House and Home

Nothing speaks independence louder than owning your own home. Owning it free and clear provides an even greater sense of freedom and control over your life.

The CDC’s final eviction moratorium expires July 31.

Housing has increasingly become one of the most unequal parts of the economic recovery.

At the top there is a nationwide housing boom, fueled by a run-up in home prices as higher-income households rush to take advantage of record-low mortgages. But at the same time, millions of renters, especially people who have missed rent payments or whose jobs haven’t come back, are at risk of losing their homes before the end of the summer.

The looming eviction crisis has added urgency — in Washington and across the country — to ensuring emergency rental aid reaches the most vulnerable Americans before it is too late.

Are we headed toward a housing crisis? I hope you all have secure living situations in these volatile times.

I live in a house which I built with a lot of help from my friends. We were DINKs (double income no kids) and were able to pay off our place in less than a decade. We have continued to improve our home, adding radiant floor heat and a year later adding solar water heat to the radiant system. We also applied a spray foam roof sealer and insulation a few years ago. Those of you lucky enough to own a home understand the endless maintenance required.

Anyone considering building their own home, I recommend checking out "The Owner Built Home" by Ken Kern to explore a variety of ideas. We settled on a pole structure, which made for a relatively quick and easy build.

We built our house with a similar approach to this couple. We first created a summer camp where we lived as we built. We got a head start by having a house raising in which we put up all the telephone/power type poles and framed the entire structure in one weekend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-0voq3nQ6U (19 min)
A simple off grid homestead. Built from the ground up with your own hands. That's the dream for thousands of people around the world. But, with cable TV programs and made up YouTube videos, what does that look like in reality. In this video , my wife Brooke and I show the process of building an off grid homestead , start to finish, and what its actually like.
For more on their project try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiCGM7n79VU (35 min)

Now, we are considering building another house on our place as a caretaker residence. I've got a number of pine trees which I want to harvest, and I have a neighbor with a portable band sawmill. We are looking at many different design ideas. So, I thought it might be fun today to look at a variety alternate housing options.

First off, there are many existing structures which we might use to ease the homeless problem. Italy is offering village homes for one euro. Other communities are providing a few years free rent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8F1jp05vsA (26 min)

More Italians are migrating to big cities, and every year around 200,000 leave to go abroad. Entire villages now stand empty. So small towns are providing incentives for incomers - like rent-free homes in Campania or one euro house prices in Sicily.

They've had a similar program in Detroit for a while, and now a couple of fellows have a HGTV show featuring their rehab work...
https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/duos-renovation-of-detroit-land-bank-ho...

They buy the homes from the Detroit Land Bank for around $1,000 then they a few spend thousand dollars to fix them up before selling them for a little bit more than they spent.

Sometimes old homes are too far gone to repair. However, many can provide salvaged materials. https://www.angi.com/articles/old-house-salvage-home-deconstruction-meth...
Some of these materials are sold at Habitat for Humanity ReStore locations.

Another possibility is moving houses to new locations. This couple has been buying and relocating homes built by the US best known architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcb1i0BX4D8 (8.5 min)

So rehabbing and salvage are two techniques to expand housing, but suppose (like me) you want to build something new. There have been two other homes on our place, but they burned down long ago leaving only old foundation stones.

Frank Lloyd Wright's book, The Natural House, had a big effect on the way I envision homes and construction.
https://www.motherearthliving.com/green-homes/the-natural-house-by-frank...

When synthetics were king and plastic was a new “miracle” material, Frank Lloyd Wright bucked the trend and wrote The Natural House. Published in 1954, the book was full of ideas the architect had been practicing for decades–starting, in many ways, with the 1934 Willey House. Wright laid out his theory of “organic architecture,” where “the nature of material and method and purpose are all in unison.” He urged architects to respect materials for their intrinsic nature and design accordingly.

Organic architecture, Wright posited, “is an architecture upon which true American society will eventually be based if we survive at all…If we succeed, we will have done a great service to our moral nature–the psyche–of our democratic society. Integrity would become more natural…living within a house wherein everything is genuine and harmonious, a new sense of freedom gives one a new sense of life.”

The Usonian house–for which the Willey House became a sort of prototype–offered an equally utopian vision: affordable shelter that embodied these aims. “Integral to its site; integral to its environment; integral to the life of the inhabitants…Into this new integrity, once there, those who live in it will take root and grow,” he wrote.

He promotes the use of local natural materials and building in a way the accommodates life's changes.

