To reach Cam and Janeen Schiff’s San Luis Obispo County home, get ready to do a lot of uphill off-roading.
That’s because the house is perched a mountaintop near Rusty Peak nestled deep in the wilderness between Highways 41 and 46 — a perfect spot for a couple who have made it their mission to live sustainably in nature.
From the west side of the property, views stretch all the way to Cayucos and the ocean. From the east side, a clear day reveals panoramas of the coastal hills and valleys. And on cool, damp days when the marine layer rolls in, the property becomes an island, floating above a sea of fog that wraps around the mountains.
The Schiffs have been married for more than 40 years and have lived on the mountaintop for the past two decades — though not all of it was with a roof over their heads.
Cam, a craft worker and carpenter, built every structure on the 40-acre property with his own hands, from the 400-foot concrete driveway that could never get built under modern regulations to the solar-powered hot tub that overlooks the canyon east of Rusty Peak.
However, when the couple purchased the property 27 years ago, it was almost completely wild, Cam said. It took nearly 15 years to get the land into a comfortable, habitable shape — and even after that, the property is always a work in progress, he said.
“Privacy is huge — it’s nice to be able to go into the shop and make a lot of noise because I do metal work and woodwork, and I don’t have neighbors, so I can do whatever I want,” Cam said. “We have fun when we’re not working — there’s a lot of places to sit down and read, and there’s a lot to be said for being in nature.”
The Tribune took a tour of the Schiffs’ home as part of a Uniquely series of stories about unusual properties in San Luis Obispo County.
How to build an eco-house
When the Schiffs first bought the property for around $150,000 in 1997, it was almost entirely undeveloped save for the access driveway, Cam said.
With two children in tow, the Schiffs packed their belongings into a 24-foot camper, drove to the summit and got to work building out the property, using the camper as their home for more than two years, Janeen said.
For the first years, everyone in the family pitched in on the construction project, clearing land, pouring concrete by hand and raising walls.
“Our daughter truly hated us at that point,” Janeen said.
While Janeen worked as a business consultant, Cam focused all his energy day in and day out on raising the home, taking carpentry jobs on the side.
He said the earliest years were the hardest. In the first year alone, the couple spent more than $50,000 bringing power, water and concrete to the site.
The 1,300-square-foot main building that contains the living room space, kitchen, workshop and shower was the first building raised, using steel beams purchased secondhand from a decommissioned Lockheed Martin factory.
At a rate of $200 a ton for the steel, Cam said there’s a good chance he’d never have been able to build the home the way he did without looking for an outside-the-box solution for sourcing the material.
The main building took the longest due to both the trial-and-error process and the lack of overall development on the site, Cam said.
Originally, the couple planned to build the entire home from lightweight straw bales supported by the metal frame — an idea that sounded great until the first 120-mph storm of the year, Cam said.
Eventually, the building took shape with a mix of stucco and repurposed redwood lumber, adding an inner foam lining of used Patagonia surfboards as insulation, Cam said.
That’s not to say that every object in the home is repurposed. By 2007, the finishing touches of the kitchen — its countertops and oven range — were finally delivered by trucks that braved the steep inclines.
“We threw Thanksgiving dinner for 32 people in this room (that year),” Janeen said. “I had a stove for the first time in 10 years that wasn’t filled with mice and mice poop.”
Eco-friendly features are designed to work with nature
As the property aged, Cam built out additional buildings from the main dwelling as needed, including a home office, storage space and a former bedroom for the couple’s children that has since been converted into surfboard storage, he said.
Though the Schiffs have drilled two wells on the property since moving there, both have run dry over the past two decades, Cam said.
When it became apparent the couple could no longer rely on groundwater, he set about rigging a rainwater reclamation system, which now provides 100% of the property’s water needs, Cam said.
Rain is collected from inclined rooftops and gutters, run through a filtration system and stored in the property’s 25,000-gallon storage system — enough to last the Schiffs a full year and then some, Cam said
A separate tank located near the standalone laundry building stores graywater for their construction and gardening needs.
That said, because the property is far out of the reach of trucks that would service a septic tank, it’s also home to San Luis Obispo’s only legal composting toilet, Janeen said.
On the couple’s property, most rooms that would normally be united under one roof are spread across the lot. The toilet occupies a small, standalone outhouse across the driveway from the main dwelling near the storage, bedroom and home office buildings.
“It is completely not conventional from the standpoint of in the winter, when it’s 100 mile an hour winds and horizontal rain, and you have to run outside across the drive area to go use the bathroom with your headlamp on, or your flashlight,” Janeen said. “Nobody does that, but we do.”
Waste is stored in a pair of tanks beneath the toilet building, which fill over the course of two years and use time, pressure and the composting process to convert the waste into usable soil, Cam said.
“Our son did an experiment in his eighth-grade class,” Cam said, said of the compost. “It grows grass eight times faster than the best compost you can buy.”
Couple prepares to leave mountaintop behind
Though the Schiffs are proud of their home and what they’ve been able to accomplish, they also realize that living atop a mountain in a home with high upkeep won’t work for them forever.
Over the course of the summer, the Schiffs prepared to move off of the property and rent it out to a younger couple who will move in this fall, Cam said.
Even having instructed the new tenants in how to care for the property, the Schiffs will still drop by every month or so to perform maintenance on the dwellings and make sure everything is running smoothly, he said.
Cam said after sinking so much time and effort into a home, it’s hard to let go and start a new chapter — along with all of the habits and routines that the couple have become accustomed to while living in nature.
Compared to the 15-year buildout of their mountaintop property, moving into a three-bathroom condo in Oceanside packed with modern amenities was a piece of cake, Janeen said.
“We literally moved in in one day because everything was cleaned and done and painted and perfect,” she said.
Still, leaving the property and all of its unique features behind will be difficult, Janeen said.
“We thought we’d leave it to (our kids), but I don’t think that’s going to be the case,” Janeen said. “This was kind of our dream, but it doesn’t have to be their dream.”
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