Mark Bonnalie
Appearances
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
yeah well locals trying to buy the houses yeah not so awesome no not at all i that that's so we were on the giving end of that um our home in um in our you know neighboring largest town from where the for where we bought the homestead acreage and property uh you know we we we sold in july of 2021 and i'll back up a little bit it wasn't my idea heather my my fiance she I was headstrong in 2017.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I'd quit the closest thing to a career life that I had built up, up to that age. And part of my life, I worked for night force optics in the small little town that I was born and raised in just because it was the, uh, honestly, just because it was the best gig in town.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I needed a good job and I'd moved back to Idaho from being young and dumb and, uh, started entry level with night force optics, got, Got to be passionate about the shooting sports industry and got to be passionate about the product that we were building. And with that passion came success within the company.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
So before long, I had worked my way into a rather career-oriented position that I never saw coming. I didn't plan on having. was now sort of making, once again, an uneducated, I didn't go to school. As naive as that sounds these days, I just didn't. I didn't either. It never made sense to me.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I did go for a couple semesters thinking that school was going to be the right choice for me, but it didn't. So I honestly kind of felt like I had painted myself into this salary corner of how am I ever going to... I'm either going to be here for a lifetime or... And I have a huge creative bug to scratch, you know, like...
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
early on in, in, in young, young life, I thought I was going to try to do something with, with artistic ability and, and, um, always fine arts, um, whether it been drawing or painting, but the most unrealistic shit that you could imagine. I mean, you know, nothing that had any, uh, any ties to reality. I just thought, uh, I've always been heart strong in, in my, um, in my motivations in life.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And, and so I just always thought, you know, I can overcome people's reality gut checks, you know, that I'm getting all the time about, uh, about this is never good. You know, what are you going to do with that? That's great. You're, you're good at this, but how are you going to make a living with that? Um, so, uh, yeah, night force optics.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Uh, I got to the point in 2017, like when I started with them, it was really small family oriented company. It's still a, a very, uh, I would say still on the scale that they're at, it's still probably a family oriented style company, but the relativeness of that term changed throughout the growth. And when I, when I left there in 2017, it was really kind of like a,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
sort of a survival move for my creativity. I had a lot of fantastic opportunities through the company and so much growth, but it was also becoming more of a cubicle and computer-focused day compared to such a well-rounded day with people filling multiple roles within the company.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
So anyway, as weak as this might sound, I could feel it plaguing me, the direction the company was going and sort of where my ceiling had landed me, which was much higher than I thought that I would ever rise to, but also I wasn't able to contribute to the creative direction of the company. The creative bug was something I was always wanting to and needing to fulfill within my own...
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
yeah, just within my own happiness. So, uh, in 2017, uh, this is going to sound crazy, but I had, I had this, I had this passion for, I have always had a passion for old, old vehicles, old, just classic Americana in, in all senses of that term. And in 2017, uh, I was really looking for like, okay, what can I branch out?
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
If I do quit this job, what can I do on my own by myself or start in that manner and begin to make a business out of this? I've always been into sort of small space living, tiny homes. And at that time, a little bit of the, like we grew up camping my whole life as a recreation in my family. But vintage Airstream travel trailers. Those things are badass.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I mean, it might sound crazy to your audience. A lot of people don't even know what the hell I'm talking about.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Those silver Twinkie things? They look cool. Oh, they're incredible. Yes. What's not incredible is how much they cost. Oh, they're insane, especially the new ones.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
It's wild. So we owned one. We owned like a 1966 26 footer. And I was always attracted to the early... more simple versions of these.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
The lineage stayed the same, but... but the classic vibe was, you know, was it, it morphed over time, but the, these were space shuttles, man. Oh my God. They're so cool. And they began making them in the, you know, the, the earliest airstreams are probably the very late end of the thirties all the way up to. And so ours was a 66 that, that was Heather and I's personal trailer.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yeah, that absolutely is. That looks like original floor coverings and original furnishings. Yes. So, I mean, you know, as... We probably all grew up with that 70s show in mind, but we're even talking earlier than that, that 50s and 60s show. And so I, yeah, man, I mean, we were on vacation. Soul searching.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
You know, I was I was really getting fed up and hard, hard to cope with just the doldrum of what I had found my life to be at that point. And how old were you at that point? I would have been. Oh, man. Well, that was in 20. I would have been late 30s. Okay. Yeah. It's not too young for a midlife crisis. No, no.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I mean, I did what I could for a long time and had – I made the best of it and I had great – I don't ever want to – it was me, not them, is the point. I just had creative endeavors that I knew I was capable of that I was not – within the confines of, of the structure of the company, at least for me at that time, we're not being, I just didn't have an outlet for them.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yeah. And, and finances. I mean, I, I'm, I'm the first to tell you that we do, you know, we, God, we're so self-sacrificing when it comes to our, our, our comfort zones and our, um, Stepping out of that box is the hardest part. There's been so much happiness on the backside of the scariest decisions I've ever made. Yeah, same.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
So I can't preach that enough to the general public when it comes to taking the leap to the thing that keeps scratching at your insides that you can't get rid of in the back of your mind. Oftentimes we will... write that off for 20 plus years or, you know, pretty soon life's passed us by.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And, and we didn't pursue that just like, you know, you and I talked on the walk over here and, um, regrets are more powerful than bad decisions through, through the growth that you can, you know, that you can experience through taking those leaps. So,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yeah. It's so scary. I mean, we're only here for literally like a flash in the pan. I, I, I've always had the ability at least within my, within myself to, to realize even as things are new and shiny, like I'm going to get tired of this or I'm going to get like, this isn't going to be what it is to me today forever. Um, go for it. I mean, just, just pursue it.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And I'm still a product of poor decision-making and learning, learning, learning through the hardships of it all. I mean, I can't stress that enough. I don't want to, I don't want to portray that I've got anything figured out here, but all I did know is that I did not have it in me to, um,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
let my life slip away between the cracks and, and go on, um, not chasing my dreams to the point where I knew I either, I either failed or flew. Um, the longer you waited in that decision, the worst it would have been too. Yeah, absolutely. Um, so.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Decided there in the latter years of a decade-long career with Nightforce Optics that it just wasn't going to... I was either going to be a lifer or else I was going to make some drastic life changes. Started the Vintage Airstream, what I thought was going to be a restoration company. I always liked...
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I've always liked building creative projects, whether it be old classic pickup trucks or we personally own that 66 Airstream trailer. And I knew from from a business and marketing standpoint, I knew that there was a cult following around these old old time trailers. And I also
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
through my own personal passion for them had realized I've seen, you know, maybe not hundreds of these things out in, in the sticks, like on these old country drives. Oh, they're out there though. Yeah. They're there. They were my neck of the woods in the Northwest of, of the country than in, you know, North central Idaho. I kind of attribute it to, it's just a little bit behind time.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
So the people that, um, there, there was not this knowledge that, oh, there's, these things are valuable and these things could, you know, there's people looking for them. So I, I started a company called Hell's Canyon Vintage Airstream and I thought I was just going to be turning wrenches and creating airstreams. And, and, and, and I was cool with that, right?
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Like it wasn't going to be an office. It was no longer going to be a cubicle or a computer. I don't want to take away the fact that I got to shoot a lot and get paid for it. I got to travel all over the globe representing the company and doing all sorts of cool things. But the core responsibilities at the job were getting funneled more and more into a computer, telephone, and a cubicle space.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
The Airstream thing, though, it went from... me having an idea what this business was going to turn out to be to me, I wound up just having a knack for finding them out in, like I said, out, out in the country on these back roads drives. And is that how you would find them as well? Yeah, absolutely.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was, I give people the visual of like, uh, American Pickers.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Well, cause obviously finding him as the first part, leaving with it attached to your truck is the second part. Absolutely. So the pitch was always, and at the time it really wasn't a pitch. I just was bonkers passionate about these things and the, the history and the, and the separation of what this is versus a 1967 versus, you know, a 1962. Um,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I was always, whether I felt like they were going to want to part ways with it or not, I was telling them stories about how this was towed behind an old international pickup across Africa. Not that particular trailer, but this model. Trailer, similar to that, yeah. So it was always kind of a correlation between...
