About - Down to Earth Homesteaders

Welcome!

We are Martin, Julie, Sarah, and Seth Johnson. We moved to seven acres of raw land in Northern Idaho and lived in tents for 6 months while we built our off grid cabin.

Our ultimate goal is to develop a self sustaining modern homestead 100% from scratch, debt-free.

We aren’t retired Silicon Valley types, or trust fund babies. We are just normal average middle class conservative folks looking for a change.

Our Mission

Our mission with this blog and our YouTube channel is to encourage, educate and entertain you through our experiences along this journey. We hope that as you watch normal folks with little experience build a modern homestead you will be encouraged to start your own journey.

We want to be as helpful and transparent as possible. Therefore, we are sharing not only our successes but also our failures and mistakes. Which, if you watch our construction videos you will see plenty of!

If you are a professional tradesman I’m sure you will get quite a few laughs.

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More about us

We both grew up in Northern California and had pretty normal childhoods. Before we married, I (Martin) went to college, worked in various restaurants, factories and as an HVAC/R technician. Julie went to college, studied in Argentina and worked at a daycare center.

After getting married we went to Bible school in Texas and then went into full-time ministry. We ministered in various locations, but the most relevant location to our new adventure was Indonesia where we served as missionaries for about nine years, living off-grid on the island of New Guinea for about 4 of those years. You can learn more about our time in Indonesia here.

In the 19 years that we have been married, we have lived in 2 two countries, 6 states and in over 15 different houses. Now it is time to settle down. We aren’t quitting ministry or missions, just settling down.

Our Homestead Property

Want to see where we are homesteading? You can check out this video we made for you.

Don’t miss any of our new videos by subscribing to our YouTube channel.

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Building Our Off-Grid Cabin

We moved to our property in late spring, setup a construction camp (tents), cleared some land, and started building. We had only one goal. Have a warm place to live in by winter.

What comes next? Join us on this journey by subscribing to our YouTube channel and we’ll figure it out together.

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Resources

I often wonder what tools other homesteaders use. Also, as YouTubers and Bloggers, we are often asked about our cameras and blogging software so I put together some of my favorite tools for you below.