Christine Tailer didn't always live like this. She used to work as a lawyer in Cincinnati. She lived in a large suburban home. She had an electricity bill and a landline.

So much has changed for Christine and her husband Greg in the past nine years. They quit their big-city jobs, sold their home and created a life for themselves in the country.

Christine calls their living situation "off-the-grid," but what that means in 2015 is probably different than you're imagining. At their Straight Creek Valley Farm, they generate electricity with a windmill and solar panels. They have a septic system. Christine is able to practice law part-time with the help of satellite internet. Of course, they also grow food and raise vegetables.

Christine says their lives aren't that much different from yours or mine. "I think the biggest thing that people who don't really know us and just have heard about us think that we must live the way people lived back in the turn of the 1900s," she says. "We live small, our world is tiny. Well, our inside world is tiny, but our outside world is huge."

Christine continues her story:

Making The Plunge

Between my husband and I, we have seven children. We were in this big city house with six bedrooms, three stories tall and basically inside the city of Cincinnati. We had already bought the 63-acre farm. We fell in love with the property. It had been a weekend getaway for us; we would go out camping and just enjoy it and go fishing, hiking and walking.

One weekend at the end of the weekend, we stopped off at this one porch swing, which is by our beautiful fishing hole. The sun was setting and it was lovely, you know the dappled light through the trees and it was starting to get chilly. I don't remember who said it, if it was Greg or I, but one of us said ‘What if we didn't have to go back?' And we both were like, ‘Yes, what if we didn't have to go back? Maybe we don't have to go back? Maybe we can make our lives out here!'

Technology In The Country

We're high-tech. We've got cell phones, satellite internet and television, computers. We have all the creature comforts, including a Keurig coffee pot.

My husband and I always eat breakfast together. We usually turn on the internet and see what's happened over breakfast in the world, and then we put the technology away and put on our work boots and go out and do the animal chores. That takes about half an hour every morning.

For two years, I did drive back and forth from the country to the city. I would wake up in the morning in our little 388-square-foot cabin with the wood stove, and the first year we actually used an outhouse and we even showered outside. I would put on my lawyer clothes and go downtown to the city, and I just felt so smug thinking, ‘Nobody knows what I've really done this morning.' I knew that I felt special.

New Neighbors

We're always building things. We built a greenhouse this past year. We just finished my husband's shop. I have a sugar shed where I keep all my maple syruping and honey equipment.

One of the concerns I had at first is I had a whole life raising children and neighborhood and people I knew so well. Moving to the country, I didn't know how I would make friends, how I would get to know people.

This is when we were still just coming out on the weekends, we came out one weekend and there was a note tacked to the front door. It said, ‘My name is Carl, I've been fishing at this creek my whole life. I know the property has changed hands. I was hoping I could still have permission to fish here.' And he left his phone number. So of course I called him, and of course I said yes. I don't know how he had found it, but he had been fishing there, he told us, for about 50 years, this one fishing hole. When he passed, his son came to us and said, ‘My father so loved this place, could we leave some of his ashes here?' And of course we said yes. We definitely feel as though Carl is still with us.