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
the history and nostalgia of what it is that this thing is and that I'm just trying to make a small American dream come true in order to pursue creativity and pursue my version of the American dream at that time. thought it was going to be a restoration company.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
What it turned out to be was a rescue and rehoming company where I literally just pulled it out of the field, you know, on flat tires, um, didn't restore the trailer, but I would get it up, up and running, um, enough for safe. Well, just for safe travel and just through, um, you know, connections and, and being, um, passionate about these things, I found,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
other restoration shops down in Southern California that had long lists of clients, projects on the books and no trailers to build these projects out of. So I began to just supply the, basically the raw materials of a, of a, of a project trailer to already established restoration shops.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Um, and for me, that was already the funnest part because it was like, I mean, it was, it was just an adventure out through the, through the country all the time. Um, whatever that looked like, I, you know, complete freedom and complete, uh, self guided, um, destiny in that sense. And,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And I had a knack for not, there was plenty of money to be made in the final sale of what it was to the established shops in California. So it wasn't, I didn't need to get them for pennies, you know, on the dollar from the, so a lot of these people were like, that thing is a piece of junk out in my field. What are you talking about? You know? I'm, you know, I'm like three, 4,000 bucks.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I mean, what, you know, maybe the same price that somebody would pay for a good used older travel trailer that they could jump right in and use. And these things are hammered. Oh, they're hammered. They're probably not hammered. They're just abandoned, just abandoned, neglected.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
A lot of them turn into storage units for people's junk that, you know, um, what was the coolest or most unique one that you found? Well, I wound up shopping all, you know, the entire Western United States began to become my... Playground. Yeah, absolutely. And that's the thing. So prior to the Airstreams, I had really gotten into vintage Ford trucks. So I had built a 1964...
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Ford F 100 short box, little pickup that I had built it as like a, a shop truck, you know, like a little marketing vehicle. Um, I don't know that you, that, that people would know, but just like an original paint beat up scars, lots of, you know, patina is what it would be called.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
What is it? An F F 100 64 F 100. Um, short wheelbase would be a good... Whoa, what was that map you were on, Michael?
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
That'll just give you the short wheelbase version of it. So, yeah, this green truck with sort of the company logo on the side door, that is off the cuff, is close to what I was able to just cruise the country in, knocking on doors. It was quite obvious I was passionate. I had my Airstream business on the door. It was no mistake that when I was able to talk to these strangers that this was –
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Fully custom. Yeah. Original. So that was part of it, though, was that I'd gotten into... building these old trucks with the old shell over the top of a modern drive train underneath. So as much as you would never know it from the outside looking in, but it had like a 2007 Ford police interceptor chassis underneath the whole thing. The wheelbase is identical.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
The body literally just... So anyway, passionate about the trucks, passionate about the thought that I get to like I'm living a very creative life at this point versus the computer doldrum that I was up against. So got to travel the country, had a knack for finding the trailers out in the wild and scooping them up, you know, for an affordable price that everybody was happy with the price.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And then I would always include my travel and delivery fees into the final sale to these shops down down south wherever they wherever they happen to go but most often southern california so um i went from this team oriented boxed in computer type life to the western united states is my playground and i get to
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
orchestrate these these road trips i mean complete freedom road trips i would tell the most obligation i had was i'll be there some sometime next week you know i mean sometime wednesday to drop the trailer off um was making a d was making a good enough living you know i kind of i i hate to say it i was i was using more of the profits from the sales of the trailers as a
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
way to see all of these back road corners of, of the United States that I always wanted to travel and see. And, um, so I, I didn't once again, poor financial planning, but I didn't, I didn't, um, sell these with the get rich program.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I mean, I was really trying to experience this creative version of my life and, and I got to, I w I would take two or three week, you know, um, I never traveled, traveled back home the same direction. And I would always take at least a couple of weeks, um, going and visiting a new area of the country as I made my way back to Idaho to sort of start rinse and repeat this whole cycle.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
What was the coolest one you found? 19, um, I want to say 1952 Silver Streak. Maybe we can type this one in. It was early 50s. Let's just call it a 52. And this one was made by sort of a sister, not an affiliated company, but there was a handful of companies making Airstream-esque trailers back in that day. Silver Streak, Alien Eyes. What? Yeah.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Whoa. So, yeah, the front and rear windows. That looks like a mask. It's incredible. Go the far left edge of the screen in that same second row down. That was what it looked like when I was finished with it. I did take the time to have it professionally polished, but that was... That is the model. I mean, that one still stands out.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And when I found that, I found it down in wine country of California. At this point, my shopping grounds had expanded, you know, to a lot larger area. And the novelty of some of these more unique trailers was definitely a calling for me. So if I could figure out the math, like, okay, I can...
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I can travel down, I can pick this up and I can still see money at the end of the, end of the road once I make improvements to it. Um, but I bought it down in, yeah, gosh, wine country of, of central California. Um, how'd you find it? Uh, internet, you know, Craigslist at that time was, was a huge thing. I was, I've met some weird people on Craigslist.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Nate Petroski. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Of course you know him. Yeah. I'm familiar. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. He, he, uh, he had a really early sort of just blossoming on TikTok. And so I started seeing his content on TikTok early on, but he's of course made, you know, he's made the leap to all platforms at this point.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I just started listening to Theo Vaughn interviewing the creator of Craigslist, and I'm already scratching my head.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Oh, my God. I discredit that nowadays. I have so many folks, you know, wanting to come and see bits and parts of the homestead firsthand. And I'm like... Boy, I don't know how to handle that. First of all, we're not set up at all for it. You know, our facilities, my ability to be a good host, what I would consider to be a good host is lacking.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
But just back to this story real quick, you know, like used this business as a fantastic excuse to rediscover myself and my creative potential. So like when I bought this trailer originally, Central California coast, you know, like I towed this, that trailer up highway, highway one, coastal highway. I've driven it many times.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Okay. Yeah. So you're familiar. Yeah. So, you know, iconic American, American West highway. Beautiful coastal road too. Unbelievable. Not the most direct, but beautiful. Yeah. And that was the beauty of all of this. I was never in a hurry.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Eventually, I wound up building a micro camper in the back of that 64 Ford, where I realized I was spending a lot of my profits just in the lodging that it took to travel all over the country. So that will just...
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
As iconic as I could create my life at that time, I was able to, you know, to make money towing this, towing, in this instance, towing this very rare 50s trailer up Highway 1 from California all the way up to Washington, where I would just cut over, you know, back to the homestead. Not, I say the homestead, but at that time, just our normal residential home. You know, I just built a...
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
built a new shop that I thought was going to be put to good use doing the restorations of these things. And it really just, it worked me out of that mindset into you have a knack for finding these. You enjoy the communication between these people. You've made the contacts that are hungry for the trailers. And yeah, so that was... That was my rebellious period away from corporate America.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
You know, I mean, Night Force was amazing. I learned so many... That's what introduced me into the passionate world of training and anything to do with, like, I just grew up a hunter, you know, so we would hunt for deer and elk in Idaho. It's a good place to do it. Oh, it's beautiful. I mean, unbelievable. I've got fantastic memories of my dad and my uncle.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
out at hunting camp on a yearly, you know, annual basis. But as far as firearms went, you know, we were no different than the average Montanan, probably like a paper plate at 100 yards to make sure that your three to nine scope is on target. And I like it. Yeah. It's been known to work. It was cool.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
But, but to find meaning within that, that night force role, I began to really, I mean, I got hyper addicted and obsessed with long range precision shooting and stuff. Yeah. And, and. it wasn't ever structured. I didn't shoot competitively. It was just always, I had the, the public land, you know, here within my, um, close, close radius to home in Idaho.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
So, um, but, but once again, so night force was, was incredible. Uh, I got really hooked on the, the, the, Bits and pieces of the tactical community and exposed to things that I just never dreamt of within that company. Also got burned out on it, went completely left field into the self-employed vintage trailer restoration and rehoming, basically rescuing business and
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And I was kind of, uh, I had the blinders on and was kind of tunnel vision on how do I take this to the next level? Um, I had just built a new shop in the back sort of area of our residential home. You know, we sold a 20, nothing fancy, but like a 2,700 square foot, you know, home that we'd put a lot of work into making it, making it pretty and making it comfortable for us in town. Um,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And then COVID hit and my then girlfriend, Heather, she said, we can sell all this and buy land. Like, you know, it was not my, like I said, I had the blinders on with finally being self-employed and making something of it. She's, of course you would hear whisperings of the real estate market at that time, but she was the driving force to think. No, it's like, you know, it's a real thing.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
We could make a lot of money off of what we've built here and reinvest in being out in the country, which we, folks our age at that time, I think we're kind of, unless you really had something creative in the works or, or, um, business entrepreneurial in the works, a lot of people are just, uh, sort of accepting and getting locked into like, this is not a bad life.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
It's not maybe my dream life, but, um, we may not ever own that acreage kind of a scenario. And so I think there was probably about a six to eight month gestation period between, you Right now, it's a good time, and it was never going to be an easy time. We set out to reduce our belongings down to basically nothing. We started traveling in a radius around our current living.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Heather is a labor and delivery nurse and I've worked for the same regional hospital as a labor and delivery nurse for at that time going on 20 years so she didn't want to this life change wasn't really trying to move to a different region in the United States we really just wanted to find land within the within an out-of-town radius of where we were already at and
