For the kids. We want to be the fun place to be where other children are attracted here, other kids are attracted here. This helps keep them off of screens and have fun. I like to play it with them. A fan, keep it cool. We have everything super insulated. We're using less energy than we were before despite huge cathedral open ceiling. We were so cramped and so dark before. We really lit it up in here. We let in the light, also the warmth. Tile, that serves as a mass. You know, the heat comes in and warms that up and it releases at night. I mean, that's the theory anyway. VIP porch. We call it the VIP porch because the builder ended up calling it that and we, I don't know, 'cause we don't have a way to get up here from out there. You gotta be in the club to be able to make it to this porch. Green Egg smoker. —your copious meat eaters. You'll see our freezers in a second. Again, you could come out here to the south side, get some sun, get an amazing view of the gardens and chickens. Well, an amazing view of our farm. Locust boarding off of our land. We harvested this locust, had it milled, planed, and we're— I'm walking on wood from the land. That's a porch with a story. A struggling plant. We grow all our own food outside. Thousands and thousands of plants. We end up neglecting indoor plants. Just— it's just not happening. Kitchen, where do I start? Let's start at the unexpected. Huge stainless steel milking pan for pig scraps. That's important because we have lots of food scraps. All this, this beautiful blue cabinet, blue poplar from the land. Also from the land, walnut. Wood floor, not from the land, but you and I sure had an adventure going to get it in Tennessee, didn't we? Probably one of the most important areas, which is constantly doing dishes. I swear I, I, I did the dishes before this video, but they've piled up again. Generous sink. Beautiful view while you sit here and do dishes. And my favorite part: one dishwasher, two dishwashers. You might be a homesteader if your dream is to have two dishwashers. And if you want a pinch me, I cannot believe this is real dream, this has got to be one of my favorite features. I definitely use it all the time. With homesteading, you often need ice— I mean I'm mostly using it for my sparkling water. I don't know, you know, you might need to cool something down. You're gonna have a community party, the kids are having their friends over, you need to cool down some chickens after butchering, whatever. Shall we keep going just on down the line? Walnut hood. This is a legacy house, gonna last forever, gonna be a gift to the kids forever. Pot filler. This is a big game changer. This way, especially in a homestead house. Not a 5-gallon pot, but you'll get the idea. This is a 2-gallon pot, and that'd be 16 pounds. A 5-gallon pot would be 5 times 8, like whatever, 40 pounds. You don't have to go to the sink and haul it over. I didn't even know these things existed. Thanks to the beautiful one for introing stuff like that. That's nice. That is a gas stove as well, which came in handy in the hurricane when we lost power. We had a generator, but the stove didn't have to be on because it's gas. And one is a small— this is like our microwave. I have no microwave in here. It's terrible for you. What do we do when you need to heat a little something up? Well, you put it in the little oven. But we got double ovens, which, which comes in handy because you keep— you cook things at different temperatures. We have 6 burners, which is crazy, but not really. Not in a homestead house. Just the other day we had all 6 of these going. It's not uncommon. You might have a veggie in this one, a meat in that one, a broth in this one. Somebody else is cooking something here, frying something there, starting a hot tea. All 6 burners going often. At the same time. People are going to want to know where I got that. Well, no, nowhere like crazy except that it's Etsy. Oh really? Because I've seen— I think there are people who like, there's— they're a homestead and they make them. Yeah, a shell bucket for, for breaking the shells into and feeding back to the chickens. Yeah. How many you got? You got a good bunch there? Well, I washed a bunch. Okay. Yeah, I washed a bunch. Washed ones go in the fridge. We're gonna see that in a second. Another new concept inset cabinet matches, but it's a fridge. And for us epic meat eaters, a freezer. Have so much storage. We did not have enough storage in the house before, so this is very exciting. Look, look at this pantry, and you can roll this stuff out and grab it. I don't utilize that enough. I don't realize it's there and I'm reaching in the old way and I realize there's a new way, y'all. I can grab these noodles. This, it always reminds me of the, what's that movie? C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Walk-in pantry, we're so excited about that. Another fridge overflow, like what do we have in here? Okay, we have some cream. We only got 1 gallon of milk right now. We got some spare cheese. It's kind of sparse right now. And just a walk-in pantry just full of herbs and gluten-free baking supplies, salts, extra chips. I mean, you got the bulk herbs by the jar full. We prioritize with growing of our own food things you cannot buy, like organic Boston butts. So we grow our own pork, you know, we grow our own grass-fed lamb, raw dairy. And those are some of the bigger expenses. And then we kind of go down the line to the veggies, and then eventually we'll probably be growing more of our herbs. But for now, we're just happy to buy them in bulk. Before I leave this section, another sink. A hand washing sink, a raw meat sink, an overflow sink. Hey, somebody's using that sink. I need a sink. Let's go to that sink. Speaking of overflow and extra, 2 more ovens. 