critique my Zero to Hero homestead plan...

I've made some (very wordy) past posts on permies, possibly frustrating some people along the way, a part of my long-standing public brainstorming plan trying to learn about how many different ways can I get to what i'm terming the Minimum Acceptable Lifestyle after which i'm no longer in a crisis about what to do.

So instead of explaining and justifying my thinking in long paragraphs i'm going to try to be alot shorter and be more like listing bullet points for the moment.  I will try to be easier to read.


QUICKIE STARTING FACTS - aka Me at Zero:
- One Me in later 40's in not great physical condition (injuries and such), aka I wont be digging ditches for 8 hours, i'm finishing up undergrad college and hoping to do graduate college meaning I will mostly help on weekends or summers (or will part-time the grad college the first year or three to get the minimum built)
- One Wife-to-be in younger 40's less injured than me hoping to live fulltime on future land/work from home, able to build and help
- One Friend who may-or-may-not show up in 2-4 years if I have land, lots of useful skills
- Light duty pickup and a 4x8 folding trailer as my only 'heavy equipment' right now

STAGE ONE GOAL: Buy the most inexpensive starting land I can find in middle Minnesota and the quickest four-season liveable tiny house to get OUT of mortgage/apartment costs putting me further in debt every year the last 10+ years
- Total soft budget for land, house, equipment and EVERYTHING maybe $30-50,000
- Getting under $30k would be great, going over $50k is dubious for the first stage because I still have medical bills and grad school... but this gives you a feel for where i'm looking. (the serious low end of the market)
- Not even sure I will be ABLE to finance/mortgage anything between school loan debt and such, so it's going to be build and upgrade as I go.  I cant afford to borrow 200k to have professionals build my house knowing for sure I can pay it off - i'm already in that situation and drowning from unexpected bills/losses and dont want to risk losing everything again.
- Minimum ongoing costs because until or unless I make money post-grad school we'll be struggling with debt and bills for years to come

STAGE ONE PLANS:
- I'm trying to find some land from 1-11ish acres, mostly forested (both cheaper and starts with free wood), or/and some kind of "less desirable land" (anything goes - maybe too hilly to farm?) to drop $/acre down.  I think i'd also prefer "forested areas" to totally cleared wide open land.
- If I can get 11 acres or slightly above, I could qualify under agricultural zoning for property tax purposes the moment i'm raising food in a greenhouse, I think 11 is the minimum even if you can commercially raise food on a greenhouse successfully on much less land (like the guy who raises a million pounds a year in 3 acres of greenhouse in wisconson)

- Build an A-frame tiny house (20x24 feet planned) just off the road on a skiddable structure, or mobile home frame, or (other ideas??) to "temporarily postpone normal property tax increases for permanent structures".  Just off the road because I wont have the equipment to clear trees or put in a road to start.  Eventually this will be moved further inland when I can clear trees for a road and house clearing, then the tiny house becomes a guest structure while we try to build the 'real' main house.
- This will be off grid everything including electricity for now

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This is just the very first part.  I'll see if anyone has some starting comments before I post Stage Two.

However Stage Two could go in multiple directions.  Do we immediately start to raise food because the economy has gone to XXXX and food costs 3x more?  Do I have the time to build some long-wanted mechanical projects like a LifeTrac tractor https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/LifeTrac which enable all sorts of other powered-equipment projects?  Or do I upgrade what I have in place (putting in power next and so forth) since electrical tools in a workshop like for woodworking make things so much easier?


I'm willing to live a bit experimentally once I have the absolute minimum in place.  Ie - once a tiny house is the fallback shelter, I can experiment with things like Passive Annualized Geo Solar or Annualized Geo Solar https://greenershelter.org/index.php?pg=2 which I have wanted to since I first heard of the concept in the 90's.  Or wanting to fill earthbag structures with rice hulls for being both very lightweight and insulative value.  Or building my own earthscrew foundation machine for the LifeTrac using it first for solar panels (instead of the house) to see how it holds up.  If those projects for some reason fail miserably in the middle of winter, we can always move back into the tiny house.

I don't have a critique of your plan, more like commiseration.

- One Me in later 40's in not great physical condition (injuries and such), aka I wont be digging ditches for 8 hours, i'm finishing up undergrad college and hoping to do graduate college meaning I will mostly help on weekends or summers (or will part-time the grad college the first year or three to get the minimum built)  

I feel that lack of time. I am currently finishing my second AA degree. Starting school again made me wake up to all the time I was wasting. So I became really productive during my summers and weekends. But school still takes a lot of time that I could use for homesteading. So my motivation is to get school done now so I can learn masonry and other homesteading skills.