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I have a hard time recollecting enough to tell you that we, we didn't know what the acreage that we were going to find is. And we were, of course, you know, the massive sale of the home was also soaked up in paying the home off, paying all the debts off. So even though we sold for this crazy dollar amount, we, and I say crazy from a small town, Idaho kids perspective, I mean, not, um,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
not like we could just go buy anything we wanted, but we... You didn't get here in your private jet. Oh, God, no. No, no. So... But, yeah, Heather's idea of this and her... was very, you know, she, she was always aiming towards a more self-sufficient existence and always aiming towards a more clean living life.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Um, trying to step out of the typical, just the typical supply chains and the typical surprises that were always like, uh, a friend of mine were talking this morning. It's like even, even a lot of the health foods store nutrients and things we're learning later on were sort of just glorified versions of, of
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yeah. Yeah. And, and a lot of folks were pulling the wall, you know, it had the right label and it had the right vibe check, but it really was found out later. It was, was not, um, not so true blue. So, um, I got to give credit to Heather for so much of the, the initial jump into, into becoming not, not becoming more self-sufficient because that's like such a broad category.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Um, I just look at self-sufficient living as being in my own world, unwilling to hire anybody for help. I'm, I'm, and I'd say unwilling, mostly just philosophically unwilling. I'm trying to figure out, I'm trying to problem solve and I'm trying to
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
trying to make the money go as far as it can by, by not, you know, with the real estate boom came the contracting boom and the price of having the simplest of jobs done became you know, maybe five to 10 times what you could actually do it for yourself with materials. And if you've got the time and the know-how.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
So, um, early on we, My fiance and I, Heather, we've been together for like the last decade and we've always had a dream of just really living without neighbors, you know, living out in the country. We've always had a place in town, small town of about 36,000 people. Previously. Previously, yes. Where was it? East Coast, West Coast? No, no. Only about a half an hour from the homestead property.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
You know, I don't know if it was, I don't know because I think it's so disconnected, you know, and I've tried to, I've tried to, because I come from this background, I've always wanted to have a deeper understanding of that industry.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I will say right off the cuff that my dad and, and mainly my dad, because he's worked in the woods his whole life and has been through the roller coaster of the high times and the low times of that industry. He was always like, run as far as you can. Like, don't, don't, you know, do something, do something different than this. I've, I've lost, personally lost
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
two uncles that I can just immediately think of, you know, lost their lives in the woods, you know, falling trees and or hauling logs. Um, so, you know, my, from my dad's perspective, just trying to look out for a son, he was like, this is dangerous. It's, you know, the money's not there any longer, but honestly, Andy, I don't know the there's huge timber conglomerates in, in North central Idaho.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And maybe they're more widespread than I'm aware, but like potlatch timber company is one of them. And, and I, my interpretation of, of those organizations is a lot of, um, board members making decisions for, for these land holdings that don't live in the area and don't get to sort of see the end result of
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And there's playground areas of the woods just up the road from my place where I grew up in Idaho that are just – I'm not a tree hugger by any means, but they're just – raped to say, you know, like it's ugly.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I mean, I'm not the first person that's highly educated on the regrowth and, and, you know, um, and I know that it's a renewable industry and, and, you know, I'm not being judgmental of that, but I think, I don't know why the, why the industry went under. I
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
the people that made the industry go around when it comes to actually harvesting the wood out of the woods and hauling it back into the mills, and possibly even the mills themselves as well, but they... their life doesn't change as we see these lumber prices go. skyrocket, you know, when you had to go get framing quotes to frame up, you know, the black rifle location.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
It's wild because you talk to local industry loggers and their wage is not fluctuating with these. It's not going up 30% one day and 40% the next. No, so I mean, I don't want to overstep my bounds and claim that I know why the industry overall has kind of just fizzled. But one thing I can tell you is that
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Okay. That's not too bad of a commute. No, no. 45 minutes from the homestead property. And at that time we... we really just didn't have an exit strategy and we hadn't experienced these bumps in the road in life that wound up pushing us over the edge of wanting to, wanting to venture out. And, um, the biggest thing was, I mean, I gotta say that the, one of the larger pushes was the
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
the nuts and bolts, the dudes, the hardworking people that are making the industry go round in the small town or the small boots on the ground sense are not, they're not being, I believe it just became outpriced to continue production of wood harvest and selling the wood. I mean, the equipment alone, you know, that they're investing in to have a now modern logging company.
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You do a million, you know, million dollars for... I'd say that's probably entry level, like millions. Yeah, for these things that, you know... Somebody used to stand at the base of a tree with a saw, being a sawyer and sawing the tree down himself. But now it's like something that looks like came off Transformers and grabs the tree and saws it. I do like watching those YouTube videos.
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Oh, I love it, man. I'm not judging at all. Uh, it's, it's much safer. I think the deaths, you know, the, the injuries are a lot less and I'm not, I'm not being judgmental of that, but the, the barrier to entry.
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So I think they just got, uh, I think the ability to afford to play in the game just became the math wound up not being there. I grew up with one of my best friends in elementary all the way through high school. His stepdad owned one of the more successful logging operations in our small town.
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you know, they were, they were kind of the comfortable family when it come to, you know, um, just spoiling their, their children a little bit more than what, what we were used to. And, and, but I watched the whole, the whole cycle run its course. And, and before too long, they were
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luckily they had invested in properties and other things like that, but they, but by the end of it, they sold off almost everything in order to try to maintain the, the, the logging business.
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And, um, so once again, I don't, I don't know the, uh, the technical reasons why it all failed, but really just, I think everybody got outpriced and the, and the payoff for what the work they were doing and the, the lumber that they were bringing out of the woods, wasn't paying the bills.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
No, we really were trying to operate within the confines of first and foremost, we we wanted to find a property that was within. commuting range to, like I said, Heather's sort of bonafide career at that point. Outside of finding something that was close enough, and a lot of people ask me questions about how do you find land like this? How do you find land with water?
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
The biggest separating factor and common denominator that is the reality of our scenario is that we weren't shopping to relocate across the country. We weren't looking at an internet ad of what this property may or may not be. We were able to go, you know, take an afternoon road tripping around our region and hike in these places that were for sale. So... It's always hard.
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It's more difficult for me to advise a lot of the people that I would love to help narrow their search and quicken their dream along for finding these incredible properties. But our scenario was we were just looking for something within maybe on the outer edges, maybe a two-hour radius from where we were already existing, living. But we did not know the scale. We first of all wanted to find...
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
the property that made sense. And we live in a sort of a mix of landscape and terrain, anywhere from agricultural farm, you know, field land to just up river where I was born and raised, much more timber and steep mountain, not mountainous in the high peaks mountainous sense, but much more canyons and rivers and timber. So we didn't want barren, you know, open farm land necessarily.
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the whole COVID experience. We weren't in a position that we were fully locked down or restricted like a lot of the people that you would read about or see.
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We were always attracted to the more sparse timbered areas within that landscape.
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Granted, we didn't have this nest egg of our home sale before. So we're just fictitiously being... dreamers thinking, we're going to sell this house, so let's go look for property. We didn't have any money to buy the properties we were looking for. You were window shopping. Exactly. We were absolutely window shopping and we were just trying to use it as a case study for
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
who knows, maybe something will be available, but think, but properties and homes were being bought and sold within days of being listed at that time. We're talking midsummer of 2021. Um, you know, we're 18 months into sort of the, the, um, the splash of COVID even being a thing. And so, yeah, the real estate market was absolutely bonkers. We, uh,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
We basically just went and walked this property that we found listed on Facebook Marketplace. I'm not sure if it was even real estate listed at that point or if it was property listed or owner listed. Went and poked around enough to figure out where it was and find it and hiked the property. It had...
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an archaically developed water source in the way of a natural spring on the land and it had one power pole so there was no outbuildings there was no structures there was no anything we weren't able to shop in the realm of hundreds of acres we were looking for no neighbors and um and and a remote feel. Um, and, and so what we found in this property was like, it's cliche.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Everybody says, Oh, you, you walk in that house and you just know that's the one, or you walk on that land and you, you have this. there was a deep seated feeling of, wow, this feels way different than all the, all the 20 other properties that we've went and visited. We love this. Um, how many acres? 14 acres. Okay. Yeah.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Nothing, nothing to, you know, um, yeah, nothing to write a book about when it comes to land ownership in the grand scheme of also nothing to turn your nose about either. No, we're not, we're not being, um, we're so grateful for everything that we've, the opportunities that have come about in this, in this journey. But, um, but we weren't really shopping.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
We were shopping for bare land and I, and we were, we were planning on doing it ourself. We didn't know what that, we didn't know the magnitude of what that, what that would look like or what that meant at the time. I knew I was capable. I was building small living structures in the way of, of these vintage trailers. Um, mechanical abilities enough.
