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The False Dream of Cottagecore | How the problematic romanticization of Western rural life reveals our discontent with the modern world
(beneaththepavement.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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I live a version of "living in the woods" and there is no way to do the white girl hobbit lifestyle without massive modern infrustructure. Also, the amount of resource management destroys any aesthetic satisfaction. You are essentially camping with a house. It eats up all your time and then you are supposed to have time to what? Simplify?! Yeah, nah, gotta pay the bills too. So, you still have all the problems of modern living but with the extra complication making it work far from society. All for a whimsical aesthetic?
The cold reality is this is not a cinematic experience. Its stressful, unscheduled, chaotic, and not always rewarding. I'm the IT for our home network and internet, the lumberjack/arborist, the landscaper, the plumber, the water filtration expert, small engine repair tech, concrete, framing, roof, electrical, HVAC...etc. There are a few of these services I could outsource, but then I'm babysitting contractors who usually don't know what they are dealing with or refuse to travel this far.
Living in a cute little cottage with a cutesy greenhouse or vegetable plot and a goat and some chickens sounds like some beginning to a romance novel. Instead you will be dealing gophers destroying your just tilled rows and foxes eating your chickens. You'll be at home depot all the time and farm supply for feed. You'll end up getting a tractor, so diesel will fill the fresh air. A water main will break in the middle of the night and the septic tank will fill up. The power will go out everytime there is a big storm. The shear amount of work and maintenance it takes is neverending and always growing. You'll be doing so many chores that curling up next to a fire with a glass of wine and a good book will sound like a laughable affectation.
Unless you are independently wealthy, there is no way to have this whimsical fantasy of a lifestyle. Chances are, the people who want/promote it would be bored out of their minds inside a week and wouldn't survive it for more than a month.
I grew up in the suburbs and married a girl from a town of 700 and moved to a slightly larger town. My in-laws have a hobby farm and largely do all of their own maintenance, and the whole place is constant chores to keep in good order, and that's when nothing's broken.
I'll put it this way, while clearing several inches of snow in -10 degree weather the tractor broke down and would not move, so my father in law had to hand shovel the rest of the driveway plus a path around the stuck tractor to be able to get to work and then fix the tractor in the middle of the driveway until it ran well enough to get into the unheated machine shed where he's at least not working in the cold wind. Oh and there's more snow coming in a couple of days so better hope he gets it fixed fast. It's a new adventure like that every couple of months on top of his working 40-60 hours a week at his day job
I also live this life, and with a dayjob + all the infra work around here I am working harder than I ever have in my life. And I used to literally dig ditches...
The Sunday morning coffee with chipmunks on my lap makes a good picture, but it doesn't begin to capture the stress and sweat that is necessary for this life.
My hope is that in 5-10 years I'll have systems in place that will take some of that work away, and then when I'm done with the dayjob I might actually get to enjoy it!
People who think they can come out to a forest, cut out just enough room for their tiny house, and relax for the rest of their lives are insane.
Also former ditch digger...
Work on those systems. Think about what they need to be for someone less agile or just less physically capable in general. Think about what it takes to train someone new on those systems.
We went with pellet stove over traditional wood stove because of the ease of use and the lack of local wood supply. Three trips to the city with our pickup gets us all the pellets we need for winter. I think that the combination of improved technology and government subsidies will see us with a heat pump and electric baseboard heaters for backup this year. Easier yet.
We scrapped our indoor plumbing because keeping it from freezing was a full time job. Now I fill 7-9 20 litre jugs once a week and top up our gravity filter system a couple of times a day. Next step is to route some self-draining lines to an interior tank in the unused space above our filter system to get rid of the jug hauling.
We bought a snowblower, because shovelling a 300 metre access road by hand was getting old. Next step is to go electric so that we don't have to deal with fuel and small engine repair and maintenance.
Our yard is being converted from lawn to fruits and vegetables. A bit more each year as we figure out what grows, what we like, and what keeps or can be preserved.
We've made connections in the community, both personal and commercial, so that assistance is a phone call or cheque book away.
Those and other things have brought the time and effort difference between current life and our city life down dramatically. We now have plenty of time for a variety of hobbies. I retired last year and now I can't say I really even notice the impact of chores on my freedom to do as I will. Keeping in mind of course, that some of those "do as I will" activities might be seen as chores by others.
Commenting here to remind me to flesh out my reply when work isn't breathing down my neck.
Short form - This comment is so very similar to how we think and work. I would love to discuss more.
Especially this part: "some of those “do as I will” activities might be seen as chores by others."
My morning chores are the best part of my day. Probably because I chose them, and do them in conjunction with the flows of seasons and the natural changes in which animals and weather patterns are visiting us. Chores indeed... More like meditation!
@[email protected] Tagging because I thought you might not get a notification from me replying to my own post instead of yours :p
Finally have some downtime to flesh this out a bit.
We are in our mid-40s.
Thinking ahead about the systems we use is paramount, as I have crohn's and other immune-related problems surface as debilitating gout and/or iritis, and my wife suffers from hip issues. Everything is being planned on single floors, with as little stairs or walking as possible. We both know how hard it will be in another ten years.
We use a standard woodstove mainly due to the fact that we live on a bunch of acres of trees, and there is enough standing dead to get some 'free' firewood every year, and I truly enjoy dropping and splitting trees.
Our main water source is a creek about 200 feet from the main house. In the winter I have to keep 200 feet of hoses and the gas-pump in the bathroom to have it thawed when I need to run it and fill our two 1000litre totes. From there we have a 12 volt pump that is connected to a small charge controller with two 100watt panels and a lithium battery (cannibalized from the 5th wheel we lived in while building our tiny house)
This system is working 'ok', but if a well company would actually show up we would probably trade it for a well in a heartbeat. Especially my wife, who is very tired of driving to the city to do laundry.
