Sunday, November 27, 2016

Another way to build a house for under 30,000 dollars

Though it is more work intensive, this would be for owner builders who have more time than money for building their homes. First, this likely would be best in more rural environments where you are going to build a home. Then you search for a place that is being torn down in your area. Then after you assess the quality of the wood of the place (barn or home) that you are going to tear down (you might have to plane the wood to make it acceptable to building inspectors where you live) you get the wood approved by local county building inspectors before you start to build with it.

Then often the building materials are for the most part free that you are recycling in this way. Like I said this is much more time consuming, so your time you are using in place of money to buy materials. Most places when they are torn down don't charge you for this wood, in fact you likely would be paid to tear this barn or home down. However, you have to be skilled enough to know what is going to be valuable and what wouldn't be valuable. However, this is still possible to do. Also, you might have to tear down and move the wood of several homes or barns to wind up with what you want in the end. However, this is possible to do many places in the U.S. still.

First you have to study local building codes to see what is feasible to do in the area you plan to buy land and to build. Of course, it is also possible to avoid a lot of work by placing a motor home or trailer or doublewide on your land while you build your home there too. But, no everywhere allows this to happen legally. So, you have to study the codes wherever you live before you start or plan anything.

IN my own case in 1980 I chose to build an A-Frame out of timbers from my land. So the basic STructure was from lodgepole pine trees. Once I had assembled the roof rafters I covered these rafters with 1/2 inch plywood on the exterior walls and then covered that with Green felt roofing after putting down tar paper to make it watertight.  The slopes of the A- Frame prevented a roof collapse when we received up to 7 feet of snow if no one was there to shovel snow off a less sloped roof.

The flooring was made from 3/4 inch plywood also. IN this way I was able to build my A-Frame very inexpensively. The land 2 1/2 acres was only 8000 dollars because it was remote on a dirt road with no electricity but had a septic tank and toilet room shed already built there above the septic tank. There was also a running spring on the land. After the A-Frame was built we used at that time Aladdin lamps and other kerosene lamps to light our home. Other times, if we didn't want to smell kerosene we also lit the home with candles. For example, you can get candle holders with reflectors to increase the light a candle gives off in a specific direction for reading.

Also because the land was remote (2 or 3 miles to the nearest paved road) and then another 10 miles to the nearest gas station or store, we decided to home school our kids on independent study until the oldest was 12 years old (from 1980 to 1985). Then we moved back to the SF Bay area and bought another business.

We used Oak Meadow School to home school our kids on Independent study then in 1980.

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Now days, solar is relatively inexpensive and in this area I still have a friend that lives there and all the people have solar powered homes because it is still too remote for power lines to be brought in even though I sold our land in 1989.

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