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And, and I got to give it to the modern information age of, of the internet.
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Yeah. YouTube and Google up to that, you know, even up to this morning in my life, whether good, bad, or indifferent is, is,
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if you've got passion to want to learn and, and the subject matter that you're, you know, not, not trying to convince yourself to learn about, you can, I just feel like humans can accomplish things easier right now today than ever before in history when it comes to something they really want to set as a goal and have a burning desire to, to conquer. I agree.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
You're trying to build well So when we first bought the property we we we only set out to To have no neighbors and to build out in the country What that what we thought that looked like to begin with was probably 1,000% traditional building techniques and
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
i wasn't trying to reinvent the wheel in any of the the construction of our systems but what i found is that with honestly with with the twinge of covid being sort of an influence in everybody's daily life there and supply chains and um just the the slight taste of instability that we had experienced at that point in our in our short-lived life i thought
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man, if you know, this is, so we need to build a septic system. We need to build a water system like, okay, this, this is, this is the traditional method of doing that. And these are the, the most widely known modern ways of doing that. But how can we, so I said, I set out at every one of those crossroads, like, okay, we need to build a water system. We have grid power on the property.
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We don't have real spread out access to that grid power, but I have the option to build just a traditional home in the country, I guess is what I'm trying to paint a picture of. But every time I came to that crossroads, I thought, well, how can I... How can I investigate and build some sort of a backup plan into this modern standardized version of a well pump and a pump pressurized water system?
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I just found myself at all these crossroads of research thinking, okay, I want these modern comforts and amenities, but I also want to have some sort of a backup plan in an off-grid sense of property development. So...
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Yeah. And having the insurance policy of if all else fails and shit falls apart, let's try to think towards the future of how can we maintain minimal comforts within this property by... planning for those systems at the very initial stages of property development.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Oh God. Yeah. I can't. Yeah. I can't. Um, you know, everybody, a lot of my, a lot of my audience is like, Oh, I'd love to meet Heather. You know, uh, I can't believe that you're dragging her through this in a, maybe not. I say in an innocent manner, maybe not, you know, everybody likes to troll and poke fun on the interwebs, but, um, she's, she's gung ho.
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She is, uh, as much of a driving force behind this lifestyle as I could ever be. And, uh, So anyway, just research into, okay, this is the traditional modern 2000s way of doing this type of property development. What did it look like 100 years ago? How could I, you know, how could we investigate a backup plan for this traditional system? And so when you say pie in the sky,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
What started out as just like, we just want to live in a nice farmhouse in the country that we build ourself, not necessarily thinking fully off-grid or maybe not even considering trying to do something off-grid at all, has turned into these small challenges that have fed my creativity and fed my, honestly fed my
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
insurance side of me for, you know, for preparedness and, and then just challenges in the sense that, um, What I set out to have, okay, let's just, I use the water system as a common example, but a 220-volt water pump operated water, you know, rural water system, but now I want this off-grid backup plan.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
the off-grid research and property development became so successful through my obsessions, just, and nothing more, honestly, um, just through my small brain becoming intrigued by, by old way, old world ways became so successful that the, that the off-grid option became the plan a. And so now we're looking at, you know, installing power to these areas of the property as a like fire suppression.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Um, if I need to move a lot, a shitload of water all at one time, um, in, in the case of emergency, but the more simplistic off grid versions of these systems have become so successful without my
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
knowledge of, of that even being a possibility that I'm now really sort of hooked on the challenge and hooked on the drive to, and, and the comp, I've got a little bit of accomplished in my back pocket at this point thinking you can do things that you never dreamt. You know, you can maintain your quality of life.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
You can maintain your quality of living through these simple systems that, um, and in a way it's combining, Philosophy from 100 years ago with the tweaks of the little modern products that we have available through technology. And not that they're technological products, but everything's been improved upon.
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So whether it be sprinkler heads that can run off of low PSI water pressure, those weren't available 100 years ago. But now by running a gravity-powered water system and having these new modern little... tools in the way of irrigation sprinkler heads, you're able to accomplish these things that, um, really haven't been possible up until present day.
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I felt really fortunate how, um, we did maintain a sense of movement and freedom throughout that whole process. And Idaho was, you know, I think was just like you're describing. Yeah. Not, not overly, um, But once again, we saw our recreation areas shut down with an orange sign that was like, look, don't go to this hot spring.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yes, absolutely. It's humbling because we've always been just far enough ahead of the... the curve in, in general population, you know, wanting to make these life changes that I never saw it as anything special. You know, I didn't think that I was, it was just your life. It was just the natural progression of our story. It wasn't. Um, but I, so I started
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I started taking a note to social media and the possible importance of a social media presence and sharing your journey and documenting your journey, really. Like, I always...
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
get this little twinkle in my eye about if, if, if everything is as stable as it is now today, you know, 60 years down the road, I think it'll be really cool for my grandchildren to be able to flip on a channel and see how this property came about, you know, like so documenting the journey has always been a core thought in me wanting to share these projects and things, but
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I started sharing on social media back when I was doing the vintage trailers. really just wanted to show this sort of, uh, once again, niche interest that you can turn into an entrepreneurial lifestyle and, and buy back some of your freedom, you know, buy back some of your own choosing of the direction that your life goes on your own.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And I didn't have any, any preconceived thoughts that it could ever turn into what it is now. I
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Absolutely. No, that's exactly where it was. Um, I get it. 2021 is when we bought the property. We immediately, uh, we immediately, we sold everything that we own. We, we, I just got to touch on this before we move forward. But we listed our house. We sold it in four days. Cash offer. That's what I'm talking about. Four days.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And we knew that that was going to happen, or at least we knew that it was a high percentage chance. We had a 48-hour window where we had keys to our house that we just sold and title to our new acreage that had jack shit on it and nowhere to put anything. So...
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That alone was just an absolute shit show of trying to figure out how do you do, you know, we've got some chickens, we've got a couple of goats, even on our little urban farm. Maybe the new buyers wanted those.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Don't go do this thing that you're normally doing that doesn't involve any people at all. And it's outdoors. Yeah, and it's outdoors. I mean, ridiculous. So on top of just supply chain, and I'm... In the world of preparedness and prioritizing self-sufficient living, I don't step into the doom and gloom side of anything. I'm a super positive guy.
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I think had we offered them up, that would have absolutely been accepted. You actually might have been able to charge more.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yeah, yeah. No, it was... it was a major you know like we've never been afraid of big scary decisions and and taking that leap just we just boiled it down to the work involved in actually packing moving and but we didn't have you know a great big grand scheme plan um but we did only have we had 48 hours we sold In the coming months up to the point of selling, we sold pretty much all the garbage.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Oh, I don't blame you, man. I think everybody could take, take some serious advice to heart from that.
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That's awesome. Well, you're so true. I mean, um, being able to whittle down our lives into what really matters is a core element of, of maybe moving forward with a new state of mind, maybe moving forward with a new, um, weight lifted off your shoulders.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yes, absolutely. And, and all of these things are exercises of, of, um, exercises that, that show you how much more you're capable of. I mean, initially it's just the, it's the necessity to not have this much shit to move. But the byproduct of that is, I feel, I feel so much better without all this shit. Yeah. And I, and I was able to part ways with it without it crushing me.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Like I've always had the thought like the, you know, so it's, it's all one, one it's cyclic, you know, as you make these life changes as you begin to simplify things it, it, it feeds itself. At least it did for us. So we, we knew that we were just going to, lease like a 20 foot shipping container, you know, that we could have delivered to the, to the couple of flat spots on the land.
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But just the thought that you couldn't go to the grocery store and get your typical amenities was – becoming a reality that we had never witnessed in our lifetime. So, um, Heather, she is big on, she's always been big on gardening and self-sufficient food production and food preservation and things like that.
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Um, and so we really had, that was all we had in the back of our mind. We, we, um, we bought an inexpensive old RV, like a motor home. We had till midnight the night of the 48 hours to get the fuck out. And we, Ordered pizza and we jumped in this old shitty motor home and we headed towards the new property and we had moved everything out there. We just had these piles of our belongings tarped.
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You know, luckily it was in midsummer of, of, of a pretty nice climate where we live in the summer. So, uh, we later then got the shipping container delivered and placed and, and, uh, but I mean, I had a whole shot, you know, I kept, I kept all my tools. I kept everything that I knew that would, you know, obvious things that would be required to, to rebuild our life.
