• Former Illinois residents Jason and Jennifer Remillard dreamed of living a simple, debt-free life.
• The couple purchased a $50,000, 58-acre property in Maine in 2019 near the Canadian border.
• They turned two $12,000 Amish sheds into their home, connecting them with a custom-built hallway.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jason Remillard, 49, and his wife Jennifer Remillard, 55, who left the Chicago suburbs to retire on a Maine homestead.

They built their dream home out of two $12,000 Amish sheds, which are built one at a time using traditional techniques instead of mass-produced. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

My wife Jen and I lived in a small town called Wauconda just outside of Chicago. Jen was a supervisor in the photo lab at Costco, and I was the director of quality and operations for a touchscreen manufacturer.

We were the typical American family. We’d sit down on the couch and we’d watch TV. Then we’d go to bed, and wake up. Rinse and repeat every day.

In about 2010, we decided that once all six kids were graduated and out of the house, we wanted to live an off-grid lifestyle and homestead. We spent 10 years preparing for the transition.

In January 2019, we found a piece of property in Maine on LandWatch.com. We flew up a week after we saw it, and hiked a mile and a half in knee-deep snow with our real-estate agent to look at it. We fell in love with it.

It’s in the Houlton area of Maine, about three and half hours north of Portland. We’re at the end of an unmaintained road on the Canadian border.

We paid $50,000 for 58 acres.

I loved the privacy of it. We only have a few neighbors within a mile of us.

We dreamed of a debt-free lifestyle off the grid

In June 2021, we sold our Wauconda home. We packed up our trailer and U-Haul, dropped our son off at the Marine Corps, and drove out here.

When we left Illinois, we wanted everything paid off. The property was $50,000, the vehicles were $40,000, the two Amish cabins were $24,000, and the solar panels were $12,000. Over four years, we put all that money aside so that when we stepped on the property in 2021 we didn’t have to worry about anything.

It allows me to work two and half hours a day on the property and maintain this lifestyle without worrying about heavy debt. It’s about being able to work on your home, work on improving your life, without spending two-thirds of your day at a job that you don’t like.

It was really just a mad dash to figure out what the game plan was. We had no experience with this lifestyle. We made hundreds of to-do lists.

The first thing we had to do was mow the lawn. Then we worked on rebuilding the fence and had a gravel pad — a foundation for our homes — installed. We had to clean out the old shed that was on the property and fix up a temporary storage building.

It was just a lot of busy work. We installed solar panels so that we weren’t running on a generator 24 hours a day. We had to cut enough firewood for the winter.

Being at the end of an unmaintained road, the Border Patrol informed us that our property was used as a “lovers lane,” a place for young people to go and just mess around. So, we put up a fence along the road section of our property, just to let people know that we are actually living here now.

The Amish sheds give us flexibility for a permanent home

In 2020, when we had the property but were still living full-time in Illinois, we met one of our Maine neighbors on a trip. They were kind enough to invite us over and they showed us the Amish shed they had for their home. We weren’t really sure what route we wanted for our forever home, but we saw theirs and just thought, “Hey, we could do this, too.”

We reached out to Sturdi-Built Storage Buildings in Smyrna, Maine. We designed our own cabins, everything from where the windows are to where the doors are.

We’re so glad we didn’t go the log cabin route because these buildings are so incredibly versatile. Since we’ve had them, we’ve built a porch on one side. We’re going to add a sun room to another side next year.

My first thought was to put them in an L shape. But then my concern was that the snow here in the winter. If I had my two cabins in an L shape, inside the L there would just be a massive pile of snow when it all slid off the roof.

If I were a professional carpenter, I could connect the two buildings at the roofline and make them look seamless like one building. But I’m not that guy. So, I built a small 5×5 hallway between the two buildings. It was the extent of my abilities, but it works fantastic.

When the cabins were delivered, they were just shells. The floor had insulation, but wasn’t finished, and the walls were just 2x4s. There was no electrical, plumbing, or siding. We went through our first winter with no siding on our walls. We had to do everything. We spent around $10,000 making the two sheds into our home.

All of the hard work that Jen and I have done — I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

If someone wants a big, elaborate place, the Amish shed probably isn’t for you. This is for someone who wants a small footprint for their home. But they’re adaptable to any environment, down south in Texas, out in Appalachia, up in Oregon, the Midwest, and, of course, here in Maine.

We’ve documented this journey on YouTube. It’s to show people out there who aren’t in their 20s that no matter how old you get, you can still follow your dreams.

LIMESTONE, Maine — An Aroostook County tribe has found that industrial hemp plants will extract so-called forever chemicals from contaminated soil on land it owns at the former Loring Air Force Base.

There’s one problem: no one can figure out what to do with the hemp.

“There hasn’t been a way to get the PFAS out of the plants without it going back into the environment,” said Mi’kmaq Nation Vice Chief Richard Silliboy.

Finding a way to take per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, out of contaminated hemp plants without unintentionally releasing them into the air is the next step in the tribe’s effort to remediate 650 acres of polluted land the U.S. government turned over to it 15 years ago.

