SCOTTSVILLE – Chase Saxton’s home doesn’t have electricity or running water.

For now, that’s fine with him.

For the past five years, Saxton has been building a home with the intention of living a self-sufficient life.

Saxton, 24, has had an interest in homesteading for years, spurred most notably by a family he knew growing up in Edmonson County that lived off the grid.

“For me, it was something I saw growing up with this other family and it always appealed to me,” he said.

Growing up, he had plenty of opportunities to dip his toes into a modern echo of a pre-industrial lifestyle. For much of his childhood, he lived in a house his parents built of reclaimed logs from cabins well over a century old, he said. When he was 11 or 12, his parents, seeing his desire to live a more pastoral life, got six sheep for him to raise, which quickly grew to more than 60 thanks to the animals’ breeding habits.

“It was an adjustment, but it was an adjustment in a good way,” he said. “It taught responsibility and, two, it showed at a young age, this is where our food comes from.”

In 2008, the teenaged Saxton moved with his family to a Meade County farm that had a smithing forge and a cooper’s workshop, where they raised chickens, horses, cows and pigs.

From an early age, Saxton has been fascinated by the lifestyles of people who lived long before the dawn of the electric age, he said.

“I’ve always been a history buff and I loved reading how they used to do things in the colonial and the Revolutionary War days. So living that type of lifestyle was always a dream for me,” he said. “In a way it was an adjustment … not in a hard way but in an excited way. I wanted to learn how to do this.”

Saxton has mainly been supporting himself financially by working as a blacksmith.

His interest in blacksmithing began at that farm in Meade County, where he introduced himself to the craft by forging a fireplace poker he needed to stay warm at night.

“I forged a fire poker out of necessity,” he said. “My bedroom was part of the original log cabin on the property and, if you didn’t fire the woodstove in there, you’d wake up with frost on the floor.”

From there, he said, he hasn’t looked back.

While his father often relaxed when the day’s work was done, Saxton, as an energetic teenager, spent much of his free time working the property’s forge, teaching himself the blacksmithing craft.

Saxton said he enjoys the process of working with metal and how a heated metal’s malleability allows for do-overs.

“You make a mistake with metal, I can put it back in the forge and forge it back out to the way it was originally and redo it,” he said.

Saxton also appreciates the blacksmithing community, which he described as “tight-knit.”

Recently, he returned from a convention held by the Southern Ohio Forge and Anvil, a blacksmith association.

“We’re talking tens and thousands of tools just out and about, you know, I’m talking handmade hammers, stuff that are $300 each and people are, everybody’s so tight-knit, they just leave it out there with an honesty jar,” he said, referring to a jar where people can put money they use to pay for tools and materials they walk off with.

Through the years, Saxton has been supporting himself with smithing. He’s made numerous household wares and tools used in other trades and done a lot of iron work for Civil War and Revolutionary War re-enactors, he said.

Not unwilling to work with modern technology, Saxton also makes power hammers – machines that, when a pedal is compressed, repeatedly strike with a hammer.

“With this mechanical-type hammer, you can press on a pedal and it’ll hit 230 times a minute and never tire and you’re not killing your arm,” he said.

Saxton has been building his house, located on a piece of land his parents gave him, for about five years but only moved in about a month ago, having lived in an apartment at his welding shop down the road in the meantime.

The home – with an exterior made mostly of red tin roofing, a porch made of wooden planks he cut himself with a planer and a small second floor that’s not finished yet – has an unfinished fusebox and small wall-mounted structures that will someday hold light switches when he gets around to installing solar panels.

With other preparations needing to be made before the winter, the solar panels have to wait, he said.

“I have higher priorities like getting the woodstove hooked up before winter, putting the metal siding, the last pieces of the roof, and then getting a proper water system installed because right now, I’m hauling my water in,” he said.

For now, Saxton is shaving with water he heats up on a portable stove connected to a propane tank and showering in heated water pumped into a showerhead with a pump system taken from an RV.

Saxton has a garden that wasn’t especially successful this year, meaning he wasn’t able to can a lot of vegetables for the coming months. That means he’ll he eating a lot of store-bought food, at least until deer season comes back around.

“I’m just going to have eke by like that with the store-bought stuff for a while,” he said.

Despite all the modern conveniences he’s decided to go without, the hardest adjustment – when switching from a fully connected life to one in which the only electricity comes from battery-operated tools or devices like a cellphone he charges in his truck – has been the lack of noise from various machines and appliances.

“In our homes today there’s so much noise, whether it the refrigerator running, the computer fan running, all these different sounds, but then when you’re in a house with no electric running, you don’t hear those noises … and the quiet at first drove me almost crazy. It’s amazing how much noise that we hear all the time,” he said.

– Follow Daily News reporter Jackson French on Twitter @Jackson_French or visit bgdailynews.com.