Would you consider taking a year off of school after you earn your Bachelor's to get a homestead set up halfway decently? If you have the drive, I think it could be beneficial to focus on the homestead for a period of time. And then go to grad school once you are out of the rental rat race.

All the money and time being put into education should bring in more money in the future, has that been factored into this?

Brian, I wish you well with your plans and dreams.
Can I rip your discussion to pieces and suggest you detail your wish list and budget alone.
It will be clearer to read and answer.
As for building tractors etc, I would concentrate on the land first
Then consider a small place built with earth perhaps and expanded as need, time and cash becomes available.
A frames homes need a lot of cut timber.

Jeremy VanGelder wrote:Would you consider taking a year off of school after you earn your Bachelor's to get a homestead set up halfway decently?

I'd like to, but those loans have to be paid instantly when I graduate and they've built up more than they should be due to things beyond my control which happened. (had to pay medical bills with college loans to not die when insurance told me to take a hike)

As it is right now i'm forced to try to do both at the same time even if it means half time grad school for two years instead of what would be more efficient full time one year to set things up and then full time grad school.  The situation is forcing my hand.  My lady and hopefully best friend are interested in trying to make the land work, if I can create a viable enough financial plan that lets us start super-cheap and grow as we go.  That's why i've been refining The Plan for years.

Don Fini wrote:All the money and time being put into education should bring in more money in the future, has that been factored into this?

__SHOULD__.  :)  This is the biggest reason for wanting to postpone as much work as possible.  My female companion already graduated with two degrees and cant find a job years later but we still have school loans, and our cities are turning into imploding s___holes.  I dont believe that I can go through grad school, work for a few years, put away enough savings, and THEN buy land, while still having time to learn how to grow food - before I need to use some of that food because it's scarce on the shelves rich or not.  I have lost that basic faith in society by this point.

John C Daley wrote:Brian, I wish you well with your plans and dreams.
Can I rip your discussion to pieces and suggest you detail your wish list and budget alone.
It will be clearer to read and answer.
As for building tractors etc, I would concentrate on the land first
Then consider a small place built with earth perhaps and expanded as need, time and cash becomes available.
A frames homes need a lot of cut timber.

I haven't hammered in an exact budget in terms of figures yet because i'm aware that everything i've wanted to do even on the cheap end costs too much.  :-/  It's why all my conversations devolve into "but how can I make this $5000 section of road cost $2500 instead?" and I keep chipping away at every line-item cost that I can see to drive the total down further - foundation, roof, driveway, entrance road, postponing needing heavy equipment, postponing my preference for screw pile foundation, going with a vinyl soft sided arch building instead of a steel quonset, etc.

Problems like fear of theft are a random occurance that also will suck up money.

My current order of action is hoping to get a used sawmill, cut timber on the land, and use that to build an A-frame tiny house on skids as close to the road as possible standing on the lowest cost parking area I can rig up.

To stick a sealand container on site to store tools and more valuable materials I hope wont be insta stolen.

Then everything else kind of comes after that - outdoor chemical toilet, haul in water when I come from town in blue water camping cubes (I already lived that way when my house had no running water for 7 years after pipes froze and I couldn't afford to fix it), solar panel for a laptop for girlfriend to work.  I can't seem to make this project any simpler or lower in cost no matter what I do.

I started this plan ten years ago and have managed to keep lowering line by line expected minimum costs but I may have finally hit the absolute lowest bottom that doesn't involve thousands of hours of extra time defeating the point since the house has to go up faster, not take months of filling earthbags or ramming earth into handbuilt molds.

I have no idea what land cost are there but building a small cabin type structure is pretty cheap. But the sooner you start the cheaper it will be as everything constantly going up in price. Where I’m at land barely came down from the astronomical prices when interest was low. Well now both price and interest are absurd.

If waiting for a perfect plan you will never get started as something always can change. As you said this has been in plan mode for 10 years. Break it down to basics and get started.

1 land
2 cabin
3 storage container (swap with 2 if you build structure yourself)
4 some sort of shower contraption / compost toilet

You mentioned land with trees to sawmill. This will overwhelm you and if good lumber trees it will break the budget. Buy your lumber. Then you can start right away. With 2-3 sets of hands even if not experienced builders a small cabin can go up in no time. Less than a week easy.

