If they do not follow good ideas, can social media-driven change empower people, or does it weaken people?
This is a transformative time for me… the creation of Tiny Texas Houses comes to an end soon, and the beginning of a path that would eventually lead to creating Salvage, Texas, from the ethos based on the best of our past resources being saved and used once more to make the best housing in America.
Tiny was my best way to show, in the smallest package, the value of the Jewelry Box Home, which could be portable and habitable, taxable in an advantageous way that would allow you to hand it off like an heirloom to your children or grandchildren, much as many of the houses had gone through before we finally salvaged them after 150 years of life.
Homestead can become homesteads again for the masses who do not want a trailer to live in made of materials that doghouse should not be made out of, let alone human housing for sake of all the toxins in the materials used as well as the fact that they are new, adding to the trash, transport, and forced to use due to code written by the manufacturers and required by law. The process has made the builders and buyers of homes victims of a system intended to keep you buying materials for maintenance, replacement every 7-10 years, and other traps that modern housing has built into it. While the houses are going up in cost, the value is not as they are limited in life and disposable homes for the most part.
Sad to see the masses fall for the trailers on Wheels passed off as houses at high costs for trailers that will rot slower than the houses sitting on them, or the time it takes to pay off the loans. I wonder at the success of the marketing by TV and others that convince so many that they can live in toxic boxes without enough clean air being exchanged to stay healthy, yet no mention of that anywhere in the industry.
Still, the intention was to show that tiny organic toxin / import-free housing is possible with salvage, American labor, very little environmental damage, and energy cost to build. Paramount was to demonstrate that you can do it locally if you all get together and support Pure Salvage Outposts to teach, create, gather the materials donated by locals, and the wisdom of the craftsman who could teach the few kids who do want to know how to build. Please help where it is needed, locally.
More could be building these houses all over the USA; trust me, many want them now. I never understood when I started, and thought that many would copy. Why did no one make the effort to do it right? Copy my research and methods, please… they were meant to show everyone how to do it, not to do one for everyone who wanted one, cheaper than anyone who did not love doing it could build them for.
The profit-driven alternatives, faster, cheaper, toxins-be-damned attitude that took over the tiny housing industry is disgusting for its lack of attention to the financial and human health of the buyers over the decade after the purchase.
Can you see the changes in the look from one owner to another? It was in Bastrop on the Colorado River and then moved to West Point, Texas, on a 23-acre setting. That is the beauty of a portable house, not the ugly trailer and narrow size that is not good for decorating or feeling like this makes you feel.
Some things are tough to duplicate today… especially great stained glass.
So many traps and so few speaking out as the fan club for Tiny Houses on Wheels was touted by all the major networks and pushed into the realm of a monstrous following. Next in this cycle of sale to grave come the consequences, and they have been many but as yet, not getting a lot of attention: health, transport, parking, maintaining tires, etc, will all need to be factored into the big picture before this story can be fully told. Will anyone want to say to it? Not if they were part of making it all happen. They will be gone.
Some know and have paid the price of health and wealth, and they are frustrated by being unable to find a place to put the giant, expensive homes. Time will tell the story, but I always like to put the house on piers and use the trailers that cost megabucks to do other things until needed to move again. Oh well… one can show the path, offer it to all the sheep that pass as they are led to the cliffs by the shepherds who claim to be leading them, but only to their death.
Sheep do not ask where; they follow and savor being part of the crowd that shares all their ailments and pains in common. None will know there was a better path unless they get near the fringe of the flock and see the trees, forests, and waters beyond. Instead, they are too busy looking at the ground for the grass or the butt of another sheep to know where to go next. Pity.
Darby Lettick