Living the Simplest Life: Shelter

My brother recently sent me a real estate link for the Eurelia Hall. It can be yours for $35,000. Built in 1909 it is 'set on a large allotment of 4047m2 with quiet surroundings,' according to the real estate blurb (the real estate blurb also claims that the hall is circa 1876, but with less than a minute's research I can confidently state it was opened with a concert, followed by dancing and supper, on November 27, 1909). My brother also sent a map of the quiet surroundings.

Yep. Quiet. Very quiet. Eurelia is nearly 300km north of Adelaide on the southern edge of the Flinders Ranges. Its population, from the 2016 census, is 14. And of course, as I contemplated the Eurelia Institute Hall which features 'both a kitchen and a supper room with cement floors', 

I did the mind experiment which provides so much entertainment for me as I look at other people's houses while I walk the dog. First, I see any spare land (such as lawns) as real estate begging to be covered with fruit trees and vegetable gardens with a chicken coop on the side. Just think how much gardening could be done on all the scrubby grass around that hall. Think pergolas covered with grape vines and citrus trees and shade houses for summer greens. And then I contemplated how it could be used for some interesting purpose.

I looked up the mortgage calculator and found that on a 30 year loan the repayments would be $133 per month. Or $31 per week. Imagine if you and two of your best friends signed up for a mortgage together. Suddenly your housing costs are $10 per week. I'm thinking the chances are good that there are plenty of opportunities to do some creative recycling with old building materials found along the streets and the tip at Eurelia. Three bijou little residences either in the hall itself or in the expansive supper room with a communal kitchen. Could you convert some space for tourist accommodation? You are close to the Flinders Ranges. Could you start a yoga/permaculture/macrobiotic cooking retreat? Could you carry on your consulting/writing/accounting career from Euralia - probably, if it has internet. It may not, of course. In which case you could start a social media detox meditation retreat and write a lot of letters. Or buy a small printing press and start your own magazine or quietly get on with your oil painting or make ceramics. Or become a jackaroo on one of the nearby properties.

Alright, so there are not many $32,000 properties out there for sale, although there may be more than you think.. but what are some other creative ways to find shelter that will save your pennies and let you live the life you want?

You can buy your childhood school bus and live in it.

You can swap work for shelter. Farms often have extra houses on their properties that aren't lived in and negotiations can sometimes be entered into. The builder who built my verandah lost his house in a divorce and lived for a while on a farm, renovating the little farm-hand house in exchange for rent. Years ago there was a farming family in my homeschool group who rented an empty house on their property very cheaply to another homeschooling family. It was a win-win situation - company for the isolated farm kids and their parents and cheap rent for a family temporarily out of work. 

You can build a $12 dome house on someone else's land. 

You can live in a bus called Edna and host free tea parties.

You can live in a bus for twenty five years to save up for land and then build a house for $1000. We don't need fancy houses. My favourite houses are small and handmade and furnished with things found and hand crafted. Paul bought his land twenty years ago and put up a tin shed to live in temporarily. He is still living in that shed. It is not fancy by any stretch of the imagination but it has everything he needs. Let me say this again. We don't need fancy houses. 

Maybe you already have a house. Maybe you are renting or paying off a mortgage and money is tight. What then? The historical solution is to add more people. Once upon a time anyone who had a spare room rented it out. Often if there wasn't a spare room, someone was shifted around until there was. We have an expectation that children should all have their own rooms, but sharing a room with a sibling or two is how most children grew up before the 80s. And after. My three oldest children shared a room until The Boy was eleven (we were renovating. There were always several rooms out of service). We just carved him out a sliver of a room of his own in time for the youngest to move out of our room and in with her sisters and all three of them shared a room for another couple of years. The youngest two shared a room for years after that. The funny thing was that as the eldest children got their own rooms they would often go back to the communal bedroom for sleepovers. They were lonely for bedtime camaraderie!

Taking in boarders comes in all sorts of forms. Maybe it's a friend or a cousin or Grandma, or the grandkids. Maybe it's a stranger who becomes a friend. Maybe it's a disaster and has to come to an end in a hurry. Maybe it works out so well that you have a permanent companion or lovely 'aunty' for your kids. When I was a teenager I boarded with family friends in Adelaide so I could go to high school while my parents worked in New Guinea. I went from having one sibling to having five and it was an opportunity for me to see how other families live. 

When I was a new mother, home alone with a baby in a new town I encountered two couples who had taken the student share house concept and extended it to family life. When both couples got pregnant at the same time they decided to rent a big house together so the new parents had each other for support and the babies had instant friends. I remember being so envious of this arrangement as I was finding new parenthood difficult in the extreme and very isolating.

Beyond the spare bedroom is the granny flat or converted garage. Lots of people have attached garages these days. They can be made into little flats. My brother rented a single garage for a couple of years. It had been turned into a tiny apartment and still had room for his motorbikes. It wasn't spacious but there was enough room for him and the cat. Another use for garages is to rent them out as storage units or parking spaces. I live near a hospital with limited parking and there is a house down the road with a double garage that is rented to hospital workers for parking.

One of my friends is a single mum with a mortgage to pay. She lives in a typical old Launceston house built into the side of a hill. It has three levels and she has made the upstairs and the downstairs into apartments to rent out and lives in the central original house space with her daughters. The downstairs was once a nasty old unused garage that looked like a concrete cave. It was the kind of place that might have had bats, but now it is a beautiful, functional, wheelchair-accessible space that is currently rented out but could become a place that my friend's elderly mother could move into, or that she could move into herself in the future when her kids move out. And now her house will produce an income far into the future.

I think this is one of the key ways to think about our houses. They are not just places that shelter us, they can be the hub of our productive lives. They can produce a harvest for us in so many ways. They can provide income when we rent parts of them out, they can grow food and create energy, they can house home businesses and be the place from which we make a living. This has always been the historical reality for houses - that they are the centre of economic activity. We are currently living in an odd anomaly where houses are for sleeping in and watching TV and people go out to work from them, and make money for other people instead of for themselves. But that is a story for another day..

My house is a little cottage on an ordinary street in a regional town. The backyard grows food for me, the back verandah dries my clothes. The woodshed stores all the heat that keeps us warm. I was able to buy the cottage outright when I sold a large house and bought a small one, and not having a mortgage gives me a lot of options. Since the third childling moved out in January I have a spare room for the first time in many years. If I still did have a mortgage I would be thinking very hard about renting out that room to pay it off. And think about this. There are a lot of people who need a small, cheap place to live. Offering up our collective spare rooms could be doing a lot of good in the world as well as paying off the mortgage. As it is I am hanging onto the spare room for now because for the first time I will have somewhere for the kiddos to stay when they come back to visit other than stranding them on the loungeroom floor or squashing them into the tiny study where there is room for a single mattress but nowhere to actually walk. Still, if I ever need the extra income, room mate it is.. 

What I do love about my little house is that it is the centre of the whole life of both of its occupants. I work from home and the kiddo is now a bona fide homeschooler. This is the centre of operations. School work, writing, gardening, cooking, preserving, chopping wood, making, repairing, creating and storing hundreds of precious jam jars. It all happens here..

I would love to hear the ways in which you stretch your house to make it earn a living for you, or creative ways that you have found shelter. Tell us what your friends and cousins and great-grandparents did to provide themselves with shelter as well. I want to hear all the stories!