4 ovens. And it's not uncommon that we have 3 ovens going at once, sometimes 4, like pizza night. Natural light. Look, we have the skylights blaring. I don't know why these lights are on. We wouldn't even know the lights are on. Watch this. No difference. That's why I didn't know they were on. Gotta talk about this. How many people can you sit at this table? We commonly have 8, our family plus Grandpa. Uh, there's a 10— this is a 10-person table. That's a homestead table right there. Jonah made us this custom phone charging station, which is great because you don't lose your phone and you don't— and more important, just as importantly, you don't lose your charger. Kids can't run off with this charger. My mom's phone's here, the kids' is there. That is everything on the list except I had one more thing, and that's just this farm. You're gonna see farm views all around, really, from this holler house right here in the center. We can see everything over on this side, everything over there, and everything behind us, all from our zone zero house. It's handy to be able to check in on the home. Now my office. First time having the office since we've had kids. This is amazing. It's It's not too far away from the living places, which I like. We can keep the door open if we want. This, these days, you know, it's where a lot of this comes from. I mean, Austin edits, but keeping myself in batteries. Mike's security station. Also a good view of the farm. Probably one of the coolest features in here. Yeah, we're gonna have to do another tour when we get our dream, uh, furnishings. This is just a Facebook Marketplace like $50 score or something crazy. Oh, this is fun. Look, million subs, 100,000 subs. We never believed it. We would never believe we've even gotten there. A million subs. Are we ever gonna get to 10 million? I don't know. I, I won't say I— we won't, because I never even thought we'd get to a million. I'll save a lot of this for the beautiful one. The finish tour, the HGTV tour. This is the home tour. Bed muffin, I have an ice bath, polar plunge. It would be so good, so good for you. I've just gotten out of the habit. Sauna, we do every night. Definitely a favorite spot, a little private sunbathing back here off the road. Geese can see me, and I can see you too, buddy. Nice view of the pole barn. You know, we we lamb in the winter. We can come out here and kind of just check and monitor on that. Phase 2, I guess we're gonna put stairs down through here so I could get down to it. Been showing you a lot of the frontwards view, but this is the back view. You can see the crop gardens. You can see where we've healed the land from, or, you know, restored it as best we could after the hurricane and mulched. This is quite the feature. We didn't expect it to come out this good. We didn't, you know, it's kind of a See everything that's going on in most of the farm from this back porch. This is a hit. Kids' room. We'll save you the HGTV tour. This is the only kind of indoor plant we don't kill. Dad joke. It's plastic. You thought we were serious up there. Serious down here. Dedicated garden kitchen, we're calling this. Okay, but it ends up being a milk parlor, clean all the milk stuff. I cannot believe we were doing all this in that little 700 square foot house. Uh, dedicated washing machine or dishwasher. Yeah, dishwashing machine. A great view of the garden. A mini split. It didn't have to kick in a whole lot in the winter because we're earth— we're in the earth. See, we're in the earth. It kind of insulates it itself. Take the milk, the filtered milk, put it right in here. Okay, maybe this comes with the HGTV tour. We got to put in the oven. There's going to be an oven down here. Be a great place to can. Hopefully we want to break down our animals here, not slaughter, but break down, you know, putting out a stainless steel table here and just parting our animals. We got to get our cold room going again though before that happens. Oh, a dedicated bathroom. And what's cool about this bathroom is I can come down here and not have— not, you know, every time I have to go to the bathroom, the beautiful one ends up needing to go to the bathroom. You know, you know how it goes. This is a farm bathroom. We take our shoes off in the house, air pure, keep that air pure inside the house. You could come without taking your shoes off and go to the bathroom in here. Again, more fun, more fun for the kids. Definitely one of my favorite rooms. It's gonna be kind of loud, but not— don't need to show you too much except 1, 2, 3, 4 freezers. Oh look, I could probably start consolidating. This is the pork aisle at our, at our homegrown grocery store, right? Pork department. What's this? This is lamb department. This is kind of our veggie department, which ends up having beef liver and pepperoni in it. Oh, here's some, some blueberries, zucchini, turkey broth. That's our version of a veggie department, I guess. Beets, squash puree, Yetis for traveling. This year we hope to see you guys at the Homestead Festival in Tennessee and then Homesteaders of America in Virginia are two for sure tour dates this year. We'd love to see you guys there. I like this room. I didn't know how much I would like this room. I'm proud that we have this room. I'm proud that we do this. Got this off of Facebook Marketplace. They weight train. They weight train 5 days a week. I weight train 4, 5 days a week. And guess what? The beautiful one's gotten into it too. And we don't need much. We got kettlebells, a weight bench, and what do you call that? But anyway, that's all we need. More veggies. Okay, some peppers. Bit of salmon. Okay, a little meat department, little bones, little pork. Basically a custom design. You can't buy homestead plans, designs. You need a big pantry, multiple ovens, multiple burners, uh, living spaces open to the sun, air to be able to come through, big mud rooms, multiple doors. We live here. We don't— I can't remember when was the last time we ate out. It's been a minute. It's been months. What? Yeah, that was January. I'm filming this in, uh, early April. That's it. Hopefully you got some inspiration. This has been a long dream for us, finally come true. Now to pay it off. Happy day.