Wow. Wowowow. :) I've always hypothesized the existence of people (fellow Millennials, or maybe Zoomers) who got so radicalized by Stardew Valley that they took off and decided to do solo homesteading with zero experience. If you haven't played the game, the main character is a depressed office drone who decides to quit and move to the old farm they'd inherited from their grandfather. Other games, like Skyrim, also have very fancy and fun homestead-building modes.
I get the feeling there's a lot more of those overly enthusiastic and vastly under-qualified folks out there haha
Also, I have got to watch that "Homestead rescue" show now: it sounds like great entertainment. (In Fallout games, there are lots of subplots about terribly inadequate fallout shelters that people had built on their own, only to die within a year of the nuclear war...)
As for the article itself:
At night, covered in sawdust and grime, we drank too much and huddled around a propane stove to keep warm, eventually falling asleep and breathing in noxious fumes all night until we staggered awake in the morning.
Holy shit. If they were just a little less lucky, they would've won the Darwin Award. You
do not keep a stove on in an enclosed space, especially when sleeping. O_o
By 9 p.m., we’d head to the bar and use the Wi-Fi to madly produce copy for freelance writing ventures that barely kept our bank accounts afloat.
Meaning they did all that without any savings to fall back on...
There was something about building that was exactly as we had hoped. We loved that we weren’t staring at our computers all day. We loved how stiff our backs felt.
Those stiff backs = possible permanent spine damage if they continue on that path. That would be darkly ironic, considering how their original motivation was to escape the gradual health effects of being office workers. Incidentally, this is also why women live longer than men, on average - they do a lot less dumb stuff like this.
I wonder how many others got inspired by that article. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Also, it's pretty funny how they very casually mentioned that they installed electricity but didn't specify how. Methinks if they'd hired a handyman or carpenter to work alongside them from the start, they would've saved a lot of time and money. (Money from wasted 2x4's and from all those extra months of work = lost paychecks.) Yet another fine example of frupidity. ;)
Almost forgot - the part about the local hermit trying to cut down the tree that kept another tree from falling on their little cabin? That was comedy gold. :) Great planning there.