Building as I can afford it

I guess by this time in my life, most people would have a tight house, be well organized, with all the comforts of home. There are times when I wonder if hiring out my body full time for money, going into debt for thirty years, and building everything right away might have been an easier route. I guess everyone does what they do according to what they know.

For me building this house has been a continuous stop and start affair. Get a little money, buy some parts, move the project forward (sometimes sideways). Right now I’m lowering some of the temporary walls, establishing the permanent top plates and getting ready to set the real roof in place.

The house is a yurt design, but for a while I was still thinking about a more geodesic approach. Now that I have the roof lumber on site with more permanent walls in place, I guess the yurt design is the one I will use- maybe the geodesic will work for a greenhouse.

Anyway, I build with screws, which facilitate changing my mind (the walls started out over 8 feet tall).

This also makes temporary walls and supports easy to construct and easy to remove. Many of the temporary roof boards have never been cut and many have no fasteners except gravity.  So they lay up there in an overlap fashion, resting quietly on temporary walls, waiting for me to get off my ass and finish the job.

Today I unrolled a piece of rubber roofing that has been repurposed many times in earlier structures and cut it in two so I can carry it up the ladder and use it as a quick cover on the central flat roof supported by the yoke of the yurt (no I’m not deliberately trying to be funny).

The point I’m trying to make is, I heartily endorse going slow with large investments, and especially endorse not going into debt any more than necessary,

Yes, occasionally a bit of debt might be useful if it really improves water supplies (as in renting a backhoe for earthworks) or some other investment with really good paybacks, but make sure to have a source of funding that will ultimately pay it back, and do so as quickly as possible. It’s no fun being in servitude to the bank.

 

 

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