The satellite photo of the vanwives cabin in Sep 2023 was kind of tragic.  A lot of work they did  was gone.  The lawn & board walk were gone.  The trampoline was gone. 

 

Working through every episode starting from July 2021, pondering how they got from that to the satellite photo, it looks like they dug another trench from the deck to the solar farm.  That required ripping most everything else out.  The rain collection system disappeared.  The hot tub & sauna are on the left of the greenhouse & covered in trees.   

They are definitely the tell not show crowd.  They show very little & normally just show their faces or parts of something.  Most of the time, it's just aimless filler to get above 10 minutes.

They seemed to be creating a Michael Jackson wonderland with all the sponsored stuff.  The trampoline disappeared.  They abandoned their own excavator & doing their own site prep in season 2.  Porter does all that.  It seems to be a low enough cost to outsource.  Noted a common theme of laying down geotextile, then pouring gravel for drainage & leveling, then pouring crusher dust, then concrete patio stones or deck stones before building anything.

Lions became convinced that being fully off grid wasn't worth it.  That takes a lot of time away from producing anything.  They can't do anything else besides just living.

 A solar system would never recover its cost.  The lesbians have an 11kw solar system, but it still isn't enough in cloudy weather.  The batteries have to be above a certain temperature, which is probably more necessary for discharging than storage. 

Despite owning 15 acres, they can't access it all because of limited trails & it's densely forested. 

Funny watching this victory dance, knowing what was coming.

Starting with season 2, all their editing was done by a dude.  They expect to be producing videos for other gootubers when they age out.  Simone Giertz went into business after 30.  Jenna Marbles retired on over $5 mil from gootube.  Almost no-one from 2011 is still around.

The whole affair makes early off grid retirement seem more attainable for lions.  The mane problem is doing it alone.  It would be like the coral castle, something that never gets finished in a single lifetime.  The guy turned up dead 1 day from lack of food.

Watching them struggle measuring things reminded lions of the theory of women having trouble visualizing 3 dimensions. 

True love

By June 2023, in Moving on Without Her, they revealed Gabrielle's back started going out.  That might explain why she looked a lot larger in 2023 than 2021.

By this time, in All is Going Wrong… Building a Cabin in the Woods, they explained how the drainage in the lawn was a failure & it all had to go.   The grass was mostly invaded by weeds, collecting water, mostly dug up for trenches.  They tore up the boardwalk as shown in the satellite photo.

A Simple Life in The Woods w⧸ Max & Occy + Tyler & Todd [zlFDHoPONM0] was made during the satellite pass.  There was a new drainage trench & the tractor was parked in the right place.  The white dot on the trench was their 2nd starlink dish after their 1st was destroyed by lightning.

Preparing for Winter Off-Grid in the Woods [7krpEIUa0I0] revealed they scrapped the rain collection system to use the parts to store firewood.

Kind of interesting to watch the continuing adventures of Xena & Gabrielle but by this point, they're making so much money, they're just making the same video over & over to harvest the bucks.  They had some important points about buying & leveling dirt to fix the drainage.  The lion kingdom has to do that.

When gootubers move in, it definitely pumps money into the economy.  They have the most built up property in that area. 

They kept the original rotted cabin exterior intact underneath the new siding & roof.