For young people or energetic middle age folks who are worried about getting a good job or perhaps are unemployed you might consider moving to a rural area with cheap land prices and start to do what you can yourselves. I've wanted to write this diary for a long time as it might be helpful for those that just can't see themselves making it in the city, so to speak in these sucky economic times. I offer my experience below maybe inspiring someone. (or scaring)
In 1971 I was in my third year of college and the draft was about to end. I had particiapated in many anti-war demonstrations and the world just seemed crazy to me. I wanted no part of the system and just wanted to live as self sufficiently as possible out in the woods where I could do what I wanted. The song Wooden Ships at the time seemed to speak to me about just getting away from the madness and the line "You don't need us" was how I felt my country felt about me. After the Kent State shootings not only did I feel unwanted, I felt most of the country wanted me dead. While in college I had joined the outing club which went on many hiking/camping trips sometimes in the middle of winter. With the right gear I learned I could survive almost anywhere.
So in 1973 my brother in law in Michigan had bought an abandoned house and 70 acres in Maine sight unseen as the person who had inherited it was selling it for $7000. My BIL asked me to go check it out and said I could stay there for free. After a scouting trip I dropped out of college and loaded up my vw van with canned goods and little propane tanks and tools that I thought I might need. This was in February and Maine winters are long. To give you an idea of how numb I was, on the first trip up with my sister's boyfriend we discovered there was a kitchen wood cookstove in the kitchen. I looked all over for the plug when my companion said he thought it burned wood. All my years in suburbia I never imagined that there was such a thing.
After staying there for a couple of years surviving on gov. surplus food and some income from playing in a band, I and my future wife decided we wanted our own place so we went back to Ct. and worked minimum wage jobs living with our parents and banking almost everything. After a year of that we returned to Maine, camping out all summer and then caretaking a place for the winter. Between the two of us we were getting about 500 dollars a month unemployment and were able to bank most of it. After looking all winter for land at 100 dollars an acre (only clear cut land was available at this price) we finally broke down and bought about 40 acres for about $300 an acre, land with 40 year old trees. It is crap farmland, lots of boulders and very little flat land but within a few years we had most of our money back selling trees. (There's plenty left) We paid most of it in cash with the seller financing the rest for 3 years. I got a job 25 miles away in a lumberyard and the spouse got one in a school office. I also must mention that Maine was full of refugees from the madness and the system at the time. I guess we were called back to the landers or pioneers and outerstaters, and probably some less flattering terms.
I'm sorry if I've spent too much time with the context as now ain't then. But I thought some folks might benefit from knowing what we did next. I had bought a used chainsaw and started hacking a hole in the woods and burning brush. We hired a back hole to did a small hole for a basement 8 ft by 14ft. We had a small dump truckload of gravel dumped near the hole and using a small cement mixer and wheelbarrow the spouse and I poured a concrete footing and then made the cellar out of concrete blocks. The house was 14ft by 20 ft on top of the cellar and wooden posts (not a good idea but free). We bought the framing lumber from a sawmill, roughcut, again not a good idea but cheap. I got a modest discount from the lumberyard so used plywood for the sheathing. The power company installed 2 poles and ran the wires for free, hooking up to a meter box with the main switch and outlet on a tree so we had power! We lived in a tent while doing this and then briefly caretook in the fall and moved in our house on Halloween. We had plastic on all the windows and no siding on the house. A friend had loaned us an enormous homemade wood stove made out of watertanks. So we were very cosy. We had a homemade wooden ladder to the 2nd story where our bedroom was, insulated but no sheetrock or anything. I still remember when the wind blew the plastic in the windows would go whap whap whap. We had a sink that drained into a spackle bucket and the water we carried in buckets from a dug well we had put in that went dry very early and filled up sometimes very late. We lugged our water in 2 and 1/2 gal. pails. We had a small propane stove and thats what we used to heat the water. Too bathe we would go outside naked and dump some of the heated water over us, soap and scrub and then rinse with the rest of the bucket. Even though it would sometimes be zero or below I don't remember this being so bad, in fact that last pouring of hot water was wonderful. At first we had just a wooden box with a spackle bucket in it for a toilet but by the time we moved in I had dug a hole and built an outhouse over it. In the winter we kept the toilet seat in the house and carried it out. The pile in the outhouse would freeze so occasionally it had to be knocked down with a stick. We did our laundry in a laundromat 20 miles away. We were too cheap, or didn't know any better to have the 1/4 mile driveway plowed. When the snow was too deep we parked our junk car out by the road and used a tobaggon to carry in our laundry and supplies. The neighbors remarked how they could tell spring was coming as our car receded down the driveway
That first winter I cut some big pine trees and hired a neighbor to use his tree skidder to yank them out of the woods. Then I paid to deliver them to a sawmill and in the spring. I had huge pile of lumber, stickered to dry. I believe the cost was less than 10cents a board ft. I had quit my job the previous fall to work on the house. I was given some defective Anderson Window sashes and made my own window frames using directions from a book. By the next spring I had gotten a little smarter and poured concrete posts for the next addition, a 16 by 20 ft piece with a 10 by 14 ft piece joined to the original structure. A neighbor showed me how to,and helped me build a chimney out of concrete lifts and flue tiles and brick where it went through the roof. We got rid of the loaner behemouth stove and got a small ashly for 69 bucks that all the back to the landers had. That second winter was much better with glass in most of the windows and more space even though the new space was unheated and uninsulated. It gave us room to build stairs to the 2nd floor instead of the ladder in the kitchen. The sink had a drainpipe into a ditch outside and we had a claw foot cast iron tub that we'd bought for 10 bucks hooked up to a drain too, though no running water yet. Since the well went dry in the summer we had a small gasoline pump by a spring 600 ft away that managed a trickle of water to fill a garbage pail. When the well didn't fill up in the fall that meant draining the water pump in the evening and filling it back up in the morning.
Other big milestones over the years were a deep well and plumbing. Our septic system was put in very cheaply as it was easy to bypass plumbing permits in our small little town. 32 years, 7 additions later, one son raised and sent to college, over 50 windows (handmade ones replaced), over 25 roof lines, our 95 percent finished house is really nice all 2500 sq. ft. with 1500 sq. ft of sheds, garage, and porches.
I started working with friends doing carpentry and learned the trade and the spouse went back to school and earned a teaching degree. My best year I netted 35000 (very rare by a long shot) and because of health issues my wife only has 17years teaching over the past 32 years.
This experience isn't that unusual and people who live in rural areas think nothing of it. A lot of the back to the landers were much more serious than us, raising their own farm animals and huge gardens, etc.. When suburbia was all I knew, this way of living was completely foreign to me. So even though the times are different and everything is much more expensive it's still doable today. Local people often start out with a couple of acres and a house trailer, but if you can rough it for awhile you'll save by building yourself and the value of trailers go down every year. If you are willing to work hard, you won't get rich but work is available. Right now, even though construction is way down people always need roofs replaced. I don't recommend that for any duration, but if you're young and strong with half a brain you'll find work. A lot of it has to do with simply sticking to it and becoming part of the community over time. Honesty will do wonders.
Yes it would have made more sense to build our house at once with a mortgage, we never had the security of a steady income. You have no idea how safe it feels when you don't have much money but own your own place.
This model is the opposite of training for a career and then going where the jobs are, which works well when the economy doesn't suck. Instead, you decide where you can live for cheap and figure out the job once you're there. I also must add that while our town has 400 people we are by no means in the middle of nowhere. We're 30 miles from the capital and 20 mile from the coast (very wealthy mostly)
I do miss my outhouse. I saw so many stars back then.