My brother is building his own home, from recycled materials (salvaged, secondhand and auctioned). Another friend is doing something similar. Both say the same thing: the income they earn during the year they build their homes is equity income.
They’re giving themselves a DIY Housebuilding Grant.
That is, by building their own home in a year they save far more overall than a year’s wages. If you have a way to make ends meet cashwise in some way (a partner with a job, say) for a year then the money you save on mortage payments for ever after more than makes up for the year of low cashflow.
It might even be possible—if the partner has a decent job—to get a home loan to build the home and in effect pay yourself a wage. So then you don’t have to rely on another income source. You can still come out ahead.
Of course it helps to have home-building experience.
My bro says everyone should build their own house. If you possibly can, that is. He says it’s not that hard. It’s a year of, well, building your own house, something that maybe ought to be a special thing in one’s life. It’s not working for The Man anyway.
My bro is building his 2400 sq ft house for $50K. It started out 1800 sq ft and $30K, but they got a little carried away.
You can also, of course, build it the way you like it. But then maybe there’s a question of appraisals at some point, if you want to go that way.
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Before I get to the dream, after I had it, I wondered where it came from. I think it relates to this cool book I got recently. It seems a likely influence: “Home Work” by Lloyd Kahn—it’s a celebration of homemade homes worldwide. I looked thru it but found nothing like my Dugout Cottage, but the SPIRIT is there everywhere! If you don’t know Lloyd Kahn, he’s the original “Shelter” guy for the Whole Earth book and the leading guy behind the DIY house-building movement of the 60’s. “Home Work” is an updating of his classic “Shelter.” Both are among the more glorious artifacts of one of the better aspects of our world: they’re about people who stand up for creative earth-oriented dwellings in an age of frequent dwelling despair.
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OK, now on to the dream: I had a dream a couple days ago about a little ramshackle cottage that we had bought up north and were visiting for the first time with friends. The idea of the cottage has stuck with me and makes me wonder if such a thing could be actually built and if it would be cheap and functional. It seems like maybe a decent summer-camp folk/indigenous cottage concept.
OK, it was a dug-out cottage, dug say five feet into the ground so that the lower walls were dirt. The dirt was then plastered and whitewashed. Vinyl flooring sheet was layed down with oval rugs on top. There were short white stud walls with windows close to the ground level, so they’d be about shoulder level for adults. Red and black painted trim. An A-framed style roof overhead, open ceiling, pretty low, 7-8 feet to lower white 2×4 trusses. It had a clapboard exterior in a kind of 1930’s style.
The dug-out aspect resulted in rounded corners and edges. This seemed pretty darn cool and cozy.
Everything was smaller and closer-in than in modern construction, with more nooks and levels and ‘stashing zones.’
It had belonged to an old lady who died. It was just as she left it: worn out, tiny, lots of nooks and crannies full of this’n’that, little closets one foot wide, a 2’x3′ bathroom with accordian door. The main area was a long, narrow slot, maybe 12 feet by 8 feet wide, with the living done at one end, kitchen with table and oilcloth at the other end by the closets, bathroom and doorwell. Several easychairs were facing each other at the living end, with maybe a couple feet between the legs of people sitting, with little lamps on stands and wire magazine racks, and a wood stove at the very end.
While our friends were hanging out chatting I found a little curtain which opened to a narrow shoulder-height whitewashed trench about 2 feet wide leading to another room-area which had a couple stoves in it and lots of shelves and curtained-off areas and a sleeping area up shoulder-high in a corner with an old mattress and storage underneath. It was kind of an indoor-outdoor area with an overhanging roof over it all but open on a couple sides to the elements above the shoulder-high dug-out whitewashed area. I thought, Hey they must’ve done a lot of canning in here. We didn’t really know how big the place was that we bought or how much land we had bought. I looked out and saw a couple old one-bed travel trailers. There was another white shack 100 feet from ours. And an old white wooden one-car garage. And a couple tattered, flattened plastic-sheet greenhouses about 8×15 feet in size. A little trench led to the greenhouse area. Another trench led to yet another room—only this time a little boy was in there! I figured he must be a neighbor boy. He was fiddling with the knobs of more stoves. The boy was a little simple. A trench led to yet another room, only this one looked lived-in! Similar but tidy and newer. Then I saw some people. It was the neighbor’s house! I said Hi and they said Oh hi, make yourself at home, yeah, there was an understanding arrangement between the houses. I wondered what that meant but then I realized that we owned both houses. They were the old lady’s family and when her estate sold everything that meant the whole shebang. It seemed fine to me to share this labyrinth of cozy, shacky rooms with these people who were still busy hunting, fishing and canning veggies to get by.
NOTE: I posted this to my OYB mail-list and someone said it wouldn’t work because of wall cave-in and groundwater. That brought a reply from a guy who grew up on the Plains who said, Hey! And that it was like a Soddie Dugout that he grew up in. So if you have a big roof overhand and low water table, it really might work! –Dreams ain’t bad architects after all!
