Website owner: James Miller
Housing. It just costs too much. How can you cut the housing component of your cost of living? How much house do you really need? I live in a 2000 square foot house. I estimate that I spend 80% of my time in my library which measures 11 feet by 20 feet and about 20% of my time in our kitchen/dining area which measures 8 feet by 20 feet. That totals to 380 square feet of space that I use. The rest of the house is furnished but unused (I sleep on a mat on the floor and can sleep anywhere). So I actually use about 20% of my house but furnish, heat and air condition the entire house. What a waste! We have a 16 foot by 24 foot cabin on a ridgetop in the mountains that I built in 1999 for around $10,000. The usable floor space there (excluding closets) is around 320 square feet. That is ample for my wife and I. I could be comfortable living in it year around. It is well insulated and costs very little to heat. Septic systems. They just cost too much. A septic system at our cabin would probably cost nearly as much as the cabin. What can you do? Well, there are pit latrines, outhouses and composting toilets. Water wells. They just cost too much. In the area of our cabin the cost of drilling wells is such that it would probably cost us $12,000 at least to put in a well. More than the cost of the cabin. And then the water would probably be hard and not taste very good. What can you do? How about collecting water from the roof and running it into an underground tank? It is done. In days past it was done commonly. You can treat the water by chlorine or some other means for consumption. July 2011
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