The actual method of getting hot water to the kitchen tap might drive some folks nuts, but for us it has just become part of life. it goes something like:
Our water heater is one of those propane driven camping units with the propane bottles stored outside. And our cookstove/oven is also propane (shout out to unique appliances for their sweet offgrid models!)
For lighting we primarily use solar string garden lights due to the fact that it took us over 13 months to get grid power which gave a lot of time to get used to minimal power from a little all-in-one bluetti power bank and a couple of 750watt panels. And now we just enjoy the light they give off, and the fact that they just turn on and off in conjunction with the sun.
We have since switched most of our internal things like computers, pet lights and a small emergency space heater to 110v, but being out in the boonies means a lot of power outages and glitches, so we also have the bluetti ready to serve things like the fridge, snake light and heatpad, and our internet, when the mains go down.
We are always finding little things to help, like installing a usb fan above the woodstove to supplement the anemic air movement from the little stovetop fan that we bought, or improving the efficiency of the small heater in the bathroom to also warm the incoming water lines when they are hovering around freezing temps so we don't get frostbite on our fingers under the tap.
I dug a septic tank and field myself last year, and moved the toilet from an outhouse to an actual flusher. That was like moving from the slums into a palace for us! No more 3am runs to the outhouse at -30C!
I am starting to feel like we are getting less work than our old life, but the truth is probably that I am just more used to the work I do every day, and can even enjoy some of it.
Oh yes... A snowblower. I blew the bank on a used commercial 48inch blower last year after we got stuck in our driveway by a plow piling literal 100 pound ice blocks at the end of our driveway on christmas eve. I'm a strong guy, but those bastard blocks were just impossible to move by hand. NEVER AGAIN. Now I run the big blower every time I see even an inch of snow. And I go out past our driveway so the plow doesn't have anything to push in my way.
I won't even start on thawing the incoming water lines every morning as that has just become part of life, and/or the removal of snow from the roof of the house or the outbuildings.
Spring is coming. And this year is the year of 'improving, not building' so we shall see what comes out of it.
I'm sure I missed 100 things here. But I have to get back to work now. Thanks for giving me a reason to type all this out :) I sometimes forget how far we have come from carrying buckets of water from the creek, and digging an outhouse...
... and then there is drainage.
Our lot is positioned to collect all the runoff across a few acres. In itself, that's manageable, but the septic holding tank is sitting under the trailer with insufficient height above the ground. Even that wouldn't be a problem, but a new neighbour did some perfectly legitimate landscaping that causes a pool to form where runoff used to make its way directly to the creek behind our lot.
So now, every spring, I have to take a shovel and do drainage management to try to get the water running down the road instead of into our yards. It's kind of fun in its own way, except that I cannot get people to understand that they have to stay to one side of the road, even if that means taking turns. Every time someone drives in the wrong place, it creates ruts that direct water to the wrong side of the road.
I just got in from trying to break up an ice dam that is causing water to run into our septic tank.
Thanks for tagging. I would have missed it.
It sounds like you're on the right track. Unsurprisingly, we have some substantial differences, some based on the fact that we live in a park.
We are not allowed to have a septic field, so we just have septic storage tank. Getting an off-season (winter) pump-out is very expensive, so we do a lot to keep pump-outs to once a year.
We are not allowed to have a well, so we put in a freshwater cistern. I haul water from a very good well. Our household use is about 180 litres a week. I pump from the cistern into jugs that I bring inside. Most gets poured into a highly rated gravity filter. Laundry and showers use unfiltered water.
We got used to living out of jugs before we had a cistern, so giving up on plumbing after the 3rd freeze-up was a no brainer.
Laundry water gets warmed up either by the pellet stove or sitting in the sun, depending on season. All other hot water comes from a kettle on our propane range.
Depending on the season, our laundry either gets hung outside to dry or hung on drying racks in front of the hot air blowing from our pellet stove.
Irrigation water comes from the season water distribution system that the park has. It's just raw lake water.
Our power used to be just 30 amp service, so we're quite accustomed to low power living. Up until the last couple of years, our grid was so unreliable that our standby generator ran about 100 hours a year (probably closer to 400 hours if we didn't ration how long it ran). Grid upgrades mean that we've only used it about 4 hours in the last 2 years, and mostly during planned outages as they continue to work on the lines.
My plans for this year are:
Install an interior water tank against the ceiling, filling it manually via a permanently plumbed, self-draining line. No more jugs! Then I'll hook up our hot water heater and bathroom/laundry plumbing to make showers and laundry easier.a
Crawl under the trailer (a mobile home) and remove the axles. This means it'll no longer be classified as a mobile home so we can take advantage of subsidies for energy efficiency, heat pumps, etc.
I look forward to more!
The way to "experience" cottagecore is honestly to support the local farmers. Go to farmers markets when you can, visit the apple orchard with a friend, make a pie using local berries
You put it best. Many want the cottage/cabin in the woods for the vacation space to post pictures on their instagram or such. There is little allure to the true nature of the lifestyle, the simple cruelty of it. The aesthetic is not the lifestyle, and I wish people would understand that.
The way you uphold this sort of lifestyle is through community along with recognizing that even the "simple" life requires someone dedicating their time to keeping up the infrastructure and that those who do so deserve to be compensated fairly for doing so.
"Compensation" kinda detracts from your "community" point.
If everybody's contributing according to their strengths, that's community.
If everyone's doing it to make a profit, that's no longer community.
By "compensation" I meant "have their needs met" not "profit." I shouldn't have assumed it would have been understood that way.