Using hemp plants to suck up PFAS from the ground has been touted nationally as a potential fix for the widespread pollution. But the Maine tribe’s experience has revealed a significant obstacle to making it work. Testing will soon be underway to try to find a solution to the roadblock.

PFAS refers to a group of manufactured chemicals often found in household and personal care products that have polluted soil and water at former manufacturing sites. Known to break down slowly, the long-lasting “forever chemicals” have been linked to increased risk of some cancers, issues with hormonal and immune systems, developmental delays in children, and other health issues, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The land the federal government gave the Mi’kmaq Nation in 2009 was so contaminated it was designated a federal Superfund site. The Mi’kmaq property used to be a key training area for Loring firefighters, who used a PFAS-laden foam.

In 2019, Silliboy and Chelli Stanley co-founded Upland Grassroots, an organization dedicated to cleaning up the Mi’kmaq parcel. Stanley, who lives near Hallowell and has a background in community organizing, learned about hemp-based PFAS extraction and contacted Silliboy, who was immediately interested in its potential.

That year, Stanley, Silliboy and other tribal members planted and harvested several small plots of hemp plants on the Loring property. They sent the harvested hemp to the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, a state-run scientific research facility.

Initial data showed that the hemp plants were extracting various forms of PFAS, including perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, or PFOS. In summer 2022 the group planted five larger plots, with four hemp varieties grown in smaller subsections within each plot.

Of the 28 PFAS varieties identified in the soil, 10 were found in the harvested hemp plants, according to the group’s research published earlier this year.

Stanley and the Mi’kmaq Nation want to eventually expand the number and size of hemp plants to test for larger extractions of PFAS. But without a safe method to dispose of the PFAS-laden hemp, the group’s research can only happen on a smaller scale.

“We don’t want to put the hemp in a landfill and have it be somebody else’s problem,” Stanley said.

One of the group’s scientific partners, the University of Virginia, is currently developing and will soon be testing a method to take PFAS out of hemp plants, according to Bryan Berger, a chemical engineering professor.

Berger declined to reveal what method will be tested but said that if successful, he and colleagues could publish results in early 2025.

Hemp, like other plant species containing toxic contaminants, cannot simply be burned, Berger said.

“That ends up creating airborne forms [of PFAS] that can end up in the atmosphere,” Berger said.

Hemp-based research related to PFAS extraction has been limited, as industrial hemp was only approved for agricultural use in 2018, and funding for such studies remains limited. But Berger and tribal partners recently scored a major funding source to expand their efforts and work toward long-term solutions.

Starting in 2025, the Mi’kmaq Nation, Stanley, Berger, the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station and Central Aroostook Soil and Water Conservation District will use a four-year, $1.6 million EPA grant to continue hemp planting at Loring and testing potential ways to extract PFAS from harvested hemp.

As part of the grant, the group will also test areas of the Aroostook River, a waterway that the Central Aroostook Soil & Water Conservation District has found to contain PFAS due to irrigation runoff from nearby crop fields. They will study hemp as a potential rotation crop for keeping PFAS from seeping into potatoes and other produce.

The agricultural studies will be a continuation of work that the conservation district has already begun, Berger said. His lab will test approximately 300 to 400 samples of water from the Aroostook River as well as potatoes and other crops to know the extent of PFAS contamination.

With colleagues from the Connecticut station, the group will study how PFAS moves through insect food chains using sample insects from Aroostook.

Berger credited the Mi’kmaq Nation and Stanley’s initial collaboration for being one of the first groups to study PFAS and hemp at the community level and bring attention to its potential.

“As a researcher, I have not seen a lot of people work on this until recently, so they’re way ahead of everybody else,” Berger said. “Our goal really is to help other tribes, farmers and rural communities who have been impacted [by PFAS].”

The Maine Warden Service is offering a $2,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of a man who shot a domestic dog on a hiking trail in North Yarmouth on Friday.

The incident happened at about 11 a.m. as three people were walking their dogs on a marked trail in the Knights Pond Preserve, according to the Warden Service.

One of their dogs was shot about 20 feet ahead of them.

According to the Warden Service, the shooter was described as a man in his 30s, with dark hair and scruffy facial hair. He was wearing a blaze orange vest, a blaze orange hat and camouflage pants. The owners of the dog had a brief encounter with the shooter, but he quickly fled the scene.

A man matching this description was seen leaving the area in a dark-colored, full-size pickup truck, according to the Warden Service.

“This atrocious, negligent shooting is both heinous and inexcusable, and is aggravated by the cowardly act of the shooter fleeing the scene,” Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Commissioner Judy Camuso said in a statement. “The incomprehensible and appalling act of one individual tarnishes the reputation of all of Maine’s 230,000 hunters.”

Anyone with information is encouraged to call the Maine Warden Service at 207-624-7076, or contact Operation Game Thief at 1-800-ALERT-US.

The Warden Service is also urging the shooter to call 207-624-7076 and turn himself in.