The first thing we learned off-grid is that nothing works the way you think it will. Solar doesn’t mean electricity. Rain doesn’t mean water. Silence doesn’t mean peace. That first week, we lost power four times, water twice, and our collective sense of humour by Wednesday. Day five we got it back again, mostly because Jamie renamed the compost loo “The Throne of Despair” and Sam nearly snorted tea through her nose.

We didn’t come prepared. We thought we did—lists, checklists, Pinterest saves, a folder labelled “Eco Transition.” Turns out you can’t manifest plumbing by printing out diagrams. The water tank leaked from a corner no one could reach without removing a wall. The inverter tripped every time someone boiled a kettle and tried to charge a laptop at the same time. I didn’t know how to explain it to Jamie, so I just said “don’t multitask in sunlight.”

We hadn’t figured out showers yet, so Sam boiled pans of water on the gas ring and mixed them with cold in a plastic tub. She washed standing in it like a Victorian peasant, curtain tied to the rafters with a shoelace. Jamie refused to participate. He fashioned some kind of private rinse-station using the garden hose and three bins, then blasted drum & bass through a Bluetooth speaker while bathing. Our neighbours haven’t looked us in the eye since.

Week two, it rained. Not a nice rain. Horizontal rain. Roof-tile-lifting, mattress-soaking, wall-paint-bubbling kind of rain. We put out buckets. They filled. We celebrated, until we realised the gutters weren’t connected to anything, and half the water was going into a hole behind the house that Jamie later named “The Pit of Probably Disease.” We poured most of it down the loo. Used some to mop the kitchen. Drank the rest after filtering it through a t-shirt and pretending we didn’t see the floating bits.

Sam kept it together better than I did. She started marking days on the calendar with short phrases—“Power dead,” “Water okay,” “Found rat (dead).” She made meals out of scraps like she was on a reality show. Rice, lentils, onions, and some magical combination of herbs that made everything taste less like panic. The gas ran out on a Tuesday. We didn’t have a spare. Dinner was raw carrots and toast made over a tealight. Jamie refused to participate in that one.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, it happened.

The shift.

Not a miracle. Not a moment of joy. Just a… pause.

You wake up, and the sun’s coming through the half-fixed window. You don’t hear a fridge hum or a traffic whine or a notification ping. You just hear wind. Trees creaking. Chickens. Jamie swearing softly at a solar app. You sit on the edge of a mattress, feet on the cold floor, and for the first time in what feels like months, you don’t hate it.

Sam found an old broom and started sweeping the front path every morning like it meant something. I started building shelves from leftover wood and bent nails. Jamie installed a motion sensor light on the roof that mostly flashes when moths pass by but still, it works. Kind of.

We started bathing in shifts. Cooking together. Fixing things without yelling. The electricity still cuts out if someone forgets and turns the blender on. The water still smells faintly of moss. The toilet situation is unspeakable some days. But we’re managing.

And there was the chicken.

It appeared one morning, walked through the front door like it lived there. Brown, dusty, mean-looking. Jamie tried to chase it out and got pecked. Sam named it Terror. It lives under the old sink now. Occasionally lays eggs, always at 3 a.m., which it announces with violent screeching. We haven’t figured out where it came from. We haven’t figured out how to get rid of it.

But Terror is family now.

So yeah. Month one was a disaster. Nothing worked. Everything broke. We nearly lost our minds twice. But we’re still here. We’re bruised. We’re exhausted. We’ve cried, laughed, bled, boiled things that shouldn’t be boiled, and slept fully clothed because the insulation is theoretical.

And somehow, I think we’re doing better than we were.

Just don’t ask me about the laundry.