A frame already cramps the side walls. I would build a regular cabin. While it’s cheaper to build my 10x20 storage shed with metal roof /siding was like 5400$. And lots of times you can find on marketplace or Craigslist etc for half price maybe only 2-3 years old.  Sometimes spending a little more saves you money in the end. Or it might save you a little sanity to just know it’s done and you can focus on the other aspects without worrying about having a roof over your head.

Long winded but wish you luck. Take that first step and keep it rolling

Joe Hallmark wrote:I have no idea what land cost are there but building a small cabin type structure is pretty cheap.

If waiting for a perfect plan you will never get started as something always can change. As you said this has been in plan mode for 10 years.

Well it hasn't been waiting for a perfect plan, it's been waiting for the endless life crises to stop like cancer and covid and injuries that disabled me a year at a time or taking care of my disabled father until he died and similar.  That gave me down time so I went back to thinking and planning.  Will I even live long enough to do this or am I still even able to after physical issues pile up?  I honestly don't know.  I just know I either get busy trying to live or give up and die, so my only option has been "refine the plan further, try to make each thing cheaper, and figure out the easiest, first step you can take to reduce the barrier to entry".

I'll reconsider the no-sawmill option, I guess one reason I like the A-frame is no conventional roofing.  Your big costs with any conventional house are the roofing and foundation far more than the walls.  Two people can pull up the A-frame sections with ropes and connect things at the top with a simple ladder, I dont need a crane, i'm not buying roof trusses to have to balance on things or renting scaffolding, it's about reducing my needs for additional things to rent or buy.  A-frames are also really strong against things like stiff winds and dont accumulate roof snow.

It's just like my love for screw piles - but it costs money to rent a machine and haul it to the middle of nowhere and engineering experience to design a DIY one so I re-opened consideration of foundation options and probably like the mechanical concrete idea stacked into piers best if it's only for a tiny house.

The biggest issue has been that i've had lots of ideas to refine the "overall multistage multi year plan" but figuring out how to make that first step as low/inexpensive as possible, and the followup necessary steps also possible has been my problem.  (until i'm out of my current house there's no money freed to even take it, but i'd been kept from selling or leaving due to medical care needed multiple times a week in the city and other issues but maybe thats finally clearing up now we'll see)  Once I stop paying monthly and yearly bills of mortgage and property tax and house insurance that frees me from the treadmill to nowhere so I can save up for materials and tools to make the next steps easier.

Roofing is not expensive for a cabin. Building trusses out of 2x4 is easy and cheap. Assuming we are talking cabin size and not a house. Painted metal roofing is about 2.15 a foot for 3 ft wide sheets well 3’ when you put overlap. Plain is maybe .20c cheaper. And foundation is cheap for that too. Small buildings dong need huge rafters or footing. Then a few concrete blocks.

How large do you want this temp building?

What is plan to get out of current house?

Joe Hallmark wrote:Roofing is not expensive for a cabin. Building trusses out of 2x4 is easy and cheap. Assuming we are talking cabin size and not a house. Painted metal roofing is about 2.15 a foot for 3 ft wide sheets well 3’ when you put overlap. Plain is maybe .20c cheaper. And foundation is cheap for that too. Small buildings dong need huge rafters or footing. Then a few concrete blocks.

How large do you want this temp building?

I was wanting something like 20ft wide by 30ft long for an A-frame since less than 600sq ft I might as well just live in a sealand container or semi truck trailer and more doesnt count as a tiny house.  Remember this is meant for 3 people and at that width you also have room for a half height loft for sleeping.  Honestly if I don't mind a 7.5 foot wide room (after 6in insulation on each side) that's faster just being container/trailer and might well be my first up temporary house until I get the A-frame built.  The A-frame is meant to be what i'd consider the first liveable size and for when the narrow room starts to get to me - maybe even start at 20x20 feet instead and later stretch to 20x30 or 20x40 ultimately.  It's about the width where some kind of crane seems necessary for roofing and some kind of foundation below frost heave seems necessary, and where working without scaffolding seems real difficult.  Those are all extra expenses you can avoid with an A-frame.

