Two months, $250, two people, and then sides
(Page 2 of 4)
July/August 1975
By Ellen Kesinger Tietjen
Next, scrounge. Let friends and neighbors know your needs so they'll be able to steer you toward anything interesting they turn up. We got our windows from an acquaintance this way and found our back door in the dump.
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Lumber is sometimes harder to come by. While abandoned buildings abound in most country areas, finding the owner of such a structure and getting permission to tear it down was one of our major stumbling blocks. We finally managed to buy a run down farmhouse for $25.00 and then spent a month demolishing the building and hauling the wood home. Our load, of course, included a lot of old nails, many of which we removed from the boards and straightened It's a tiresome job but does help to cut cost.
In the end, when you've scrounged all you, can, you'll,. Kakis have to buy a few items. For us, this included roll insulation, tar paper, some nails, a few panes of window glass, caulking compound, a roll of clear plastic, and aluminum offset printing plates from the local newspaper office (for roofing). The used plates cost 10d apiece when purchased in large quantities which isn't quite the bargain you might think, since the sheets have to be fastened down with expensive aluminum nails.
Our total bill for materials at the end of the first season was $250. We still have additions and improvements to make (including the finishing of the interior walls) but that small sum provided us with the comfortable, livable structure we needed to make it through our first winter on the farm.
CONSTRUCTION
To begin the fabrication of our home, we cleared a circular area the size we wanted the house to be (25 feet in diameter). Then John dug a hole in the center of the space he made it three feet deep, so that the excavation would reach below the frost line and piled our flat foundation rocks into it. From this center "pillar" we then measured outward to ten equidistant points on the circumference of our circle. Another hole was dug at each of these spots, and foundation stones were set in so that the tops of the pillars were level with one another.
Our floor joists consist of 2 X 4's nailed together to form 4 X 4's (although 2 X 6 lumber would have been better). A bird's eye view of the floor support plan looks like a huge wagon wheel with ten spokes the joists radiating from the center and resting on the stone pillars. At the hub of the wheel we left a circular opening for the center pole (the "axle") to rest in. The spokes at the outer circumference were connected with 4 X 4's, and supporting joists were run between to provide a strong framework for the floor. Since we'd left little crawl space between the wheel and the earth, we-then slipped whole structure.
From that point on, most of the construction was fairly conventional and followed the methods described in the various good books on building frame structures. The guide we used was an out of print work entitled Your Dream Horns: Hove to Build It for Less Than $3,500 by Hubbard Cobb, Wm.. H. Wise and Co., Inc., New York, 1950. (Handbooks that are currently available include How to Build a Wood-Frame House by L.O. Anderson, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1973, $3.00, and Basic Construction Techniques for Houses and Small Buildings Simply Explained prepared by the Bureau of Naval Personnel, Dover, 1972, $4.50. Both can be ordered from the publisher or from MOTHER'S Bookshelf. -MOTHER.)