I live in the forest, and trees are a resource here. After 30+ years, some of the pines have grown to the point they are shading the garden and the solar collector, and I want to harvest and make use of them here. I plan to hire a crew to cut the trees, and my neighbor to saw some of them. There's lots of work in timber harvest and milling. https://www.logcabinhub.com/build-a-log-cabin-using-trees/
I need to have a pretty good house plan to determine the dimension and lengths of lumber I'll need. Some I want to use in the round...
There are several options building with logs. To my mind two of the easiest are:

Cord wood style

https://cordwoodconstruction.org/cordwood-cabin-with-24-thick-walls-is-e...
https://insteading.com/blog/cordwood-construction/

Vertical (stockade) style

https://www.small-cabin.com/forum/2_1959_0.html
https://www.countryliving.ws/listing/10-reasons-to-consider-a-vertical-s...
http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=004QQy

Here on the mountain there is also plenty of rock. I have done a few rock structures using the Flagg (slip form) method I learned from Scott and Helen Nearing's book, Living the Good Life.

https://digginginthedriftless.com/2012/05/08/building-a-rock-wall-using-...
https://digginginthedriftless.com/2012/05/10/building-rock-wall-using-sl...

Another book which helped me design our house was The Passive Solar Primer which advocates building a home like a thermos that gathers solar energy in winter, and shades against it in the summer. Building materials and orientation are key.

The first big issue I see with most new homes is how poorly they are sited. I often see dark brick homes sitting in the middle of a sun drenched field like a masonry solar oven. People are scared trees will fall on their home I guess, and scrape their building lots almost bare before construction. Another problem I often see is poor orientation, in other words not maximizing protections from weather systems nor winter solar gain nor water collection.

Proper plantings can also increase energy savings. Houses use 22 percent of the energy consumed in the United States today. About half of this is for heating and cooling. A properly designed landscape can make a home significantly more energy efficient and reduce air pollution, including greenhouse gases. It can also cut heating and cooling bills by as much as 40 percent.

Use plants to shade your air conditioner unit, heat sinks like driveways, windows with direct summer sun, and so on. Vines can be used to create arbors over porches and patios. Evergreen trees can provide windbreaks on the side of your home which receives most prevailing weather.

The extent of protection is related to a windbreak’s height and length. For the greatest protection, homeowners should plant windbreaks at a distance from their house of about two to five times the height of the trees when they’re mature. That means that if the trees being planting will grow to 40 feet tall, homeowners should plant them at least 80 feet upwind from the house.

I've written before about Earthships which I admire and want to emulate. (24 min)

With walls made from old tires packed with earth, as well as upcycled glass bottles and cans, Earthships have always been built with mainly found materials. The home provides its own energy (with photovoltaics and passive solar and geothermal tubes), water (rainwater and even dew-water capture) and grows food in the essential greenhouse (necessary for temperature regulation and for filtering the water to be reused).

Costs range from $100,000 for a Simple Survival model to $1.5 million for the top-of-the-line Global design. Earthship Biotecture has just completed their first Encounter: an affordable model that provides all the power, water and good of a more costly home.

As climate chaos accelerates I think buffering homes and buildings in the Earth is wise. Some people literally build with Earth. Rammed Earth is one technique...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjyGOOtOFik&t=60s (12 min)

Adobe is another Earthen material which has been used for centuries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWBz9kl-hTA (11 min)

Earth bags can also be used to make walls and structures
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vdI72pSbb4 (7 min)

Usually these Earth bag structures are covered in a Earthen cob mixture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyOq-yAJ8Kc&t=30s

Earthen floors have been around as long as people have built homes...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSIsEF3nybA (11 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRKg8j1VfUM (5 min)

There are also more modern methods to build Earthen structures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9cDy9XkXPw (7 min)
The most Advanced Compressed Earth Block Technology! The new BP714, producing perfectly dimensioned earth blocks with strengths exceeding concrete!

Or how about 3D printing with Earth?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_ZbTD-2keo (8 min)

Another interesting energy efficient structure is a straw bale building.
22 undergraduates and one fearless leader used 200 bales of straw and some mud to build the University of Michigan's first off-the-grid, solar-powered building.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DEmPJYvieo (3 min)

Here's a more detailed explanation from North Carolina.

Straw bales are basically rectangular BRICKS OF INSULATION that you can stack to make a wall and literally just smear them with mud to create a superior wall system. Think about it, these are about the closest thing to legos that you can use to build your home, except even better. Like LEGO’s, straw bales are lightweight and easy to move. Yet they are BIG, so stacking a whole house can easily be done in a single weekend with help from a few friends.

Stack the bales like bricks in a running bond where they overlap on each successive course. We use a chainsaw to notch out space in the bale for the framing - so it’s all flush on the outside. Then all we gotta do is apply an earthen clay or lime plaster for BOTH the interior and exterior surfaces. We smear it directly on the bales to seal them up and protect from rain, pests and fire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h1SKGWSpmU&t=6m30s (9 min)

How about combining straw and Earth to make a straw clay house?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J0862TFPwU (6 min)

I featured this fellow's underground homes before, but it is worth visiting again. (24 min)

The house we are considering building utilizes several of the preceding techniques in combination and mixtures. We are still in the exploration and incubation stage of development. I enjoy the design and planning stage of big projects, so I've been having fun with the exploration.

What about the bigger concept of house and home?