I've seen too many people build truly tiny houses and go a bit batty after a few years realizing too tiny is too tiny.  600sq ft I think I could live in a decade or more Walden style and not feel cramped - foundations and roofs for that on a cube shaped building dont' have to be "expensive" but they arent as cheap as the stick built walls or something like rammed earth walls or earthbag walls or if you have free straw strawbale walls.  But all those alternative building methods with free or near free walls still end up needing some kind of roof and some kind of foundation whose extra cost more than offsets the money saved by 'free' walls in all the other designs i've looked at, often costing more than a normal stick built house somehow by the end of it.

Joe Hallmark wrote:What is plan to get out of current house?

The moment i'm medically stable in a sustainable way we can leave the city because going from a house to an apartment in the city isn't an improvement of condition tho it will free up equity and let us figure out where we are financially.  Meanwhile i'm chipping away at college classes I need to take anyways.

I'm 56, and recently bought 10 acres to retire to. I'd like to provide some advice/tips that may help:

-Don't wait for the 'perfect' property. You will age out of this being a possibility before you do. There is always going to be some sort of negative when you're looking for land, based on trying to do so for 10 years. Price, utilities, taxes, distance from town, weather, etc. Instead, focus on what the most critical TO YOU needs are. Do you want a place 30 minutes from the nearest town of 10,000 people? Can you work there, or are you going to have to actually drive 1+ hours to work every day? Are you in poor health? How far is the nearest hospital, and how often will you need to go to the doctor?

-Determine what cheap means to you. To me, 5,000 an acre was my top dollar, and it required several things already be present. If you don't care about water or electric, maybe your budget is 2k an acre. If you're a millionaire, maybe 50k an acre is a good price.

-Once you know your, say, top 3 needs are, and what your top dollar for that is, it makes it a lot easier to narrow down your search.

-For me, it was critical for it to not be land-locked, that it have the potential to have an address, have ready access to water, not have code enforcement, and be within 30 minutes of a hospital.

-A lot of people think you can only get a land loan. If you go through a local bank, you'll find you can get a short mortgage even for empty land. I got a 10 year mortgage for 40k.

-Do not discount the value of having some sort of water and electricity on the property. You'll be shocked to discover how often you need water for something besides drinking. Setting up a misting station, mixing concrete, etc. Having a power pole somewhere, preferably with an outlet or two on it is a huge help, and it gives you a point from which to plan. It's at least 2k to have a pole installed otherwise. Even if you plan to use solar, power at the start let's you get a lot more done till you're ready.

-When figuring out how long something will take to do, be very conservative, then double that time. Buying lumber, putting in piers, building a shed, removing a stump; everything will take a lot longer than you think it will.

-Prepare for pain. In my head I think "okay, now I just need to put the sides on my shed, then if I have time I'll start on the roof". About the 10th panel, after lugging it over, scooching it up the wall, holding it with one hand while aiming the nail gun and attaching it, your arms will feel like jelly and your legs will be shaking. In your head the simple activities discounts the effects of holding a heavy nail gun up, or the impact of climbing a ladder up and down dozens of times. Get in the best shape you can before you start.

-Figure out your minimum shelter and aim for that first. If your minimum is the A-frame, that means you won't be sleeping there till it's built. Every time you're going to work on it you'll need to plan around the weather, give up for the day if it rains/snows, etc. For example, my 'minimum' is a 16x16 shed I'm stick building. The logic is that it gives us a functional building later, and we could sleep in it overnight/during rain showers, etc. Is it the home I always wanted to build? No, but it gives us something to work from. And if I happened to lose my job? I'm good, I can make that work. I have minimal needs. On the other hand I've got a buddy that's high maintenance. His minimum is a 2000 sf house, built by a contractor. He's also got hundreds of thousands of dollars, so that works for him.

I am with Joe on the cabin VS A frame
And Marks comments are 'spot on'.
A 600 sq ft starting size may be absurd, I have written extensively about building in stages that work for you and change the use of the rooms as you move ahead.
I start with a 10 x 10 foot room that is a bedroom / lounge with a cooking corner.
Then add a bathroom with a bath / shower / etc.
Add and extension to the initial room that may be the final bedroom location.
Next work on a formal kitchen area.
Prior to building each new part, you may construct the roof initially to give you something to work and store things under.
If you use 10 ft ceilings its will be great when its finished and everypart can be built by one person, thats what I have done.
A frames are not a single person build.
The roof area they use is very high compared with a cabin style.
And they cannot be built in stages/

Maybe dream of the A frame, but live in a cabin!