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But it was a, it was a fraction of what we had and, and a fraction of what, of the comfort of what we had. Um, for the longest time we had, you know, shit, we had a, we had a propane powered shower, you know, like, hung up in a tree next to the spring water source where... Probably some of the best showers of your life. Absolutely.
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It's unmatched. I mean, and I'm, you know, I, I, I don't take anything from it. I'm just also trying to, um, I'm trying to make this lifestyle accessible to a wider range of people that may not be so easily extreme in what they're willing to give up and or sacrifice. And so I just always enter the conversation with the knowledge that.
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not everybody's me when it comes to like, but that, those were my best showers on the property. I mean, those were some of the, the simplest times. Like, I mean, for the longest time, I hadn't thought of this for years, but, um, you know, the, the spring overflow ran into this little, uh, horse trough thing. Well,
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Rather than going and buying ice at the closest place that we could haul ice and keep it as long as we could in a nice cooler, that cold water that just comes out of the mountain became our little juice cooler, whatever. We had our cans thrown inside of that in that little water trough. Yeah.
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It just the simplest things, but I mean, I'll still remember those memories when I'm on that deathbed that we talked about earlier as probably some of the most pure moments that we've, that we've had.
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So her, you know, part of her dream, whether, whether any of that would have played a part in our life, but what would have been with the rural acreage to, um, um, step into this more self-sufficient life of creating our own nourishment through, you know, our own food and our own, um, just stepping away from the supply chain a little bit. And, and gardening is tough one up here.
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I don't, I don't, uh, I think I take for granted how many of the fears have been erased from my mentality of what we can put up with and how do we approach this without this and the, the problem solving and challenges that come with this for us buying what I'll say is raw land with, you know, with not with, with nothing there other than just a couple of amenities and working from, from there outward.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Um, It takes a long time. It takes a lot of work. I'm a glutton for punishment because no matter how hard it is and no matter how the time span has grown past our initial hopes that we would be working and building on our forever home at this point... What was your initial timeline you gave yourself? I mean, you know, I think that... Like, have this thing knocked down in six months, no problem.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yeah, no, no. The land... So we're on a steep slope of a canyon wall, timbered, not a lot of flat land at all with it. And initially, at that time, I guess kind of ties back into the logging stuff, but my dad, one of his earliest woods bosses, became his longtime good friend and was much older than him. But when he passed away, he left my dad a...
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a cat d7 dozer in his will so my dad didn't really use this thing for a lot of things and it wasn't a fancy you know it was in late 60s piece of logging equipment but he was able to bring that thing up there to our property and sort of help us reimagine what we could do with the land and and we didn't you know we didn't change a lot we just we just um maximized the flat areas.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yeah, we needed as much flat as we could. Even with that, we're more spread out like a homestead of outbuildings than we can put everything within walking range of something like you'd see a modern house. But the property itself, raw. So I think that we had this... we hadn't put our finger on it because we didn't know how we were learning as we went with development of a rural acreage like this.
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But I think in the back of our minds, we thought a couple of years at the most before we were maybe living in our, in our forever home, if not at least building our forever home. And how many years ago was that three years ago? So, uh, yeah, we're, we're, we're, we're a humble, um, we're a humble, uh, dictation of what,
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what we thought we might be possible, you know, what we thought we were possible of. A little bit, you know, there's a little bit of, sometimes, I heard you talking about not too long ago that you hate, uh, it was like on full auto Friday, but you were talking about, you just hate saying things. And then that for some odd reason, they don't, they don't happen.
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Yes. And I've always, I've always been that guy in my personal relationships and my, um, especially, you know, I'm always learning different sides of business and, and, um, but,
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One thing I can tell you with being that glutton for punishment and trying to be committed to doing all of this homestead building on my own, oh man, I can't tell you how many times I kicked my own self in the nuts with I said this and God, I just have to accept that I can't. And so- It sucks. It sucks. Painful tuition payments. It really is. And not taking any...
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it's just a, it's a hard arena to play in. I mean, that's, that's the strong point of that statement is that a guy can watch YouTube, uh, all you want on the consolidated process of building this thing and think, and, and, and then sort of apply your own skillset to that activity.
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And, uh, Heather's real good about telling me at this point, like I'm going to build that concrete pad and that little, you know, that little gazebo roof and this, this thing. And, and It'll, you know, it might take me a week, two weeks. And she's like, you fucking idiot. She's like, that's two months. I mean, you have to, you have to start really. This is why we need.
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I'm not trying to pull the wool on anybody or flat out lie to anybody about even myself. I'm just overzealous with my ambition for what I know I can achieve and what I want to do with the reality of... the research that goes along with the process, like a lot of what I'm doing is all of what I'm doing is brand new to me.
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I didn't, I didn't, you know, I've worked every sort of job that you could strum up in a small town, you know, some, some laboring, some, you know, the, the peon for contractors, uh, just, just all like a taste of all sorts of different industries. And But I've never been a pro at any of this shit. Like, I mean, not even the slightest bit.
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Absolutely. Like I'm, I'm already so grateful for, and that's one of the things that just feeds the monster in this whole journey is, you know, if we, if we stumbled across a pile of money tomorrow, I'm, I'm still not gonna, I'm not gonna skip from A to Z. I love this. I love this process.
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It'll definitely make life easier to fund these projects a little bit more graciously, but I'm just not interested in the shortcut. And that's come with the accomplishment of, just like you say, pieces beginning to fall into place, like, oh, I can do that. There's nothing I haven't been able to fix or make work even with bare minimal raw materials.
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And our life might be under a microscope, you know, less glamorous than a lot of folks out there that that can't grasp this concept of building a homestead or the homesteading lifestyle in general. But the wins are so important. I mean, they're so meaningful.
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Yeah. Okay. So the biggest thing... Water system, septic system, and when I say water system, I mean distribution throughout probably a five-acre parcel of our land, all throughout future outbuildings, future greenhouse. So basically, I've never had to think so far into the future of septic. I don't want to redig this. What does this look like?
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I'll probably break some stuff if I have to do this again later down the road. You know, just the thought process that goes into what's going to be here, where's it going to sit. But water system, meaning underground distribution of the spring water that we've developed ourself throughout a multi-acre parcel of our ground, that took... a year and a half to complete, like just this last spring.
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So I guess it was last May or April was the first time that we have used water out of a spigot. We had one We had one water access point from the archaic spring that I had told you was already part of the property when we bought it. So we live off of a garden hose. We were filling our water through that garden hose constantly. But after...
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this water distribution system last spring was the first time that we like sort of lifted the handle on a frost free spigot and had water that we made happen come come out of our out of our ground. So as simple as that might sound, that was monumental for us. We've got a third of an acre area that will all become herb, herb and plant garden. My
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Uh, Heather, she's a, like her roots are in Western medicine and the nursing scene and, and, um, labor and delivery, but she's, uh, she's a super passionate herbal medicine, um, uh, maker practitioner.
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Um, so, so a big part of, of, you know, a big part of our usable and accessible acreages is going to be, um, isolated to food production and then, um, medicine production when it comes to natural plant medicine, um, water system, we've got our septic system in, but of course, I was of the belief that I wanted to build the infrastructure of the property before we finalized with the home.
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I sometimes have second guesses on how I interpreted this life and... Maybe some of the hangups that have come with that, but that's the path that we're on. We've developed all of the systems that will hook into the house before we'll have broke ground on digging the foundation for the home.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yes, it is. Um, it's, but once again, I, and I gotta be honest with your honest or with your audience and honest with my self, because I don't want people to be misled by the realities of this lifestyle is we're now operating out of pocket. Like we had this nest egg from the sale of our home and the sale of our old life, but
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the the future of what we're able to produce is going to be solely based on how we can turn our homestead into an income and turn our turn our life you know this content platform that i've been building for a number of years now um we're now operating Even not not underwater, but we're now operate.
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So I want to say, you know, there was a time that we just kind of committed to the fact that we're going to be starting our, you know, breaking ground neck this this later this year in the spring. Financially, there's been some things come up in the meantime that I think have humbled me once again and made me more so start to button my lip and not speak out of turn. But that's next.
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The house will be, I mean, we've got fencing and pasture and greenhouse and small barn that we need to construct. Um, all like sort of little outbuilding projects, but the major tearing up of the earth in, in a beautiful way, you know, reconfiguring the flats on the earth, making more flat ground.
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Um, and then doing a lot of the work that you just wind up covering over with in, in waterline ditches and electrical conduit ditches that, so that we'll be able to. Nobody knows it's there, but you do. Oh my God. It's unbelievable. And maybe it's a good thing that we started with this stuff that you wind up backfilling back over and you're like, what the fuck did I do for the last couple?
