I’m not tied to the idea of “nice” or “really cheap”.
It’s more like I am interested in looking over my options for cheapest place that I can own and not rent that are within an hour’s drive of a decent poker room that I wouldn’t mind playing in for 25% of the year. I’m going over the thoughts I have had in the past, not describing my current thinking, so I am walking through a bunch of options that I considered.
Big one is $1.7M.
If I can spend that much for a motorhome, I’d want something like this one that has a car garage:
The natural turn from thinking about RVs goes to tiny houses. I think of them as artisanal mobile homes or hipster mobile homes. I’ve watched YouTube videos with tiny house tours and I haven’t been super-impressed with either the homes or the people who build them.
Tiny houses come in two main flavors: a THOW, or tiny house on wheels, and a tiny house on foundation. Tiny houses have the same problems as mobile homes. If it’s on wheels, you have a problem finding a place to park it. If it’s on a foundation, not everywhere will let you build one. Many of the locations I have looked at have zoning where a tiny house is under the minimum size allowed.
One place where tiny houses make sense is as an accessory dwelling unit. Some people have downsized by moving into an ADU on their property and renting out the main house. I could consider buying a cheap house to rent out while building a tiny house for myself in the back, but I don’t relish the idea of being a landlord.
When I say cheap house, I mean that I was looking at sub-$50K homes. A lots of those are fixer-uppers, often with boarded-up windows.
Building a tiny house just doesn’t seem to make financial sense in most places, partly because of regulations that are written to protect the property values of existing homeowners. A tiny house that is a third of the size of a regular house doesn’t cost a third of the price of a regular house. It also makes more sense if you have some DIY ability, which I do not.
I have no desire to live in a McMansion, but tiny houses seem a bit too small to me. However, there’s a move towards friendlier regulations that will allow more people to build tiny homes on lots that they own. Maybe, in a few years when I am ready to buy property, it might make more sense to invest in a tiny house.
They are surprisingly expensive and don’t have bathrooms.
NBZ,
Why do you play poker for a living?
Because some bad decisions in my life have made it a job of last resort. And I’ve found out that I am decent at it and I am actually happy while playing. And it’s not because I’m some degen who just wants to gamble. I am a rather tight player who gambles very little outside of poker.
There are mental health issues which I won’t get into, but playing poker makes me feel like a functional human being. Live poker is one of the few things that has motivated me to get out of bed on a regular basis. It’s something I sorely missed right now.
The natural progression from tiny homes is to container homes. Some container homes are tiny homes, but some are giant and not very cheap. I’m not interested in something like this:
But the idea of a more minimalist container home appeals to me.
Here is a general contractor with a container home YouTube channel who built a house in a 40-foot shipping container for under $20,000.
Of course, that’s just material and doesn’t include the free labor he poured into it. Nor does it include the exterior, foundation, or site work.
I have this idea for a partly-finished container home where half of it would be livable right away and the other half would be taken care of a few years later, but I haven’t seen anyone do something like it yet, so I am wondering how workable it would be. I have a few ideas for a shipping container home and I don’t see people doing them, so I wonder if other people find them unappealing or if they simply aren’t practical.
You said you are not very handy, right? I wouldn’t buy a home that needs a lot of work, or probably any home at all, in that case.
I’m willing to learn. Conceptually, I understand why stuff works, but I have poor eye-hand coordination. I can assemble furniture according to the instructions but I would never use an electric saw or do any welding.
I’m committed to the idea that I want to own something eventually and not be beholden to any landlord. The idea of a minimalist home with no more moving parts than necessary appeals to me.
If I were going to be building a container home, I would not be doing any of the work myself, but I think this info is interesting for someone like @MysteryConman, who expressed interest in putting a container home on some land.
If I can’t beat any price from an established container home builder I’ll give you $100, but you also have to publish and verify your 2p2 account.
My dream sequence is: buy bare land, then park an RV on it, then drop a double wide shipping container on it, then build out a geodesic dome home. All while making a permaculture set up happen. (5 year plan)
At this time my GF dislikes/disagrees with every step of the plan. I have a lot of convincing to do.
I understand her disagreement because my biggest handyman experience is a kitchen remodel and a 2000 sf flooring install. Which were decent sized projects, but not close to the level of what I would want to accomplish. And I don’t own any tools anymore…
Zikzak might talk you out of container homes.
Log cabin? Adobe?
If I could build a huge house, I had this idea for a geodesic dome in the middle with shipping containers jutting out like petals.
I’ve also considered a geodesic barndominium. To get around minimum size requirements, some people have built tiny houses inside a barn or similar structure. What if you build a geodesic dome large enough to have a shipping container home inside? You can put a deck on top of the containers for a second story. You don’t have to prep the outer walls of the containers to be resilient against weather.
I should look more into geodesic dome houses given how they can withstand hurricanes and my interest in moving to Florida.
Adobe seems to require a drier climate and log cabins seem to be more expensive than other homes. I’ve been looking at container homes within the context of building a cheap, minimalist house in specifically Florida.
If @zikzak has better ideas, I am all ears.
I’m not dead set on the container step of my plan. I imagined it being a way to better bridge the gap from RV living on bare land until the geodesic dome is completed. My buddy who is a contractor up in SLO really took a dump all over that part of my idea(double wide container).
My other friend who really incepted the geodesic dome and permaculture ideas into my head envisions a big ass geodesic dome that would be more suitable for a communal-type living space. In theory it sounds great, but in reality is probably opening up another can of cats that need herding.
I’m not enthusiastic about the double wide part of your plan. Cutting out that much of the container wall requires some additional structural support that takes away from the savings of using containers.
I’m also not sure why you need the container step if you plan on having a geodesic dome home in five years, unless you have a planned use for the structure after the dome is finished.
Here’s the YouTube channel of a guy who built a container home with unconnected containers.
My idea was to do something like that with multiple containers instead of stacking them, but orient them so that they could be connected with a non-container structure. This could either be a covered breezeway similar to a dogtrot style house or an enclosed patio area between the two. This would make more sense in a place that doesn’t get snow.
I was thinking I could get two 40-foot containers in parallel and cover at least part of the space between them. I would build out one container with a full kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom. The other would be used temporarily as a warehouse and I would eventually finish it out later once I decided if it would be better as additional bedrooms, an office, or maybe an AirBnB-type rental place.
Not following this thread so not real clear what’s going on. The only reason you should (try and fail to) build a home out of a shipping container is because you really want to build a home out of a shipping container. And I really mean you, doing all the work, because building homes out of shipping containers is something you have already proven to yourself is exactly how you enjoy spending lots and lots of your time and you want more. You will also need quite a bit of money. Yes, I know you probably saw a uToob and read some blogs that led you to think otherwise. Don’t believe it.
Wanting a small, inexpensive home isn’t a new thing. There’s already a huge market for it, and has been for many decades. They’re called mobile homes. That’s what the people who need to work within real world finances and practicalities have come up with.
Log cabins are expensive. Stacking entire logs horizontally is also incredibly wasteful and poorly performing way to build with wood.
idk anything about adobe, but it’s probably a terrible way to build too.
Cliffs from a cynical builder: All these new age hippy alternative building methods have been around for years and years. There’s a reason absolutely none of them have ever caught on.
