Friday, July 24, 2009

Your House and Living Successfully: Part 4/4

Choosing Your House for Living Successfully:

Whether your income is of the Nomad Model or the Farmer Model, you can still build your own house and get something better than you can buy for the same price.

My brother, The Keeper of the Mountain, has built something that is very close to the ideal Nomad's house. Unlike the standard trailers you get, he has built it with the top of the line stuff. It is built to be lived in for an extended period of time, not just camped in for a few days of the year for a few years. Inside an hour, he could pack things so the don't fall about, hook it up to a truck and drive just about anywhere he needs to and would have his whole house and everything he owns right there with him. With less than 300 square feet, it will be cheap to heat or cool even with only R-13 insulation and harsh temperatures. Considering how close I came to doing more or less the same thing, I can't say the Idea is a bad one. My Idea involved a motor home optimized for my use and a small car I could tow behind it. The only issue I have with his house is I see a structure that will not tolerate extensive moving. I have seen sturdily built wooden framed constructs built on trucks and trailers, and I have seen them fail under the shaking, rocking, and torquing that they suffer while being moved. While the building was built well, I do not see holding up to a nomadic lifestyle because the wood itself will not tolerate the constant stress on the joints of the frame.

The house I am building is very much a Farmer Model house. It will probably end up weighing a hundred tons. It will be labor expensive and very immobile. This means I need a Farmer Model income. I have had the Idea of starting my own business for some time, and have been considering it more strongly since I became unemployed back in January, but now that I have been unemployed for 6 full months and have turned in over 75 resumes without a peep in response, I have gone and gotten my business license. Already I have jobs lined up. My home territory is probably limited to about 150 miles at this point, but with a job taking most of a week, I can see getting to the point where a home range of hundreds of mile could be justified with the proper equipment.

End.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Your House and Living Successfully: Part 3/4

The Hybrid Nomad Farmer Model:

People often like to think that hybrid systems would give you the advantages of both systems involved. My experience and observations indicate that the opposite is true. Hybrid systems suffer the limitations of both systems and fail to properly realize the advantages of either. The Nomad Farmer is no exception.

A Nomad Farmer arrives to find fresh fields and abundant wild herds and starts to build expensive Farmer Model living quarters and expensive Farmer Model embedded infrastructure, only to pick up and leave the most expensive parts when the local ground becomes exhausted and the wild herds migrate. More often than not, he leaves poorer than when he arrived.

There are no examples of successful Nomad Farmer Empires. The lifestyle is so wasteful, that the chances of success of any measure are sufficiently remote and improbable that Empire building by these people is never more than a dream.

I personally know two families who have spent their adult lives pursuing the Nomad Farmer Hybrid Model. Up and down the West Coast they went chasing work like modern Nomads, yet whether they rented or bought, their money was spent on housing and land that did not move with them. Stuff acquired would be tossed or stacked in epic loads on trailers and moved using great heroics. Unfortunately, I believe the biggest mistake lies in that they tried to live in these places like they were Farmers. They spent money on housing They couldn't pick up and move and acquired things they couldn't move. The result is they enjoy temporary benefits from the new location, but often ended up with less each time they moved. The severity of the problem actually increased with the increase of Nomad income, because that enabled the purchase of more Farmer type purchases.

The only success I have seen involved a couple that happened to move to California during a particularly rich time. While earning a Nomad's wage, they managed to pay two mortgages at once. This combined with selling the California house at one of the peaks of California real estate markets, was able to ultimately buy their current place outright. They have lived here for a record breaking 15 years in spite of sketchy employment. They were able to finally able to live in a full Farmer Model residence and have built the best they have ever had. The problem is, they didn't do it until they were 60 and nearly retired. Two others I know, have embraced self employment and the Farmer model early. They have suffered robbers. Boy howdy have they suffered robbers. Yet in this big economic crunch, they are doing better than the Nomad Farmers I know. They are not without their money problems, but yet they are financially better off because their Farmer Model income matches their Farmer Model acquisitions.

To be continued.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Your House and Living Successfully: Part 2/4

The Farmer Model:

The Farmer lifestyle model is characterized by permanent stationary structures that are frequently large, and equipped with many features and extensive embedded infrastructure. The Farmer model require good farm land to succeed. This perennially good farmland permits the farmers to build expensive unmovable living quarters and lots of expensive infrastructure that will pay for itself over time.

The Empires of the Farming model are numerous and have been known to last as long as 500 years under the same government. The Roman/ English/ American Empires are premiere examples.

