When Chrissy Lee-Manes’ ancestors first settled in the 1850s in the area now known as The Hill, Boulder was just one of the many towns that popped up along the Front Range foothills to support the mining industry that exploded during the 1850s gold rush.
And those first settlers — including Lee-Manes’ ancestors — had to be self-sufficient. They built their own furniture, grew their own food, raised their own bees for honey. They were homesteaders in the original sense: They owned land and worked to make it productive so it could support them.
Now, more than 150 years later, Lee-Manes and her husband, John Lee, are working to redefine what homesteading can be and who can participate in that do-it-yourself, self-sufficient way of living. Seven years ago, they turned their DIY lifestyle into a business called Homsted. They sell goods that cater to the DIY lifestyle and offer classes to help people learn DIY skills. After opening their first retail store in Glenwood Springs, the couple in August opened a second retail shop in Boulder — smack-dab on The Hill, just down 13th Street from where Lee-Manes’ ancestors first settled.
“It kinda felt like going back home,” Lee-Manes said. “They lived that lifestyle right there.”
At its retail stores, Homsted sells goods ranging from personal-care products to tinctures to gardening tools to grow kits to seeds to food to cleaning supplies to bulk herbs and natural ingredients. All of their products are homemade, and all of their ingredients are either native to the area or easily grown.
Homsted’s classes include lessons in skills such as how to forage for and identify plants, how to make herbal medicine, how to build furniture and how to grow and preserve food for personal use.
“I believe there is a deep-rooted, innate sense in people that finds satisfaction from creating things yourself, from your own craft,” John Lee said. “Once you get into it, once you start cultivating that, it starts spreading into other parts of your life. It’s permeated every aspect of our lifestyle.”
They’re not alone. According to a June study by consumer market research firm The Farnsworth Group, the frequency of home DIY projects went up 60% during the COVID-19 pandemic, with people taking tasks into their own hands ranging from gardening to plumbing. Younger homeowners were by far the demographic most-likely to embrace a DIY lifestyle, and more than half said they would continue this lifestyle even now that the pandemic has wound down.
And Homsted isn’t the only organization that is helping people make that transition in Boulder. Local nonprofit Resource Central has run hands-on conservation programs since it was founded in 1976 to help residents save water, conserve energy and reduce waste. Its offerings include lawn-removal programs, xeriscaped gardens of native plants, education on how to reuse materials and a tool library to give people the equipment they need to do their own projects without spending significant sums purchasing their own equipment.
“If you’re just getting into this, one of the biggest things is to make one change that can be sustained,” said Jenny Steel, marketing program manager at Resource Central. “Some huge transition that doesn’t take constant attention. Those one-time behavioral changes are the biggest things you can do.”
In 2020, Resource Central helped Boulder residents save more than 128 million gallons of water, remove more than 100 lawns that were replaced with low-water native plants and distribute more than 5,200 low-water, native-plant gardens.
For Lee and Lee-Manes, their goal beyond selling goods and offering classes is to redefine what homesteading can be and who can live it. Before they began living a DIY lifestyle, they lived a typical suburban home life. When they thought of homesteading, it was in the traditional sense, like what Lee-Manes’ ancestors did when they first settled in Boulder. They assumed that, in order to homestead, people needed to have acres of land and a farm. But what they realized when they began exploring the modern homesteading lifestyle was that anyone, anywhere, can do it. And that is the message they want to spread.
“One of the biggest things we try to let people know is that you can do it anywhere, in a home, apartment or suburb,” Lee-Manes said. “The original definition of homesteading was to have land, and acres of it. We want something new and modern.”
Life in a suburban house, for example, means a backyard garden is possible. Some municipalities also permit backyard chickens and beehives. Apartment dwellers can grow a small garden in the kitchen or on a balcony. Lee said that many apartments are also beginning to allow beekeeping on balconies.
And no matter where someone lives, they can learn to identify and forage for plants. They can make their own medicines, soaps, body products and cleaning supplies. They can preserve their own food.
“Really, space is not an issue,” Lee said. “There’s the historical aspect of homesteading that involved a lot of land, but also today I think there is a rather glamorous idea people have of that from social media, with chickens and pigs and large extravagant farms. We’re trying to break away from and expand upon that.”
Getting that message across, that anyone can adopt a DIY lifestyle no matter their means or living situation, is key, especially in an era when people may see extravagant homesteading on social media and assume that’s the only way to do it.
“I think a big part of the misconception is that it has to be all-or-nothing,” Steel said. “Our world today is pretty extreme with every opinion. The climate crisis is also scary, and that can make this daunting. I think it incites a panic in all of us.
“For us at Resource Central, a big part of what we do is meeting people where they are because any effort is great.”
At Resource Central, the group aims to provide the tools to help make those transitions as easy as possible while also making people aware of just how much of an impact every choice can have. It can be as simple as buying local supplies for a DIY project, Steel said.
“When you buy lumber for your home project, you’re not just buying a piece of lumber,” Steel said. “You’re buying everything that went into producing and transporting that lumber.”
Another big program at Resource Central is the garden-in-a-box, which they sell to help residents replace their lawns. The gardens contain native plants that use far less water than grass lawns. If removing their lawn is too much for someone, Resource Central has also recently launched a service where they do that for homeowners.
Going forward, Resource Central is expanding its reusable-materials facility to provide DIYers with even more materials for their home projects.
“We are investing in our site so we can hold more materials and be there for the community,” Steel said. “We have to adapt with everything, too.”
For Homsted, the future holds expanding its retail shops to offer refill stations for their homemade cleaning and body products, as well as a tea bar for its medicinal teas. Lee and Lee-Manes also plan to expand the classes they offer by bringing in guest instructors to teach people about tasks such as beekeeping and chicken-raising.
“We’re just trying to reach people with the messaging that homesteading is not about acreage, it’s about creating with your own hands,” Lee said.