Eco is a derivation of the Greek oikos, meaning an extended family unit that consists of the house, members of the family, slaves, farmland, and all property...
Eco now designates a broad, self-sustained unit, as in the terms ecology and ecosystem.

https://www.altalang.com/beyond-words/etymology-of-economy/
Of course -ology means study of, and the suffix –nomy is derived from the Greek nomos, meaning management, law, or principle.

Well things are not going too well in our larger house. There's a leaking gas line that is on fire in the Gulf...(1 min)

Like meth addiction getting off fossil fuels is a going to be difficult with TPTB fighting every step of the way. I admire the first nations peoples...
“Defending the Sacred”: Indigenous Water Protectors Continue Resistance to Line 3 Pipeline in Minnesota (video or text)
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/7/2/line_3_resistance_minnesota_water_...
And this is despite being targeted by hired mercenaries and now even the national guard.
Lethal Force Against Pipeline Protests? Documents Reveal Shocking South Dakota Plans for National Guard (video or text)
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/7/2/south_dakota_mercenary_force_pipel...

Those who challenge these fuel behemoths at most any level are persecuted.
After winning a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against Chevron, Steve Donziger was put under house arrest. Big Oil wants the public to stay silent about their abuses. We will not be silent. To help visit: freedonziger.org (1 min)

Pre-industrial CO2 levels were around 280 parts per million (ppm) and today, we stand near 420 ppm. Climate chaos is literally "baked in"... especially in the oceans where most of the heat has been trapped.

Those of you living in the west understand how the change is here.

‘Megadrought’ persists in western U.S., as another extremely dry year develops
The long-running dry stretch rivals anything in the last 1200 years, a sign of climate-change induced "aridification."

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/megadrought-persi...

I wish I had good news about the US economy, but things are pretty dismal there too.
We have an rigged system where the Fed creates currency for banks and corporations to literally purchase their own stocks boosting CEO and stockholder revenues.
Ron Paul has been railing about the Fed for years.
https://mises.org/power-market/road-authoritarianism-paved-fiat-currency

Let’s start with what the Fed did beginning in December of 2007 without any approval from Congress. The Fed created a sprawling octopus of bailout programs for the mega banks and their foreign derivative counterparties. The Fed then battled in court for years to keep Congress and the public from learning the astronomical sums the Fed had spent to prop up failed banks across Wall Street. When the government finally released an audit of the Fed’s bailout programs on July 21, 2011, the tally came to a cumulative $16 trillion. (See chart below.) But when the Levy Economics Institute added in other Fed bailout programs that the government audit had bypassed, the actual tally came to $29 trillion.

In what kind of democracy does an institution lacking even one elected official get to unilaterally prop up insolvent banking behemoths after those same banks cratered the U.S. economy through the creation of fraudulent mortgage products?

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/06/there-is-not-one-elected-official...

Never let a crisis go to waste...

The “novel” coronavirus pandemic marks the greatest turning point in U.S. monetary history since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. The Virus Pandemic and the Federal Reserve are fascinating historical figures for many reasons, starting with the deceptions their very names work on the public. “Federal” Reserve falsely implies that “the Fed” is an agency of the federal government when in fact it is a cartel of 12 private banks acting in concert from different locations to skim interest payments off the top of the U.S. money supply in perpetuity. “Coronavirus pandemic” deliberately misdiagnoses the real disease at the root of the current crisis, which is not in fact any virus (hint: it has a 99+% survival rate) but rather a radical plan for the eventual takeover of the U.S. monetary system by the privately owned Federal Reserve.

https://theduran.com/austin-fitts-its-a-war-the-private-fed-and-central-...

Is now the time to consider building your dream house of the future? Well times are improving for new construction.

After climbing to historic heights this spring, lumber prices are headed back down—fast. Last week the cash price per thousand board feet of lumber fell $211 to $1,113, according to industry trade publication Random Lengths. That's down 27% from its $1,515 all-time high on May 28.

"We are in a free fall," Andy Goodman, CEO of Sherwood Lumber, told Fortune. In the lumber futures market, prices are down even more—dropping 47% since going above $1,700 on May 10.

https://fortune.com/2021/06/22/lumber-prices-bubble-burst-price-of-wood-...

One thing is for sure, living in a home you enjoy is true wealth.

The most famous song of the nineteenth century.

words by John Howard Payne
music by Henry Rowley Bishop
published by G. E. Blake

1. 'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam
Be it ever so humble there's no place like home
A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there
Which seek through the world, is ne'er met with elsewhere

Chorus:
Home! home! sweet, sweet home!
There's no place like home!
There's no place like home!

2. An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain
Oh, give me my lowly thatched cottage again
The birds singing gaily that came at my call
Give me them with the peace of mind, dearer than all

This genteel, vaguely "classical" piece was used as a good-night/closing song at the end of many evening functions during the 1800s. All would join in with robust voice. Because of this it became very well-known and well-loved.

Here's wishing you all a "home, sweet, home"!