Smoking can be dangerous to your house.

Smokers reading this should consider themselves fortunate. They are already budgeting a significant amount of the grubstake savings for something that is dangerous to their health, and perhaps to the health of other family members. Their good fortune is that, at a stroke, they can improve their health and begin transferring $5 a day, or whatever the habit costs, to the grubstake. Non-smokers are less fortunate. They're going to have to examine their spending much more carefully to find out where they can come up with $5 a day that our neighbors somehow manage to budget.

Page 107 - Marginal Land Sometimes land comes up for sale that has been denuded of its resources: wood, topsoil, gravel, and so on. Most people think poorly of land that looks such a mess and seems so barren of possibilities, and this prevailing attitude is often reflected in a very low asking price.

"Right," you say, "and I don't want it either." But don't dismiss this land too lightly, especially if your primary goal is to find a cheap building lot, and not to produce the various food, fuel, and indigenous materials just discussed. So often we see heavy machinery turn a pretty lot into a wasteland before construction of the house anyway. This is an example of the typical North American approach of fitting the site to the house, instead of the more thoughtful and gentler attitude of fitting the house to the site. Bulldoze, build, landscape. Trees are destroyed. Topsoil is homogenized with subsoil. Additional expense is imparted to already expensive land in order to get it to the point where "convenient" building can take place. Using already decimated land may enable you to afford property closer to town and at a lower price than for "prime" land. The estimated cost of land reclamation must be subtracted from the savings of the land cost, but if the work is done by you yourself -- sweat equity -- this tradeoff should be economically favorable.

This future typically American housing development is just a mile from the road where we live.

There is another positive aspect to buying marginal land. For so many years, American corporations and individuals have taken from our land, and given back little in return. Instead of pillaging more of the planetary capital for convenience and short-term gain, let's reverse the trends whenever and wherever we can. A lot to build a house on need not start out as part of Eden; we can accomplish the transformation ourselves. A house requires, first and foremost, space to build it on, not scenic views, not waterfront, not prime agricultural land. Friend and advocate of "gentle architecture" (as well as illustrator of this book) Malcolm Wells tells about the building site of his first underground office back in the seventies:

"Cherry Hill, New Jersey, is a lavishly rich, trashy suburb of nearby Philadelphia. My office is a tiny place on a tiny lot, wedged between a freeway and a sewer. When I bought the property (for $700!) all I could see were a few scabs of old asphalt on a patch of barren subsoil. It was dead; all the way down the scale from forest to woods to farm to suburb to abandoned highway construction yard. Now, five years later, it's almost a jungle, even though no topsoil and no fertilizer have ever been used, and a building now underlies almost half the root space. The secrets: plenty of mulch and a few key starter-plants ... Now, when we tell our clients how to find choice building sites, we always urge them to pick the worst ones, not the best, as we were always taught to do. Now people can see for themselves how easy and how gratifying it is to restore a bit of this trampled continent ("Underground Architecture," The CoEvolution Quarterly. Fall 1976, p.87)."

Jaki and I built Earthwood on the same hill where, in 1975, we joined with others to start an intentional community of owner-builders. It is a beautiful hill, with woods, meadows, springs, and streams. If there was an eyesore in the neighborhood, it was a 2-acre piece of land from which gravel was removed many years ago. The excavation of gravel ceased when sand was struck, at a depth of about four feet, so almost nothing grew and the sand was shipped up by the wind; not what you would think of as the ideal building site. But, just as the repair of the one weak link in a chain is more beneficial than strengthening all of the other links combined, so, too, the restoration of this one piece of devastated land, a work in progress, will mean more to the visual and ecological character of the hill than any amount of landscaping where Nature has already set the standard. In our seventeen years of occupation on this porperty, and inpsired by the admonition of the Gentle Architect so many years ago, we have reclaimed about two-thirds of the wasteland. Where once was lifeless moonscape, we now have gardens, oxygenating grasslands and wildflowers, even a megalithic stone circle; but that's another story.

Believe it or not, the ideal building site is dying land that is just waiting to be restored. The prospects: silence, privacy, wildlife, clean air and water, more topsoil, less erosion, and lower fuel bills.

The main story here calls forth Roy's Fourth Law of Empiric Economics: Adapt the house to the site, not the site to the house. This law has more to do with ecology than money; but after all, economics is fundamentally about how people interact with the
natural environment.

" Adapt the house to the site, not the site to the house."

Page 160 - On Building Small Although economics is the obvious reason for building small, it is not necessarily the most important one. The most important reason for building small is to get the thing completed! Inexperienced builders, even those with plenty of money, should not tackle a house with more than about 1000 square feet. There is a very real danget that the place will never get finished. I have seen couples break up over incompleted houses, and an overambitious project is one of the major causes of an incompleted house.

There is, of course, another obvious reason for building small. The ongoing life-cycle costs of the home will be correspondingly lower in a small house. Given similar construction, the small house will be proportionately easier and cheaper to heat compared to the large one. Similiarly, the small home will require less maintenance. And property taxes will be less. All this adds up to a significant impact on the yearly operating costs of the home.

There are lots of reasons why people think they need to have a big house, aside from bank propaganda and outmoded zoning regulatiions. Two of the more prominent I call the "overreaction syndrome" and "bedroom mania."

The overreaction syndrome. Jack and Jill have been cooped up in their little apartment or house trailer for so long that all they can think of is, "When we build our house, there's gonna be plenty of space!" They've got lots of time to plan; paper and pencils are cheap. They finally get started on their 3000-square-foot masterpiece. The possibilities from there, in descending order of probability, are: (1) At first, they have great enthusiasm. After about six months, money, energy, and patience run low, then run out. Jack and Jill split up. (2) After a while, Jack and Jill perceive that they've really bitten off too much. They move into one-third of the place. "Someday we'll finish the rest," they say. (3) They pull it off, as planned. I have heard rumor of this, but have yet to witness it first hand.

Bedroom mania. The functions of a bedroom are to supply a peaceful venue for horizontal resting of the body and to supply storage, generally for clothes. Other uses you may think of generally don't require any more space than for sleeping. The bedrooms in most American homes could be divided in two and each would still serve the purpose. Sure, lots of other considerations come into the planning: building codes again; an adjustment, perhaps, of the individual value system; planning a small bedroom to accommodate furniture. One thing is certain: the larger the bedroom (or house, for that matter), the more unnecessary "stuff" one accumulates.

Note from the author: This has been just a tiny sampling from a 354-page book. Hope you enjoyed it. Here is the Contents:

Chapter 1 ... The Mortgaged Home
Chapter 2 ... The Grubstake
Chapter 3 ... The Land
Chapter 4 ... The Temporary Shelter
Chapter 5 ... The Low-Cost Home
Chapter 6 ... Our Own Story
Chapter 7 ... Mortgage-Free People

The book concludes with over 50 pages of valuable resource material. All excerpts © 1998 Rob Roy. All Rights Reserved.

© 2003 Earthwood Building School