The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Low Cost Housing, Part 2

Trailer trash.You won't see trailers discussed much in the homesteading world.  Everyone wants to build their dream home, and I have to admit that I began my homesteading voyage with a similar inclination.  I researched strawbale houses, earthships, and cob.  I drew floorplans and crunched the numbers on passive solar heating.

And then I crunched some less enticing numbers.  Using a very lowball figure of $20 per square foot, a twenty by twenty foot house would cost $8,000 to put together, plus months of labor.  Neither Mark nor I was interested in getting a full time job just to pay for building a house, and we knew that if we jumped into the rat-race we'd have to hire folks to help us build the house since we'd no longer have time to do the building ourselves.  When I sat down and thought about it, I realized that what I wanted was to be on the land right away, to be putting energy into creating a wonderful garden.

"What about a trailer?" Mark asked tentatively.  "We could move in almost right away, and then if we want to build a house later, we can."  As usual, his suggestion was brilliant.  A trailer it was!


This post is part of our Low Cost Housing lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries:





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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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