Low Cost Housing, Part 2
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.
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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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