Liz and Nate heat their home with wood from their property, which also turns out to require quite a bit of effort. “We spend the whole summer harvesting wood,” Liz told me. “You have to go into the forest, identify the trees to bring down, then you have to buck the logs, bring them on-site, split them, stack them, while also being careful to monitor the wood stove as it heats.” And, as it turns out, if you want to enjoy cleared fields surrounding your house, “you have to mow . . . a lot.”
Again: hell. And completely unsustainable if one or both of you become disabled--which is basically a guarantee of living to an advanced age