It’s time to take a look around now that we have finally spent some time here. Welcome to The Hippie Geeks, let’s check out the setup on our off-grid property on the Big Island of Hawaii in July of 2023.
The last time that we took any footage of the property was in September of 2022, when we made the trip to the island to make sure that we really did want to buy the property. We were on the island for less than a week, and only on the property for a couple of days. I only had my phone camera to take the video, and so the quality wasn’t the greatest, but it did give us something to look back on over the last year while we prepared for the move.
We are starting out at the entrance to our property, and you can see just how wet it has been here through the early summer. A lot of the grasses are still green and growing, which is unusual, and from what we have heard there has been almost twice as much rainfall over the last couple of months compared to the averages. Our lot is also pretty wooded, which we really like. It helps give the property a sense of privacy, and we just love all of the ohia trees that are here.
As we progress up the driveway you will see that things are pretty overgrown, although the driveway itself is getting pretty tramped down just from us driving on it. We do have a weed eater, but it is in the Uhaul Pod still and we haven’t had a chance to get it. I had intended to empty the pod out a few weeks ago, but on the day that I had scheduled to get into it my appendix decided it was time to leave my body, so that never happened. Now that I have had a few weeks to heal, I think that we are actually going to be able to get over there and clear it out, and it will be nice to actually have our weed eater to clean up some of these areas.
As we come up the driveway a bit, we get to the first open area on the left side, and up on the hill there is one of the two neighbors that we have bordering our lot. All of the lots around us are obviously owned, but only two of them that actually border ours have houses on them. We met this neighbor on the first day that we were actually on the property, and while he is a nice enough guy, he is very misinformed about the property line, but we will talk more about that later in the video. This area has some metal and broken glass that needs to be cleaned up, and the vegetation knocked down, but we do not really have a plan for using this space yet. We do not want to build anything structure wise right here with the neighbors looking right down on it, but it could be a decent garden area in the future.
After that we get to the big berm, and this is a pretty solid hill, but we are actually able to get up in in both of our vehicles, which I wasn’t sure was going to be possible when I first walked over this hill. As we come up and over the top, you can see one of the neighbors’ two dogs, he leaves them loose and lets them run, which means that they occasionally come onto the property. Luckily, they are friendly, so I don’t have to worry about getting attacked, but our dogs are not terribly fond of them so they have learned to stay away when our dogs are with us. This area open up a bit as well, and this is actually a pretty large expanse of smooth lava, which is called PĀHOEHOE, and at some point it looks like there was a fire pit built up here. Beyond that you can see the neighbors toilet structure that we are pretty sure is also over the property line, but I think they have actually stopped using it now that we are driving in and out of the property regularly.
As we keep walking along the driveway, we are going to find one of the prettiest places on the entire property, and we call it the meadow. As we come up on this area, you can see that the driveway splits around a central ohia tree that someone build a low rock wall around sometime in the past. If you head over to the right the driveway curves and head uphill towards the back of the property, while heading over to the left side will bring you to the meadow area. Here you can see the rock wall that the neighbor has put up with a no trespassing sign, and this is where he thinks the property line is. However, after overlaying the plat map onto a satellite view knowing where our four property pins are, I am nearly positive our lot extends almost all the way back to that rocky area. However, he is not going to take my word for it, which means that at some point in the future I will need to pay for a survey along this entire property line so that I can find out exactly where the property lines are and end any kind of argument before it even starts. I don’t think he is being malicious; I just think that he is misinformed.
After looking around at the meadow, we are going to head up the driveway to the back of the property, as the driveway does run along the entire length of the lot. This is actually a pretty steep hill, and we have a bit over a hundred feet of elevation gain from the front of the property to the back, with a lot of it being in this hill. Along the side of the driveway, you can see the other type of lava that we have here, which is super jagged and rough, and it is called ’A’A. You can also see that the neighbor’s dog is still following me up towards the gate, and I will have to shoo her off pretty soon before our dogs notice her and start barking their fool heads off.
This is one of the first projects we did here on the property, we wanted to build a gate to keep the dogs up top with us so that they aren’t roaming all over the island. It is really just here to remind them to stay behind it, as they could easily get over or around the green plastic if they really wanted to. All of the wood for the structures on both sides of the driveway is from fallen ohia that was already on the property and is rock solid so that if I wanted to, I could hang an actual gate across here, but for now this is enough to remind the dogs to stay up here with us. Stepping onto the other side of the gate and looking around, you can see our Starlink dish that is screwed to a triple stack of pallets to get it up off of the ground, and also to keep it secured thru the winds from Tropical Storm Calvin that rolled thru here last week.
You can also see the fleet of shitty rigs that we have now, starting first with our 1978 dodge camper van that you have seen before, we shipped that over from the mainland and is operating as our home base. We picked this 2002 Ford F150 for a really good price, and finally there is our 1988 Chevy Celebrity that was a decent deal, but it needs some new brake rotors as the ones it has are terrible. Coming up into camp, you can see that we are using a lot of tapestries to help shade us from both the sun and rain that we have seen so far. Looking back out into the property, and you can see the main open area that we have to work with. Off to the right is an area that we have cleared out. We have started a few plants just for fun and to get things growing, and then past that is our laundry station. The laundromat here is insanely expensive, and water is free, so we are currently doing all of our laundry by hand, old school style. It takes more time, takes a lot of soaking and a lot of scrubbing, but the clothes get clean, and it is cheap. Past that you can see our current pile of lumber under the blue tarp. Past that you can see another blue tarp covering our woodchipper, along with one of our piles of brush that needs to get chipped.
Beyond that are the last remnants of the garbage pile that was here at the back of the property when we bought it. There was an absolutely massive amount of broken glass here that we had to clean up, which left us with three empty frames, two smaller sliding glass doors that were intact and the one larger one that you can see on the ground there. We still need to clean up the rotten carpet that is growing into the rocks and vacuum up the last of the glass, but we are really close to having this space completely cleaned up, which feels really good. Over to the left you can see the area where we are storing the rest of the sliding glass doors and frames, and we also have all four of our laundry lines criss crossing this area. Turning back around and looking at the property, this was initially the site where we were going to start building our house. That will still likely be what we do in the future, but at the moment our plans are kind of in flux, and I am not exactly sure what our path forward is going to be.
We will have more videos soon on the different parts of the property that we will be working on, and what our plans are as we solidify them moving forward. For now, this gives you a bit of an idea as to what our property looks like, some of the projects that we have done so far, and what we have been up to until this point. There is a lot less progress than I would have liked after my appendix went nuts, but there isn’t much that I can do about that, other than just being happy that it went as smoothly as it did. If you have any questions about our property, or what we have going on here right now, let me know in the comments down below and I will work them into future videos.
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