The Americans Pledging to Buy Less–Or Even Nothing
wsj.com
wsj.com
While my peers might take fancier vacations or drive nicer cars, I wouldn’t trade. I have a confidence in finical stability, and I focus on things that really matter to me.
How long did it take you?
What's the square footage and number of bedrooms / bathrooms?
Did anyone help you?
Did you include buying / renting tools in that amount?
Already own the land?
Interior / exterior finish levels? e.g. is it a cabin?
Are you certain?
I've done plenty of DIY projects, and as soon as you start using hand tools, the risk goes up, especially if you include cutting or drilling.
Mostly no help
Not include tools or land but include renting an excavator to do the site prep and dig footings
Vinyl and drywall
The 30k to me, sounds possible ish, but also hard especially without a helper.
Personal example, I’ve gotten many materials for free. Including several hundred square feet of hardwood floor.
But thinking through some basics of just tools needed, and being cheap- and also with an assumption that you have time, and land with wood. And assuming you find cheap / used tools but not junk.
Decent chainsaw: $600-$1,000 Alaskan sawmill: $120
Stuff to setup basic kiln house: $600
6-12 months wait on wood.
Planer: $400-600 Jointer: $200-300
Impact, drill, sawzall, oscillating saw, jigsaw, circular: $700
Mitre saw and stand: $400 Table saw: $200
Basic plumbing tools, pex or copper : $200
But when I start to think through things aside from that: If you start to buy materials…
I think it could be done, if you did a cement or block foundation yourself, and did very basic construction.
But my just off the cuff guesstimates, assuming 1500 sq ft ranch house:
Lumber for framing: $4,100 Toilets: $240 Fasteners: $500 Drywall: $1,500 Piping, fittings: $1,000 Electrical: $2,500 (assuming electric stove, and electric dryer) HVAC: $8,000 …. I start to see a hard time doing it for 30k, but, I’m sure there’s a way!
Leftover materials from a construction site have to be disposed... Unless you are a builder who wants a house and owns a truck and some land... It is a weird house, but built with pretty nice materials. I bought it from the nephew of the builder.
Second, blocks and bricks are a massive f-ing waste of labor when working as an individual since you have to handle them so many times. It's worth forming up 10yd worth of stuff and paying for a truck.
You can probably get it done under $30k if you are super cheap and only buy materials at auction and buy used tools.
A concrete truck would not even make it down my road though... and many of the blocks were carried in small bundles by 4x4 truck. Building a road for heavy trucks would probably cost as much as the house.
Foundations, walls and footings are cake because they're all formed, you just gotta finish the top. It's the flatwork that has lots of finished area for volume and is very laborious
It is worth it when you have trees that will otherwise go to waste, and you can get high quality appearance / live edge / etc cuts out of it.
If I had a lot of trees that needed to be cleared, and lots of time, I might be tempted to try using a portable mill in the 25hp range.
Bricks as an individual are miserable to handle. Even with tongs it’s tedious. When I was younger, I once reclaimed tons of brick from a house that was being demolished. More recently from a driveway someone removed. Both times in small amounts(<1,000 bricks) for specific projects.
I do know of a story of a restaurant, local to me, that somehow ended up needing to reclaim all these bricks that had mortar still on them. They invited over everyone they knew, gave out free beer and wine, and lots of eye protection, hammers etc. I can’t imagine it was an easy project but they successfully reclaimed it to build part of their facility.
Slumlords do want cheap, but they need to get money from the bank and that means the bank will care about quality. Slumlords also don't want to lose everything if the building burns. Note however that quality to a bank and slumlord are things you cannot see and so their buildings often look dangerous while being safe. (I'm not saying all slumlords are perfect, just that their reputation is on a few graphic failures that often were 100 years ago)
Also slumlords are the guys doubling the number of units in an existing triple decker, not the guys building new stuff.
You will, of course, not be able to get insurance nor sell the house later on, among many other hurdles related to liability.
Not dissing the idea of DIY, to be clear. Just noting for the audience that freedom is power and power is responsibility.
New home prices are more than double that.
Even renting a home costs more than $1/sq ft per month in the area where we own our rental property.
Congratulations. You sound like you'd fit right in with my family. Most of us have been building things for a long time.
Note to anyone else who might want to give it a whirl - you don't have to buy all the tools. Most of them and all the larger tools are available to rent on long or short-term rental contracts at rates that will save you money if you're only gonna do the project once. The skills are the important things to own yourself.
Be open to learning and unafraid of the mantra that you either do it right or you do it over again until you have done it right.
It mostly seemed like something to benefit buyers given that, and I would assume that a company changing hands would mean the the purchasing party has already done their due diligence.
With that said, I've still got a few friends who enjoy living there, so to each their own I suppose.
The police were actually pretty decent, as was enforcement of other policies like "your grass is half an inch too long" type stuff that I'd heard of elsewhere. For the most part, if the house didn't look like a junkyard or have a lot of visible peeling paint, they didn't pester people overmuch.
In my opinion, most people are so obsessive about mitigating exceedingly rare downside risk that they throw their whole lives away, leaving nothing worth protecting.
The fridge may or may not make sense depending on bow long you think your new fridge will go until it fails. Having to buy a new fridge is expensive.
The price difference isn't as large now that prices have come down, but it's $0.7, and both are still just as busy as before.
How do you get $10k in credit card debt?!?
I've gotten up to $4k at one point, but I was using my credit card to pay my college's tuition payment plan.
> Marissa Huertas-Crespo, a 25-year-old financial analyst has done what she calls “low buys” over several years. Whenever she sees something she likes, she takes a screenshot of the item, puts it in a folder on her computer and—at the end of each month—deletes anything she hasn’t thought about. At the end of every quarter, she’ll allow herself to buy something from this folder with money she set aside in a savings account.
That's a smart strategy.