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yeah, right. No, I know. This is the hard time of year for me. And many people. It's difficult. I try not to ever make a sob story out of it, but my life changes from daylight till dark, hands dirty, making progress on projects, passionate projects that are...
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yes. It was always in my gut feeling to do it this way, but I... At times that I've been questioning myself now as we still live in these old ass little RVs trying to get to the point that we'll eventually be at, I've often wondered... God, why doesn't anybody do it this way? Or why don't I see it being done this way?
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
But I really have felt in my gut that this was the right play of events to get to the point of... The home won't be the grand finale of this homestead.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
There will always be improvements and ways of making things better, but we'll be much closer to that stage of let's go sit in our rocking chairs on the porch for a minute like the rest of this shit has been accomplished through all of this blur of becoming new homesteading folks and, and, and building this ground from, or building this property from the ground up.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I do. I do. I do. Yes, I do. Um, Unacceptable. Yeah. I'm present on any... Do you do YouTube as well? YouTube as well. Facebook as well.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yeah, yeah. Which honestly, I've been very fortunate to realize that this way of life is not... age group specific. I get messages constantly from people that are 20 years my senior that are still, oh, we can't wait. We're just a... The biggest...
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
One of the most inspiring things to me is that there's such a desire to step away from whatever it is the general population has gotten themselves wrapped up in in daily life and living maybe, I guess, residential. I'm not, you know, I never have the full picture of what these people that are messaging me, what their reality looks like. But everybody is in the, what I call the dream state of
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
starting this journey. You know, they, I, I, I'm going to fill in the blanks a little bit for them and tell, tell you that what that means in my, in the back of my mind is that they're going to buy land in the country and make a simple goal of becoming more self-reliant and self-sufficient in their existence in, in the remainder of their life. Um, but it's really inspiring to, to
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I just didn't know. I mean, I've always been sort of a niche interest sort of dude, never thinking that this was a widely appealing, you know, vintage trailers, precision shooting. It's always sort of this like sort of smaller crowd that I don't assume everybody's going to find comfort or understanding in why I'm so obsessed with these things. But homesteading and
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I get wrapped up in the creativity of just the projects alone, but what comes to light after the project almost being complete is this wasn't just a beautifying sort of land. addition to our homestead property, this is going to change our life and our way of living once this is finished.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
the self-sufficient movement in this world right now is so much more broad than I ever would have given credit to it.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
No, I mean, that's, um, that's sort of a key element to my current growth right now. Um, I'm only just buckling down on – okay, let me back up just a little bit. When I first started to monetize off of these platforms and began to make – I've always just wanted to provide informational content for – like authentic informational content for an audience. I never really foreseen trying to make –
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I appreciate that. That's what it comes off to me as a consumer of the content you create. Absolutely. And to this point, I'm sort of a victim of my own lack of, of, of business and knowledge, understanding to grow it beyond that, because Initially, I was naive enough to think that I've always been like just this ridiculous dreamer when it comes to all these different things.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
creative endeavors, and so when I first began to monetize, meaning reach these thresholds within the structure of the platforms.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
So I began to get paid for basically just the number of people watching my videos from these platforms about a year and a half ago. so about halfway through, we were basically operating off of our nest egg up until that point from the sale of our home. The fact that we paid everything off, we have very little bills when it comes to normal people's lives maybe.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
But I was really striving to try to want to do more in the way of, of, well, for one, I could see the nest egg running out. So I'm like, fuck, what the hell, how the hell is this supposed to work? You know, we're on outgoing only. Yeah. We're fully committed. Like we're locked in. What the fuck, what are we going to, how are we going to make this make something?
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And that in a nutshell is, is a learning experience all of its own. But to, to simplify here, I'm like looking up at the sky often thinking, I don't know what, I don't know what, what's my next move? What do I do here to try to, I'm beginning to capture all sorts of people's attention.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
You know, whether it be creating the water system, creating a garden or creating a root cellar, you know, to store the food. I sort of get tunnel vision on just the creative process of the project alone. And it doesn't hit me until sort of the final chapters of creating it that wow, this is going to make life easier. This whole thing is going to make life easier.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And that was, that was always, uh, that was always a orchestrated desire and hope in the back of my mind, but I never also foreseen that, that it would become so out of control. And, and what's the platform that you have the largest followership on? Facebook, honestly, is 1.2 million. No shit. Yeah.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I say that and, and I'm going to, I'm going to, um, follow up with the fact that they are the least concern. Like, I don't know if they just signed on, you know, uh, Facebook is a real roller coaster of engagement. You don't, you know, you can, there were times in those early days, um, of, so I was a, I was a product of understanding short form content fairly early on and, and understanding, um,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
not that I'm a pro at anything, but understanding how to build pieces of short form content. And prior to just about the, I knew it back from the early days of that T word, because that was the, that was the initial platform that anybody, that was kind of like our first taste of, of 90 second videos. And, and, um, if not shorter, actually. Yeah.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I mean, it could have been, um, I'm always stuck in this 90 second timeframe, but, uh, that was, so I'm, I played around with that a little bit back in, um, gosh, probably like, uh, 2018, 2019 stuff. And I am asked a little bit of a following there, like a hundred thousand people, uh, Well, a lot of a lot through
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
some of the DIY projects of my classic trucks, uh, building and doing, um, so, but I had this understanding of like sort of the way that you edit a short form piece of content. And then, so when, when I began to want to document the homestead and the projects and the work on the homestead, Instagram reels was becoming, uh, the place to be. They, they wanted a piece of, of that short form audience.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
So they began, uh, prior to that, I was posting carousel, you know, just carousels, like individual pictures. I love to write. So I was trying to, trying to, which nobody reads on Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. Sweet picture swipe. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, spend, spend an hour, you know, in the morning, writing this, writing this caption was deeply well thought out caption. Yeah.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
All these feels and you're like, So, so anyway, I just kind of had a little bit of a leg up on understanding short.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
So I began to post on, I went through a rebrand, like I was, I wanted to continue to grow this content thing. So I thought to myself, like, you know, I had one sort of, Call sign, whatever you want to call it, like Instagram. Username. Username, there you go. Back in those days, and it was the Highwaymen, similar to like the old band, right? Do you still have that? I do. Because that's a good one.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And it all came from the old, you know, the Highwaymen is the band. But it was in alignment with my travels all over the country, rescuing these old airstreams and just the self-guided sort of creative life that I was able to live, living out of the back of my truck. Man, I would take that in a different direction. Yeah, I can see.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
But yeah, back to the journey of getting to the point of taking the leap to start this was a big part of it was the, um, the real estate boom that happened with everybody trying to bounce around the country during the initial COVID stage. Yeah. Go back in time for me a little bit.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yeah, that's awesome. But I was having a little bit of an identity crisis with trying to... bring this homestead content into, into what I had been trying to frame my, you know, frame my life as prior. So, um, sat down, you know, like, uh, probably winter of 2020, 2022 is maybe when I rebranded and modern rural civilian was, was all encompassing for my, I really wanted to create
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
a category and a title of people that people could identify to that encompassed all of these passions that I had amassed over my crazy journey. And, and without trying to manage three different YouTube channels that were all very specific to, yeah. And I, I, um, that was the big goal.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Like I was trying to, you know, how can I, how can I be broad enough that I can begin to show people different areas of my life that I don't have to be so, um, am I going to just do these Ford trucks and build, you know, the, the, so, um, rebranded Facebook.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I started posting through Instagram reels on the DIY projects of tearing the land apart and rebuilding it with the infrastructure that, that was becoming my daily life. Um, Instagram actually created this duplicate Facebook account that I didn't even realize I had. Probably started crushing. Yeah. Yeah.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
The first time I fucking looked at it, I had 40, you know, 40,000 followers in, in just a couple months time. And I'm like, thank you. This is not my Facebook account. Like I have my own name on, but, but yet, so, um, back to the Facebook thing, I just, uh, couldn't, I couldn't believe it. I mean, it,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
