Welcome to our blog, we are Jesse & Alyssa! In 2015 we quit our lives in the city, bought five acres of land in a remote part of the county and are both building a home (check out our timber frame house plans) and developing a property 100% from scratch, debt-free. We have goals of raising a family, learning to become self-sufficient and living the life we want to live each and every day!

Why did we start documenting our journey?

We started documenting our journey so that we can help others that wish to pursue a similar lifestyle. There are many blogs out there that teach you how to start a garden, how to store food and how to raise chickens, but not many focus on the actionable steps of what it really means to quit your life in the city and buy bare land to develop a property from the ground up, without incurring debt.

We hope that by sharing our journey that we can show others how it is possible to get out of the rat race with a little creativity, ingenuity and hard work.

More About Us & Our Journey

Why We’re Taking This Journey

For the past couple of years we have been having numerous deep conversations about the world and our goals in life. We didn’t feel that the conventional way of living in society would help us accomplish our goals of being self-sustainable and having freedom.

We didn’t want corporate jobs, we didn’t want to live in the city, didn’t want to commute to work, didn’t want a mortgage payment, and didn’t want to rely on anyone else for our basic needs.

We agreed that we wanted to own our home on some land (built ourselves, with cash, to avoid a 30-year mortgage), grow our own food garden, have some farm animals, have the option to homeschool our future children, be in control of our income, reduce our need for money all together, produce our own power and have time to live a healthy, rewarding lifestyle.

Since we didn’t want to buy a marked-up property that was already developed, we decided that it would make the most sense to build our homestead from the ground up. We would start small and develop our property as we had time and money.

Even though this lifestyle and process will be a lot of work, we feel that the journey will be much more rewarding and satisfying than conventional ways of living in America.

This is no easy feat in today’s system. There are many things holding us back from achieving true, sustainable freedom, but we love that the back-to-the-land movement is gaining traction and we couldn’t be more excited to give it our best shot.

What’s an overview of our strategy?

In short, in 2015 we bought 5 acres of land in a remote area of the country.

To start things off, we chose to live in a travel trailer while we developed our land and prepared for the big home build. We built a structure to protect the trailer and make us feel a little more at home.

Initially we set ourselves up with a basic solar power system, we’ve had various off grid water systems (from temporary to our permanent, whole-home water system), had a septic system installed and we’re working on a more sustainable power solution and will eventually decide on a water source whether it’s drilling a well or connecting to city water.

In July of 2016 we began on the home build. Our house is a 36×36 timber frame with a 12/12 roof that sits on top of an icf construction garage. We will have radiant floor heating on our living level.

So essentially, it’s a 3-story house. While our goal was to have the structure completely dried in (with Structural Insulated Panels) that winter, we had some delays so the new goal is to dry in the structure Spring of 2018. Click here to see the entire home build from day one!

We don’t really know what the timeline is for finishing our home completely. Once the house is dried-in, we hope to slow down a bit and enjoy life a little more, making the home build part of our life but not our entire lives. The goal is to have fun with it and make it a memory we will cherish forever!

How can you follow along the journey?

The best ways to follow our journey are on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram! All channels are slightly different, so follow them all!

Which blog posts should you read first?

Here is a collection of our most popular posts on the blog. If you’re interested in following our entire journey in chronological order, visit the blog page and navigate back to the first post of our journey!

How can you support Pure Living for Life?

We are extremely thankful for anyone that helps to support this blog! It takes us over 40 hours each week to maintain this blog and document the journey so that it helps others that wish to pursue a similar path.

Not only does it take a substantial amount of time, but we have real financial overhead with this blog as well. Click here to learn how you can support the blog without spending a dime!

Let us know how we can help you reach your dreams!

We love nothing more than inspiring others to make positive changes in their life and take steps in the right direction.

If you have a similar dream of quitting the rat race and going back to a more simple way of life, take a look through the blog and then let us know what you’d still love information about!

If you’d like to see more info on a particular topic, feel free to let us know in the comments of posts or by contacting us directly. We can’t guarantee that we will respond to every email but we do read them all.

Sincerely,

Jesse & Alyssa