The Nude Prudes Guide to Property Development
While Effie Shins-Fyve is busy growing a future laborer, Charlotte Collins and Rubella Watling are stumbling to the finish line of their years long house-building project (two circumstances which help to explain the Prudes uncharacteristic reticence during the past several months). This week, they would like to take you on their journey, and share some hard-earned wisdom.
Summer is drawing to a close, and you’ve found that pickling a few jars of cucumbers has not filled the aching void in your heart. Upon closer inspection, you will realize that this void is precisely the size and shape of a small log-cabin—you’ve officially caught the homesteading bug.
You’re ready for the next step—in fact, you’re raring for the next step. This is Ma Ingalls’ territory, but unlike Ma, there’s no resigned sigh from you when Pa’s “wandering foot gets to itching”— you’re popping out of the lean-to of routine with the luggage of adventure in tow, and urging on the kiddos of hesitation and doubt with the cattle prod of determination. If Pa’s wandering foot hadn’t got to itching, you’d be tickling it with a goose feather, because he can’t wander far or fast enough for your pioneering dreams.
But where to begin?
Lucky for you, the Nude Prudes are in the throes—ahem, process—of establishing our very own homestead, and we’ve got all the “tips and tricks” to get you settled faster than you can say “catastrophe insurance.” So sharpen that hatchet, buy an extra box of band-aids, and get ready to put the “prair” in prairie—only God can help you now.
The Perfect Plot
It can be hard to choose the perfect site for your Little House. Do you want a creek, or a tree-line? Are you more interested in gardens, or goat sheds? How is the drainage? The overall soil quality?
These are big questions, but we humbly suggest that you take a very different set of requirements into account: above all, you want a land with a story—ideally an ongoing and highly toxic family drama that will embroil you in months of diplomatic negotiations generally reserved for Middle Eastern peace talks.
If your first meeting with the landowner involves a long and partially inarticulate yarn about the ghosts in his basement, forget about any of your hesitations and latch onto this acreage like a deer tick with a tapeworm. The stories that you will have to tell when the deed is finally in your name—even if it takes seven years to get there—are going to be worth their weight in gold.
The Homestead
Every homestead needs a home, and every genuine homesteader knows—you’ve gotta build that sucker yourself. This home isn’t about “habitability” or “square corners” or “structural soundness.” It’s about doing it. It’s about rolling up those sleeves, it’s about elbow grease. It’s about resilience, the pioneer spirit, and most importantly—the lessons you learn along the way.
The first lesson you will likely learn is: You are not capable of building a house. The second is probably: Neither is anyone you know. Even the ones that say they are… especially the ones that say they are.
That’s ok, because there’s no adventure to compare with learning from your mistakes. Understanding the order of operations is going to be crucial.
For us, this critical lesson came home to roost, along with a large flock of tenacious barn-swallows, when our building crew removed our existing roof hours before a week-long rainstorm. The resulting buckled planks and plywood sheets were frustrating, but the biggest lesson we took away was that Things Can Always Get Worse, a poignant truth which was strikingly illustrated by the same building crew knocking down our chimney. The point is, fits of blind rage and abject despair are as time-honored an element of the Pioneer Way as “Oh Susanna,” barn-raising, and famine.
Pinching Pennies
When it comes to thrift, there’s a little saying we like to use: “a penny saved is a penny you will inevitably spend later, after having bid a fond farewell to many hours of your valuable time.” This does not mean you shouldn’t save pennies—we love to save pennies. It just means you should be realistic about what a penny is: a useless copper circle that’s going to end up on the bottom of your purse, crusted with dried gum and mysterious purse crumbs. If you’re saving pennies, it’s strictly as a hobby. It has no bearing whatsoever on the final price tag of your particular black hole.
That being said, there are many non-monetary benefits to be gleaned from the process of Doing It Yourself, so don’t shy away from New Challenges.
One of our “pet projects” during our home renovation was refurbishing a [free!] set of seven steel-framed windows. It was a simple but infinitely enriching craftsman’s journey, from the first magical moment of smashing the glass out, to sanding the frames down, re-sanding the frames down after leaving them out in the rain, moving that gorgeous ten-ton set of steel-framed windows into the barn, priming the frames, moving them into a heated shed after the first coat of primer froze, sanding and re-priming the frames, painting the frames, getting the glass cut, getting the glass re-cut after the first measurements were wrong, cutting half of the glass ourselves when the second measurements were wrong, glazing the panes, removing half the glaze, painting the glaze, installing the windows, and at long last, standing in silence, gazing out at the beautiful view and wondering…
“Did we just install these upside down?”
We’ll leave the answer to your imagination.
In Conclusion
There is one thing we cannot stress enough: lunging at the speaker with a crowbar is a perfectly acceptable response to the question “when will you guys be moving in?” The other option is to sob uncontrollably into your t-shirt, and as that will result in your getting fiberglass shards and unidentified building debris up your nose, we don’t recommend it. Go for the lunge. It will be cathartic, if ultimately useless.
Homesteading is not easy, but no one said it would be. However starry your eyes as you read about the Ingalls’ hijinks, you knew there were blizzards and cyclones and scarlet fever in there. You knew it wasn’t all Christmas candy and woolen mittens and fresh-churned butter, but you chose it anyway.
And why did you choose it?
Because you are an idiot.
No, we’re kidding. It’s because there really is something to be learned from a veggie that you’ve grown yourself, that you’ll never learn when you grab a bag of tomatoes from the store. And there really is something amazing about standing in a space that you’ve helped to create, even if all the windows are upside-down. And all the sunburns and scrapes and blisters and splinters won’t matter one wit when you’re living there, in your very own house, on your very own land, even if you’re an octogenarian at that point.
So pull yourselves up by those bootstraps—don’t be surprised when they snap—and get after it.
—CC