Small Living Journal

This post has been very difficult for me to write. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing, and most of what I’ve come up with didn’t make the cut.

For starters, I don’t make hard plans (at least not much further ahead than, say, six months). In order to make a plan you must assume that A) the situation will remain static, in which case you can plot a course to accommodate known forces, or B) the situation will change in a predictable way, in which case you can make plans that account for the changes you foresee.

But in my experience the situation changes, and when it does it changes in a rather unpredictable fashion. Not that this is always bad; it IS possible for things to change for the better, but unpredicted changes will still render your plans irrelevant, which is why I try not to plan much further than a half a year ahead.

In addition, in order to have plans you have to have goals. My goals are all either asinine (be the best shovel operator in the tri-county area) or absurd (turn the world right-side up). So I don’t waste too much time in the planning phase.

I favor a more improvisational, heuristically guided approach. I focus on refining my decision procedures so that when a problem arises, I can categorize it abstractly and apply a standardized solution to it. The idea is to make myself into the type of person who can accommodate unpredictably changing circumstances without too much trauma. Thus, when the changes do come, I may be able to step out of the path of forces I don’t want to engage, and, hypothetically, harness other forces that could potentially be of assistance.

This Tyson of Tomorrow would be a seed of civilization, knowledgeable in all the most basic arts of survival as well as the practical day-to-day work of maintaining a civilized existence (i.e. tool making, shelter building, hunting, gathering, agriculture, soil conservation, water management, cooking, preserving, transportation, communication, fabrication, chemistry, electrical generation, commodities exchange, government, etc.).

Because the long and short of it is, I’m pretty convinced that the situation is only going to get more unpredictable and a lot more dangerous from here on out, and I have zero confidence in anybody else figuring out how to deal with it. In the past half-decade alone the American Empire has demonstrated its inability to engage intelligently with global powers, handle moderately destructive natural disasters, and avoid obvious impending financial ruin.

I’m not banking on the machine leading us into a bright future.

I’d like to begin by drawing attention to a distinction between Do-It-Yourself and Do-It-By-Yourself projects, because I think that there is major difference between the two. So for the purpose of this article I will refer to both DIY and DIBY.

The DIY approach is, basically, do simple things by yourself, and when the job gets demanding or daunting, get some assistance.

DIBY means that, essentially, you’re on your own. (So far I’ve persuaded three of my friends to come out and help me with my project. Evidently “help” in this case means drink beer and throw the cans around the yard. I guess I did get Matt to drill a hole).

For reference purposes, I’ve participated in several DIY type projects in my own small house endeavor, including transporting the house to Aromas, moving the house up the hill, wrecking a collapsed barn for salvage wood, building a deck, installing a woodstove, and plumbing the house. The common denominator in all of these projects was my father, whom I call Ironhorse. In retrospect, I regret not asking him to write an article for this edition, as I can think of no one more involved in DIY than he. But barring that, I think it will still be useful to contrast he and I.

Ironhorse takes a one-man bulldozer approach. He gets serious results and he breaks a lot of things in the process, which he then has to fix. Using this approach he has built and broken (and repaired) more stuff than anyone else I know. And he gets the kind of results you would expect from a coordinated team effort. But this technique requires great motivation, fearlessness, energy, strength, a refusal to take no for an answer, a high tolerance for both pain and filth, a bunch of stuff (which will soon be broken), and most importantly the know-how and determination to fix the wreckage that you’ve left in your path (or at least the stuff that you think is important). When it comes to DIBY, frankly, his method works.

I am not Ironhorse. I share his physical strength, endurance, and willingness to dirty and bloody myself, but lack his motivation, technical knowledge, determination, and natural inclination towards practical mechanical problem solving. By contrast I am more cautious, contemplative, dreamy, bookish, and academic. To be blunt I’m not a self-starter and without direction I’m prone to laziness and indolence. In the DIY world this isn’t necessarily a problem; it’s been my experience that I’m the ideal assistant for virtually any physical task (I have this idiosyncratic competitive streak that compels me to outwork everyone else on a jobsite). But unfortunately none of this translates very well to DIBY.

If you’re a dipshit like me, (who couldn’t even get this post up without assistance from his girlfriend who isn’t even writing an article this week – thanks Manda!), without proper direction you might install a window by sandwiching the nailing strip between the framing and the siding, instead of just nailing the thing to the outside of the building. This isn’t necessarily a horrible way to do it, but if you’re working by yourself it’s way harder to simultaneously suspend a window and frame around it, and it will take you hours and you’ll wonder how the hell anybody does it in the first place. Then when you’re all done someone who knows a thing or two will come along and tell you that you haven’t left enough clearance around the edges of the window to allow for settling and expansion, at which point you’ll just shrug your shoulders, cross your fingers and hope for the best, cause you’ll be damned if your gonna take the whole thing apart again now.