What I was a benefactor of, though, is once again, Reels began to really get traction with the world in general, the actual Instagram Reels portion of content.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yeah. Views. I mean, sometimes I question if it, how much it has to do with engagement, but, um, the shitty part is, is that there's no manual to any of it. No, there's nobody to call and ask, and there's no real people you're trying to, you know, you're trying to investigate it yourself and understand on a deeper level, how can I influence the, my own income here within the parameters of what
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Okay. Yep. So, um, born and raised in small town, Idaho, um, a little logging community called Orofino that's down like Clearwater country. Um, uh, Earlier on in life, I just lived a pretty rural upbringing. It wasn't like a farm life or anything like that. The biggest industry in my little small town is logging. So both sides, my mom and my dad's family, logging or in the woods to make a living.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
No, and meta is even worse. YouTube is one thing, but Instagram and Facebook... I don't think I've ever even really reached anybody more than an automated response when it comes to questions through the Meta platform. So the understanding of this, and I'm grateful for any level of freedom that's come from this, so it's hard to try to be judgmental. Well, you're not being judgmental.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I think they have me pigeonholed into... They not only have you, they have the monetization.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
We got ours figured out, you figure it out. Yeah, you figure it out. See what works. Well, and that's what... Okay, so... I time flies and I don't pay special, um, detailed attention to this, but I think that Facebook wanted a part of the short form content action.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
So they began Facebook, Facebook reels and, um, because they wanted to, to grow their attraction to that portion of their platform, then they, they started these, um, creator, I don't know, I'm just going to say creator monetization programs that... And they prioritized it. Oh, they prioritized the shit out of it.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
So you couldn't have nailed it any more square on the head because here I am, you know, watching the money, seeing an end to the, the, the savings that we had amassed from, from our life change and wondering how do I, you know, how do I, how do I not get a real job and keep doing this? Cause I don't, I, for one, I don't want to, I want to build a property.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Oh, absolutely. Like I can't give enough credit to that, but, um, Facebook wanted a piece of the action. They started prioritizing us creators looking back. They started, God, I don't, once again, I'm grateful for everything, but they started, um, they started just using the popular creators to build their, their, um, their, validity within that short form content, which I mean, no, no.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And probably, you know, from a business standpoint, nothing wrong with that. That's a smart move, but I was sort of the, the, so here I go just monetized off Facebook with this massive growth in a very short period of time in an account that I didn't even physically create myself. I mean,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
One, one year's time I had a million followers on Facebook from an account that I didn't even realize had be, you know, I mean, granted I watched it grow from 40,000 up, but the growth and the, the views and the amount of, so here I am realizing that these landmarks are coming down the road for being able to finally, you know, make some money.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Cause I'm, I'm not naive to content creation and the thought that, um, there should be an ability to make, turn this into a living. That was always the back of my mind. It wasn't, um, the priority, but it was definitely, this is, this is going to hopefully be the, it's a real system. There's no reason to not figure out a way to utilize that. Yeah. Achieve your goals. Right.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
So I finally flipped through these, you know, um, screens within my professional dashboard and I'm looking, I finally qualify for whatever that threshold is. You know, it's saying, um, click, click to the next screen in order to, um, see your approximate earnings.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And I click one button and I go to, uh, the next screen on Facebook that says that I've, uh, I still almost shit myself, but I had, I had an approximate earnings of $9,000 and change over the last 30 days from this Facebook account. And I, I was, I was first of all, I didn't believe it.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I mean, I thought this is some scammy, you know, like I... Just give us the last four of your credit card number and your social. We'll be sure to get it right to you. Yeah. Showing Heather, showing, you know, talking to my close loved ones about it. I'm like, I don't know.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And With that mentality, probably lots of different industries like that, but you just get a lot of strong mindsets of making do with what you've got and making the job happen with as little or as much resources as you've got available to you. So all my uncles, fabricators and... Just accomplishing pretty crazy feats with bare minimum type resources.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Like, I mean, this seems legit after all of the framework that I've tapped through to get to this, but show me the money, right? Like, so... I was naive enough to think that that was just like the life changing moment. Um, I, um, I've never been super money focused and money driven.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Um, but I have, uh, I've always in no lesser way of describing it thought of that day that the break, you know, that there's some sort of a break that happens where, um, so I thought, babe, we're good. Like, I mean, this is our new baseline. It doesn't go down.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yeah. We need a convertible Porsche on our homestead. You're so awesome. And it's not, and it's not far off from where my brain.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
So let's say multiply by 15. Yeah. And that's one platform, you know, there's, there's others to come. So, holy shit. Did I dear Facebook?
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yeah. So I just thought – and obviously that's the least – I didn't have to ask my audience for anything to earn that, right? Like that, that was strictly off of their interest in my already natural, authentic life. So I just didn't think, I didn't think past that. I didn't think past the thought that this would.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
So once again, there's no, um, boardroom meeting with Facebook saying, Hey, we're changing the, the, the, um, the payout rate to like, yeah, I mean, whatever it may, may have been behind the scenes, but I really did at numerous parts of my life think this is it. Fuck, we did it. You know, like, uh, this, this is going to change our life. And within, you know, that probably lasted, um, uh,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
The first six months were life-changing with just Facebook money alone. And as they established their presence as a short-form content... Stopped prioritizing these creators. Yeah, they stopped. I still qualify and make money through all of those platforms, but the pay rate, you know, without any understanding of what the pay rate was to begin with versus what it is now...
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
you know, like that same payday might be, shit, 1,000, 1,200 bucks a month.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
It's just the game that they've created. And we're just a player in the arena. Easy to be frustrated.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So that, that just leads me. I just wanted to show the vulnerability of my naiveness through the journey of content creation to tell you that I, I've, I'm not, I don't have a, I don't have it all figured out. I'm absolutely learning as I go. Um, only this, only this year.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Am I really trying to buckle down to, and I say this year, meaning like a couple of days ago, you know, 2025. How's that going for you? Well, it's been awesome. You got a lot under your belt. Yeah. Like five days in a row.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Just a new approach, you know, not trying to maximize, trying to scratch the surface of opportunities to a deeper level to make sure that I'm not just clicking through something that could have amounted to, you know, a relationship that I never seen coming. Michael and I, what was it?
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
That's something that probably spelled that name of the channel wrong. Like, I love it. I love it. It's, it's a, there's no roadmap and, and, um, there's no, you know, I'm, I'm really fortunate, uh, with the, the reach of my platform.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
That's 100% accurate, right? So small town upbringing, I'm real fortunate for the... You know, I didn't put a lot into mechanical. I feel guilty saying gifted with mechanical abilities, but I just, I did have, my dad was always fixing everything that broke around our place. I was never groomed in a scenario where you just call the contractor, you call the dude to come in and make it right.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
It affords me opportunities to, to ask questions to people that I would have never really assumed would, would be willing to help or would want to, you know, want to offer insight. Um, Um, so super grateful for, you know, for, but, but once again, there's just no roadmap. There's no, um, there's no manual for doing this.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And it's really a new, for me at least, and anybody in my circles, it's a new sort of. career move that, that nobody really has much to contribute to in the way of, Oh, well this work, you know, it's a, it's a, it's like a mutual fund, the small print at the bottom.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
No. And, and, and it's a, it's a highly self-motivated, um, you know, I often use the phrase feed the monster on these social platforms. Like YouTube long form is something that I've always had as a goal in the back of my mind. I'm so locked into...
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
feeding that monster with the short form content of posting and working my ass off all day, filming all day, waking up at the crack of dawn, editing for a couple of hours on that piece of short form content, posting it by breakfast time for most Americans and, and then getting back. Let's be honest. They're not consuming breakfast.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
No, that's accurate. I'm a victim of toilet consumption myself. We all are. What the hell else are you going to do? What did we possibly do on the toilet before cell phones? Well, we got an outhouse now, so it's... Bougie. It's not at all. However, fuck, it's cold. It's so cold. But, but Heather, she's like, she, she busts my chops constantly because she's like, what the fuck are you doing?
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Like, it's an outhouse. I'm like, I'm answering some fucking messages. I'm sent, I'm, I'm, I'm saying hi to some friends. So the, the, the discomforts of an outhouse will not take you out of, uh, uh, perusing your social media, even while you're on the, while you're on the John. May I recommend a space heater of some kind?
