I’ve considered the idea of a cheap house. This is what a $25,000 house looks like. It’s less than 30 minutes from one small poker room, about an hour from at least three decent rooms, and two hours from two very good rooms. It’s 20 minutes from the nearest big-chain grocery store.
Of course…
Calling all hunters!! Put your hunting cabin or mobile here! Land value only. Structure not sound. Has well and septic for new build or mobile to be placed. Cash only!
I’ve considered the idea of getting a place like this and building a new home. I’d have to do some research on this buying a $4000 lot where I would have to clear trees and install a well and septic. I’m not enthusiastic about the idea of living in a subdivision with unpaved roads and I wonder what cell phone coverage and broadband availability look like in that kind of place.
Thing about buying a dilapidated house is that you will have less of a legal problem parking a travel trailer or RV there than on bare land. And utilities will be in place. You can run an AC and an electric heater.
Fix up one bathroom in the house first.
And you can still camp out in casino parking lots if you travel and work.
This house is listed at $21,900. Three bedroom, three bath, zoned for two families. Located in a city. Built in 1865. Sold for $950 two years ago. “Handyman special”. No internal pics.
It’s in a high-crime neighborhood which used to be predominantly white working class Catholic (and still is barely majority white), but has become increasingly racially diverse. This has led to racial tension as non-rich whites (median income in the neighborhood is around 30K) resent the intrusion of non-whites.
Semi-grunch: A little more than five years ago I did something similar to what you are talking about. I bought six acres in upstate NY for about $17k, in a town with no zoning laws. One option I considered–and still do sometimes–is using it to park and live out of an RV.
What I wound up doing is buying a 220-square foot cabin frame, which was delivered to a gravel pad I had constructed. I finished the cabin (floor, ceiling, insulation and walls), installed a wood stove, small solar system, and lived there.
With the addition of a small RV or van, you could do something similar and still be mobile. There was a fairly large 22 thread on this.
I lived out of a Dodge caravan minivan for a while. I found this awesome for a mobile lifestyle, but to do it semi-permanently you’d want something a little larger I imagine.
The nice thing about rural, wooded areas, is once you’re 300+ feet back from the road no one can see anything. And a non-attached structure wont alter property values, so my taxes on it are still below $600/year.
Skipping to the end, though: After five years I wanted more infrastructure, a larger dating pool and easier winters, and bought an old farmhouse. Now I’m broke.
Good luck, OP. I’m a huge fan of alternative living setups.
For your desire for more infrastructure, what specific things did you miss? I’m mostly concerned about having decent internet and being able to shop for groceries without it being a long-haul. Am I missing anything?
Do you enjoy cooking? Small/makeshift kitchens will definitely get the job done. I spent years cooking on two gas burners, sometimes in or on a wood stove, and ocassionally using a Coleman camp oven. But it gets old, particularly with a lack of running water (I used five-gallon containers that drained into a sink, that then drained into the woods below the pad).
The kitchen worked, for sure. But I wound up eating a fair bit of canned/prepared food, eating out a lot, and defaulting to one-pot meals, mostly. Cleanup was a hassle. The whole thing became limiting.
Back to running water: Showering and shitting were issues. I ocassionally used a camp/solar hanging shower, or a gym shower. But that got old. And a composting toilet, which at its base was a five-gallon bucket. I buried waste.
All of these things worked, and worked well for years. But they are not easy, and it wore on my after a while. They also greatly limited the people who were willing to spend time at the cabin–not a lot of women were willing to sleep over, frankly. Though some definitely were.
For internet, I tethered off my phone for years. It worked, but it was limiting.
It is completely doable. Don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t. And frankly, I got lazy and stopped working to make the setup more comfortable. … So after a while, it just got hard.
Nothing says it has to be the last place you live, so give it a shot. Doing something like this is a huge adventure.
Since you grunched, I’ve been thinking about the idea of being a traveling poker player working out of an RV the majority of the year, returning to a cheap, minimalist homebase occasionally. No sense in paying a lot for a home I won’t be living in full time. Obviously, the more rural I am willing to be, the cheaper I can live. I would at least pay for well water and a septic tank.
I don’t think I am ready for things like composting toilets yet. The food prep looks like an interesting engineering challenge. I only need two burners and a countertop oven, but I rely on some things that need refrigeration.
I did exactly this for a fair amount of time and fully back the plan.
The lifestyle of a poker player who plays for a living, congruent to the isolation and travel that a RV provides is really the only way to go in this day in age of poker games.
Supporting a family of four with a mortgage while fully funded by poker is fucking stressful and unnecessary.
And poker players tend to find themselves enjoying the seclusion that the life entails.
I’m way behind on this thread, apparently, but this is almost exactly our plan. I’ve reluctantly ruled out shipping containers for some of the other reasons articulated here, but RV + site build/renovation + permaculture is the most likely scenario if we ever move from our current place.
Permaculture is so awesome that I’m tormented by seeing manicured lawns everywhere. My first priority at any new property is to plant 100 fruit trees and berry bushes. We should have collectively been walking on this path a long time ago.
Also, the following is some of the most wholesome 52 minutes you can imagine. This guy created a permaculture microclimate in Arizona, and exudes positive energy that is especially refreshing right now.
I’ve shied away from the idea of permaculture because I don’t want to be a farmer (people who know me would say I am ill-suited for a rural lifestyle), but now I am wondering if it would be possible to have some sort of homestead that borrows some ideas from permaculture but isn’t quite a self-sustaining farm and offer a place for people to park an RV or a tiny house in exchange for taking care of the land for me.
I don’t relish the idea of being a landlord, but I also don’t feel comfortable with informal arrangements, so I’d want a written agreement that spells out all duties and obligations. It feels a bit like sharecropping, but maybe there is a fair way to do that that doesn’t resemble the South after the Civil War.
This thread has me thinking about ideas that involve larger plots of land than I had originally envisioned, so it is serving its purpose.
I may be defining permaculture too loosely, but I think it’s totally fine to think on the small scale with this stuff. I don’t necessarily think everyone should be growing the entirety of their food, but I like the idea of reducing environmental pressures of large-scale farming by subsidizing on an individual level.
It’s pretty reasonable to just have like 1/4 acre dedicated to fruit trees/berry bushes/perennial veggies, without dedicating all that much time to gardening or maintenance (at least once it’s established). You won’t get all your food from there, but you’ll maintain a connection with resources and take some pressure off the food grid.
Your maintenance/rental idea is super cool, though. That absolutely makes sense if you can find a decent tenant to run things.