You see, what does not come naturally to me is the PRACTICAL vision and direction. Any of the individual tasks of measuring and cutting and drilling and nailing is no real problem, but it is in the putting everything together that I am weak. I can cut and glue PVC, but if you ask me for a 3/4 street 90, who knows what you’ll get? And when it comes to electrical I really don’t even have a clue.

I can gleefully design a hundred gorgeous tiny houses. But those designs are just that, designs. They are like long articles that don’t convey any tangible knowledge or understanding. They are FUN, no doubt, but there’s no guarantee they will ever be anything more. In Lloyd Kahn’s Shelter, one of the contributing authors cautions against excessively detailed designs, because unless you’re independently wealthy, you’re going to have to work with what is available to you. Improvising with available materials is part of what makes owner-built homes unique and charming, and over-engineering can easily become an impediment to the improvisational necessities of the real world.

This is one of the reasons why I particularly admire Jay Shafer. Here is a man who obviously delights in design, who is not a bulldozer, and who executes his well thought-out designs into delightfully proportioned, comfortable, and functional extensions into reality. I’m more inclined to draw a floor plan and then take my shovel outside and move some dirt around.

For another thing, all my commitments are to ideas, values, and principles. I avoid commitment to practice. If I have a concept, I will implement it in a loose, rough form but I am reluctant to finish anything. I prefer to leave things partly finished for as long as possible until I am forced to make a decision on them. For instance, my deck wraps around an oak tree, and one of the salvaged 2 x 12 redwood planks runs wild about a foot, angled along the tree. My original intent had been to chop it off in a straight line with the rest of the planks, but when I look at it, the angle harmonizes with the tree and with the planks on the other side and I simply feel no compunction to cut it off. Maybe someday I will, but for now I see no reason to.

Or I’ll take a piece of material, say salvaged corrugated steel, and screw it up onto the ceiling in one spot, and just leave it there for a month or two, looking at it, until I decide whether I like it or not. If I like it, I’ll screw some more on there, and then discover that I’ve got to take it all down and put the siding up first.

I can accept these qualities in myself. From the beginning of this project Ironhorse and I had an agreement that this was to be MY project; he just didn’t have the time to help me. I can arrange for a few hours of assistance a month with things I just have no idea about, like plumbing or electrical, or maybe winching the house up a hill. But I knew that for anything to be accomplished I would have to station myself in the house, where ultimately the inconvenience of anything dysfunctional would force me to act on tasks. The downside of all this is that my 216 sq ft building has to serve as workshop, woodshed, and house, with mostly unsatisfactory consequences. And things get done, but they crawl along at a snail’s pace.

The purpose of this article is certainly not to discourage anyone from DIY or even DIBY, but rather to encourage readers to honestly assess themselves and their abilities, as well as their expectations for what they hope to accomplish and along what time-frame they require results. While I’m really not the ideal candidate for DIBY, I’m relying on necessity to be, if not the mother of my invention, then at least the driver of my production. Unfortunately, for the wannabe cynic philosopher, necessity is a rather lackadaisical driver.

I suppose my desire to downsize goes back to my youth and my own inability to manage possessions. I still spend a lot of time in the house into which I was born and raised, and the room I grew up in is small, no larger than one of Jay Shafer’s Epu’s. I have always despised housekeeping, and even managing toys and clothes and books and school work in that space drove me to exhaustion.

But the thought of downsizing never occurred to me until I was of age and moving about, and helping friends move. That alone has played a major roll in my minimalism. I have always been reluctant to ask for help for some personal pathological reason, but I seem to get asked for help with some regularity. After the third or fourth time helping the same friend move his truckload of possessions, I found myself growing resentful and disgusted, (probably because of my own inability to say no), and became convinced that a person shouldn’t have to ask for help moving, that an able-bodied person ought to be capable of moving everything he owned himself, preferably in one trip, ideally on public transportation carrying everything himself.

Realistic or not, this was how I moved to both Prague and New York (this method included my guitar). In fairness, I was privileged enough to leave a bunch of stuff stowed at my folks’ house (mostly books and clothing). Of course my roommates were surprised by my minimalism, themselves taking the moving-van-lifestyle approach. When we moved into a fourth-floor walkup I brought my own things up in a couple trips, then spent eight hours helping everybody else.

