Part 1

I call myself the off-grid accountant because I live off-grid and run my business from offices based at our home.

Each month I’ll be sharing a tale about life off-grid. This month is about why we chose to live off grid.

Full confession time

The truth is, it’s because we found an amazing house we wanted to live in that just happened to be off-grid. Think back it was Covid times early 2021 to be specific, we already lived in an amazing old farmhouse and had around 5 acres of land, sounds idealistic right? It was except for one thing, a great big main road (known as the A623 - through road for trucks to the M1).

It had bothered my husband pretty much from day 1. It was idealistic but noisy. We'd been on holiday in 2019 in a touring caravan and the site we stayed on was QUIET, no noise. It was so relaxing and when we got home we just said you know what life's too short, let's start looking.

Then Covid happened and nothing else did until early 2019. When in lockdown as I’m sure many people around the world did, we spent a lot of time on Rightmove and talking about what we wanted and where we wanted to live.

And then on 17th April 2021 (I know this because I saved the PDF of the house information as “ournewhouse-17thApril2021”) we came by our house. We dis-missed it at first - no workshop space for my husband who had had the luxury of a garage and a stable block to do all his manly stuff in. However, one day in the bath I read the details (not just looked at the photos) and it sounded amazing. Now my husband, a qualified electrician, has worked for many years on power generation sets and previous to that in my words "big engines."

This was a house that generated its own electricity and had its own engine room - I don’t think there could have been a person more suited to this house than John. It wasn’t plain sailing as the owners had already accepted an offer, and so it was a turbulent 4 weeks until we received the news that our offer had been accepted, but that's another story…….And so our off-grid journey began….