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yeah. Well, I've had, I've had visions of that because as we've progressed on the property and now I can visually imagine the home being started and completed and built, um, I want, you know, I've always wanted to right now I work in the, in the mud, the gravel, the snow on anything outside in order to stay.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
making progress on projects, but, uh, um, I sold a very nice new shop that I had just built, just had built. I was that guy back then. Um, and really didn't get the chance to, you know, to, to even experience the, the blessings of having this heated, you know, well lit, nice, um, space that can take you out of the season that you're in and still allow you to be laboratory. Oh yeah. Yeah. Right.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
No, it was awesome. Movie old school. Yeah. Love it. It's your beat laboratory. Don't touch the drum set. Yeah. Yeah. No, I love, I love that shop. Um, but it was only, only just got a little taste of it before we decided let's, let's, let's turn our lives upside down and start this homestead. So, um, I don't think I'll ever run out of, of, you know, eventually I would like to, um,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I'm getting, I'm getting asks constantly about teaching, um, sharing this knowledge base with, with other individuals who are, you know, less, um, earlier in the journey of getting, getting to this place. Um, I'm a little bit. I love people. I joke sometimes that I love people from a distance more than I love the reality of people. I can understand that. Right in my face.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
So I know that there's a good... I know I can offer a good value to physically showing people how some of these systems work and showing them even through the remainder of the building of our dreams here on this property. But I'm definitely reserved to the thought of bringing people to the land to be able to- I don't think you need to.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
My dad is very talented, and he taught me. I paid attention just a fraction of what I should have been paying attention. Did he go to school for that, or did he OGT it as well? Yep. He, OG, he was just, you know, back in, he, he graduated in the mid seventies from high school. And at that time the timber industry was on fire and he... Metaphorically? No. Yeah. Metaphorically. Yeah.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I mean, it would prevent you from having to have physical people. Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm so reserved in that, you know, the, um, The further along we've got with the space and the more I've enjoyed the rural country life, I'm like, I don't even want to leave the property, let alone... I'm so comfortable in this space, and I find it hard.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
There was a time that I was traveling all over the country doing these things, and I would have told anybody who would listen... this is my happy place being able to explore all over the country and see new places and be mobile and kind of nomadic. And now I don't even like to go to the corner store down the, down, you know, Mark, you can touch the world.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I'm actually taking a little bit of a gut punch to realize that I thought I'm, I'm not as well equipped to know what the right move in development of a business around this audience and around this sort of tribe of, of individuals that I've amassed and really trying to try to kind of taking a step back to, to realize, um, and I, and I'm asking anybody who is willing to, you know, to offer insight in this, uh,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
how do you do that? Like, I I've just been, I've been so successful with just my authentic way of conveying this lifestyle to people that I haven't tried to, I haven't tried to funnel anything. I haven't tried to, I think you just answered your own question. Yeah.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Timber industry was on fire in comparison to the expenditure of, of going to school. And it just wasn't as hot of a topic back then. Parents weren't really, at least in rural small town America, weren't pressuring their children to think that this is the way, you know, go get a degree and
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Well, it's just a, it's a gut punch and a humble, you know, humble pie.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
You can't have growth without being uncomfortable. Absolutely. And I'm, I'm, I'm grateful for that to come so natural. I mean, and just like you, I'm happy to, I think one of the things that sets aside some of my content to my audience is just the, I definitely don't try to be afraid to show the failures. You have to.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I love, and I put enough obsessive research into things that more often than not, I get more Success out of what I'm trying to accomplish than, than failure. But there's times that, uh, anyway, the, the internet craves that the, the, I mean, just, I think the internet actually craves authenticity.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Um, so for a long time, you know, for the first 10 or 15 years, probably into the, to the late eighties, the logging industry was a way that a lot of tough guys could make a living, make a good, you know, make a good providing living for their family without honestly, without having much education beyond just the hard work ethic. How's the industry doing now? It's poor.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Yeah. The vulnerability is so consumable by, I mean, and it's not even a content. It makes it easier for everybody else to be more honest. Absolutely. Yeah. You're creating a landscape where it's not such a polished fake world that, that everything goes perfectly. You know, I, I try to learn off of YouTube how to videos all the time. And it's so, of course they're not trying to
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
we're not there to see how you screw up, you know, in some of these more nuts and bolts activities, but, um, that's where you're, you, that's where the authenticity of, of what this homesteading journey for us as, uh, really, I get the most heartfelt comments and, and, um, messages because, um,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Man, thanks for showing how that hillside slid in on all your work, and you're down there every day digging your work from yesterday out of the mud.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
It's just realistic. It puts a more humble approach on these hard—they're not easy. None of this shit's easy. I mean, it's really hard work, and it's really— it takes some pretty, pretty strong mental commitment to even be trying to do the work to begin with, let alone thinking that it's all going to be easy. So, um, sharing that part of it has been fairly instrumental.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And I, and I love to, just like you had said with, with you mentioning to the podcast viewers, I don't know what I'm doing. Like, I mean, I I'm, I'm fully willing to tell you I'm learning every step of the way. I've, feel fairly gifted on being a decently quick learner, but I'm not, I'm not, I'm not an expert in any of this stuff.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And if I can do it out of pure obsession and learning out of necessity to accomplish pushing this needle forward on the homestead and improving very basic human needs to more comfortable amenities within whatever those homestead parameters are. so many more people can do it than what give themselves credit. So I want to, I want to make sure and, um, water those flowers, so to speak.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I mean, I don't want to speak out of turn and think that I know the ins and outs of it, but every logging company that was family-owned logging company from my neck of the woods in Idaho, there's maybe three out of 20 left.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Well, I don't know. Like, I had this thought earlier today that just be careful what you ask for because it's, it's, it can cause, it's a beautiful, the pluses are so much larger than the minuses and, and the wins for me personally and for Heather, you know, the, I can only speak from our own personal experience there. They far X far out seed exceed the,
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
You know, the discomforts and things that our life looks like right now. But I don't know if people really know what selling everything and beginning on raw acreage like, I mean... looks like and feels like, and it's hard and it feels overwhelming at times. It feels like we're fully committed. We don't have a backup plan at this point and we don't have a home. So we are figuring it out as we go.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
We are, um, we're going to have the most beautiful place that you can imagine in, in, you know, seven to 10 years. Yeah. That's what I was going to say. I'm trying not to Our plan was three, so seven to ten. Seven to ten is going to be the commitment right now. But just, I don't want to scare anybody away from it, but I do want to remind people that...
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
An outhouse in negative 14 degree temperature with no – there will always be improvements. But currently for us, there's no lights. There's no nothing. It's a flashlight out to the thing. It's water that can freeze up on you. I'm dealing with stuff that – I'm prepared for and goofy enough to put up with, but I also don't.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I just want to make sure that when people have the idea that they're going to buy at least the raw land version of what I'm trying to teach people and show people, that they understand that. I used to be so focused on a single project and like, okay, let's start that and finish that in a matter of weeks, whatever it may be.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
But I never had... I'm now juggling no less than a dozen different major projects throughout this property. I mean, I never thought my mind could even really tolerate that, let alone... There's days you feel like... Am I ever going to, you know, am I just starting shit to start shit?
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Am I ever going to finish and see the, you know, see the fruits of all this labor in any one of these particular projects? It's my average Tuesday. Yeah. I mean, it's humbling, man. It's so humbling. So I guess I would just warn people of the hardships that come along with it. But I would also follow that up with
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
if you're really trying to do stuff from the ground up, like we've chosen this path for us, there are, there are appreciations that come from like, I, I, I've found myself calling them like a circle of life fulfillment that I never saw coming, like creating a water system from
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
a mountain spring that you find just leaking out of a rock that you then go and, you know, have that water tested and that you can drink it right out of the ground. Now you've taken that water, contained it and turned it into an entire system that now I really do predict that this land will granted. I'm hoping that my, my child and our children, Heather has two, two kids.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I have, uh, coming up on a 13 year old birthday here soon, but, um, If this is their interest in life, I predict that these systems that I'm building right now will be in place generations after I'm gone, providing nourishment to my, hopefully, family down the road.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
that old world connection to accomplishing these things that just in modern, our modern daily life, we're not, we're just kind of, well, water comes out of the faucet. And, and if I, if it breaks, I call somebody. Yeah. Yeah. Like.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
The connection to our history as humans, and maybe not that so long ago history, but the settlers-type history of this country just brings me joy that I could have never saw that coming and I could have never put a frame around it for the public to understand. And I'm always so... grateful and fulfilled by this lifestyle that I think it comes out through my content.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
And I think that's part of a, a bigger appeal to all of these folks that want to watch. But I'm, I'm sort of uniquely naive in that I'm just willing to keep trudging and keep and keep experiencing the small wins and calling them larger than larger than life. And, um, But it's a hard life, and the wintertime for us, everybody's climate's going to be different.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
Everybody's version of buying property is going to be different. I mean, I think that there's a lot of people that would have the opportunity to go buy sort of a retired farm that's got barns, that's got a farmhouse, that's got these other things. Yeah. I can't tell you exactly what that looks like, but when you're trying to do it all on your own and you're trying to.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
really absorbed the enjoyment later in life that came from that, from that path to, to get to having our forever home built and, and all of this property done really with only the help from like my, my dad sometimes comes up and, but it's unmatched for me. I mean, I, the, the enjoyment is, it makes me understand why why the West was settled.
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Episode 377 - Mark Bonnalie
I mean, it was harder than hell and people died left and right, but the enjoyment that comes from the point of going from a wagon to a cabin and going from hauling water from the stream to water that you finally somehow piped into your place, those accomplishments and those improvements they just make me feel like tied to the land and tied to our existence as humans.