By this time, of course, I had already seen the film Fight Club, which was another big influence. The gritty, self-sufficient, hyper-masculine minimalism presented in the movie impressed me pretty profoundly. It wasn’t until years later that I recognized the similarities between Tyler Durden and the Philosophical Cynics of Athens, 300 B.C.E. The most notable of these philosophers, Diogenes, lived in a barrel and ate wild onions. His one “possession” was a wooden bowl, which he destroyed when he observed a slave drinking water from his hands. For his scorn of society and culture he was called “kynos,” or dog. He took the name as his emblem, and it’s from this word that we get our misused modern term, “cynic.”

Diogenes represents the ultimate extreme of minimalism, one that I doubt I could ever truly embrace, and even if I could, I’m not certain is the right path. I believe that if civilization can exist, it will require a certain degree of material culture and technology. But the question is, “how much is enough?”

I’m wagering on “less.”

There are several factors that drew me into Small Housing.

Location – I grew up in one of the last undeveloped corners of Steinbeck Country, on a lush and diagonal six acres, in a lovely house that my dad built before I was born. My family has never moved, so I have a strong personal attachment to the land itself. As a child I fantasized about having my own house on that land. One of those various incarnations was a playhouse at the crest of the hill, to which my actual tiny house bears conspicuous resemblance.

Financing – When, as a child, I asked my parents how much a house cost, the answer was in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was horrified. How on earth was I ever going to save up that kind of money? This was my first acquaintance with the concept of mortgages, and in retrospect my initial revulsion does not seem so inappropriate.

Ecological Footprint – I took an International Relations Poli-Sci course at my community college with one of my favorite teachers. He introduced me to the concept of ecological footprints as a quantitative comparison. When I discovered that I was consuming roughly four times my share of available resources I was pretty alarmed.

Construction – My father bought a concrete pump the year I was born, and I’ve been involved in concrete pumping my whole life. Much of the work I’ve done has been pumping foundations for houses, or sidewalks and backyard patios, etc. I enjoyed this work tremendously (and still do), and I used to take pride in doing what I imagined was good and necessary work. But as I grew older I realized how ridiculously consumptive this pattern of construction is. As much as concrete pumping is essential to making me the person I am, I know that 10% of the world’s greenhouse gases are produced in the manufacture of portland cement alone, which is simply one component in concrete production. I also know that concrete has been the essential material that has enabled the building of the great edifices that symbolize our modern concept of “civilization.” But I have also learned that civilization, if it exists, resides in the minds of men and women and not in awesome feats of engineering. Concrete is indespensible to most large modern structures, but not to small houses.

Financing Revisited – I worked for a startup mortgage broker in Manhattan through 2004 and 2005, beginning right when the interest rates hit their forty-year low. I got an intimate look at real estate, financing, and “investment,” and came away with disgust and a feeling of deep foreboding which has, of course, progressively come to fruition.

Epiphany – During this time, I remember having an epiphany about how home building was this essential human experience that most people in our society were alienated from, and something I deeply desired to do for myself. While I technically didn’t build the structure I live in, the enormous amount of work involved in transporting and repurposing it and the understanding of its composition and structural integrity that I’ve gained from modifying it and subjecting it to intense strains, combined with the belief that recycling and reusing is preferrable to starting from scratch, is satisfying my “home building” life-experience requirements.

The Small House Movement – I’ve been deeply impressed by small housers and their ilk, from Jay Shafer to Mike Oehler (The $50 and Up Underground House Book) to the late Nader Khalili, inventor of superadobe. I admire the advocates and pioneers of thoughtful and responsible ways of living, and try to imitate them whenever applicable.

Philosophical Cynicism – Seneca the Younger, in his letters to Lucilius Junior, chastised him for his simultaneous admiration of both Daedalus and Diogenes. For Seneca, it was incompatible to admire Daedalus—the cunning inventor of carpentry, the saw, axe, plumb-line, drill, and glue, who famously made wax wings for himself and his son Icarus to use to escape from Crete—and Diogenes, the Cynic philosopher who condemned custom and material culture in his strict adherence to necessity alone.

But as a modern admirer of both Daedalus and Diogenes, I believe that these are precisely the contrasting approaches that the small-houser, and the ethically minded westerner, must reconcile. Daedalus shows us how to use resources and techniques to make and enrich our living, and Diogenes reminds us how little we actually require to enjoy a full life. When Alexander the Great came to visit Diogenes, he asked the philosopher if there was anything he could do for him. Diogenes replied, “Yes. Step aside; you’re blocking my sun.”

We should also note that the pen and parchment that Diogenes wrote with, the lantern he carried around in broad daylight while “looking for an honest man,” and the barrel that he slept in were all fashioned by ‘Daedalus.’ Even Diogenes relied on some degree of material culture.

Somehow, this variety of influences and experiences has impressed upon me that what I am doing now is the right thing.