Quite naturally, since the American Empire is a Farmer Model Empire, the commonly accepted American Dream is that of Home ownership. Even the smallest of homes are much too big to hook up to a truck and tow away without thousands of dollars of equipment, expertise, and permits. They are usually designed and built to be hooked up to the buried infrastructure built by the community to provide even the most basic features like water, power, and sewage. Frequently at least some land not covered by the house is included, and has some kind of boundary structure like a fence or at least some markers.

If you earn your money by running your own business and moving outside of your home territory will only hurt you, then you have a Farmer's style income. Then you can build a Farmer style house as you have little reason to move.

To be continued.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Your House and Living Successfully: Part 1/4

While I am digging up files that may or may not be backed up, let me ramble on Living Successfully versus Successfully Living. Successfully Living means you managed to survive something. Living Successfully means you are thriving. Successfully Living is something we do every day. For some, it is a lot of work, but it's something everybody does. Living Successfully require something more. From the aspect of choosing your housing, let's look at lifestyle models of human society in four parts.

The Nomad Model:

The Nomad lifestyle model is characterized by temporary and movable structures and no embedded infrastructure. They succeed on poor land because their living quarters are cheap to build and or movable. When the grazing land is used up or the herds they are hunting move, they fold their tents and move on. They recognize that acquiring too much stuff results in waste, because it has to be left behind or will incur a substantial cost to move it. If any infrastructure is built at all, it little more than a well.

The biggest nomadic achievement is probably the Mongol Empire. It sprang from a band of nomadic herdsmen in 1206 AD and in 73 years it conquered 1/6th of the planet and 100 million people. It stretched out and touched lands from Korea to Poland. It stands as the single largest empire to be ruled by a single government ever. 15 years later it broke into 4 parts and proceeded to go into free fall.

Modern Nomadic structures range from tin shacks thrown up in a shantytown using whatever materials that can be found, to travel trailers, to motor homes. Motor homes and travel trailers come in various qualities. Most travel trailers are like the Prowler that The keeper of the mountain bought. Their frames are of wood that is stapled together, wrapped in aluminum, given maybe 2 inches of insulation, lined inside with cheap wood facing, and sold by slick salesmen who want you to think you actually like the boxy styling and ugly paint. Your better motor homes and travel trailers are made of buses and transport trucks. These have welded or riveted metal frames as well as a metal exterior. Even on these, installation tends to be skimpy, because installation is space hungry and they are usually driven to mild climates by people on vacation, not lived in for years in hot or cold environments such as where I live.

If you earn your living working for someone else, with little or no warning you could be dismissed from that job. Does your company promise lifetime employment? Lifetime Employment promises proved to be empty for many Japanese. Are you the third generation that is working for the same company? General Motors has had such workers, and many are now looking for work in the region with the worst unemployment rate in the nation. Finding another position may mean you must relocate. This places you squarely in the position of being a modern nomad. You need a house you can pack up in a day and drive away without leaving anything behind.

To be continued.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Vista Fail

My Vista laptop decided not sign in this morning. After several tries, I told it to reload windows. All of my unbacked up stuff is now gone. I plan to dual boot it with Ubuntu so I have an operating system that won't just sit there when I tell it to do stuff.

This laptop, from when I bought it new, has been freezing up for a half minute or so on a regular basis and sometimes it would take 5 minutes to close a window. I think it's safe to say Vista is Windows ME 2.0. Windows ME was bad enough you'd think they would have been smart enough to not make a second one, but hey, they make 14 billion a year in profit making junk like this, why should they change?

Solar Observatory: Part 2

I've had a rather remarkable problem using my Solar Observatory. Even though I'm working around the longest day of the year, rain and early morning fog have been conspiring to block out the sun. A curious development for a month that brings us less than 2 inches of rain.

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Utility Room 1

Following the Concrete Party, steady progress has been made on the Utility Room. The overhanging structure here is supported by heavy pieces of angle iron embedded under the framing.

The over hanging structure is this sitting window. The windows are all double pane second hand windows from Habitat.







The OSB is now painted to help preserve it. Next year we will put siding over it.










The nice wide space under the right half of this window proved to be a source of injury. It's a nice wide space that looks like it is a good place to pull yourself into the room from outside.




The problem is, just above the line of sight is the bottom of the window sill. I attempted to pull myself through with great conviction and got a nasty knot on my head for my efforts. Not 15 minutes later, my dad whacked his head on the same spot. We decided it would be a good Idea to put up the piece of siding before it happened a third time.

Pro Tip! An "A" frame ladder over the front walk way creates a quick superstitious burglar barrier. :)