Our Missouri Life

Jenna from Cold Antler Farm has released a neat little video covering her last few years… Cute!

(from Lifehacker by Kevin Purdy)

An $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers has been extended to cover contracts signed by April 30, 2010. A real estate professor writes that those seemingly free dollars might not save you any actual cash, however.

Joseph Gyourko, chairman of the real estate department at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, runs the numbers on five myths of home ownership, including the standard “buying is always better than renting” argument that we’ve previously posted about (and considered as a calculator). About the tax credit that’s regularly in the headlines, Gyourko suggests the savings may vanish quickly if you’re buying in an area with a moderately competitive market:

Just because you got an $8,000 tax credit toward the purchase of a home doesn’t mean that you actually saved $8,000. In areas where there is strong demand for housing and the supply of new housing is limited — including the Washington metro region — tax credits may result in the bidding up of home prices. In other words, the program has probably led to higher prices in these areas than we would be seeing without it. This means that some of the benefit of the tax credit is being passed on from homebuyers to home sellers.

Has the new buyer credit made you think twice about buying a home? Do you still consider home ownership a solid, if not exactly profitable, investment? Trade your takes in the comments.
5 myths about homeownership[WashingtonPost.com]

This has been an argument I’ve long maintained and has been backed up by friends in the financial industry. In particular with the market now, it makes absolutely no sense to buy a home. As you read above (following the links as well) you truly are better off renting or investing that money as opposed to buying a home. True enough, you don’t get the peace and quiet necessarily (a huge issue for me). But searching around may yield a rental that provides it.

It makes sense to downsize, lower your expectations of what a home “IS” and build a smaller home that you can actually afford.

Doing most of the construction (heavy lifting, stacking of blocks, driving nails and etc) you earn the so called “sweat equity” and lower your costs.

By downsizing your home (you DO NOT need a 3000 square foot home!), you’ve already lowered the initial cost.

By building with simpler materials and simpler methods you’ve lowered the cost of materials. You don’t really need that 10′ plastered wall with the arched ceiling…

Reading a book or two (or more) can show you the basic skills you need to build your home. Start using the books to learn the basics of household maintenance… Hiring out help is easy enough to do, and cheap enough when you don’t hire the first “Joe” you find.

With even the most basic skills, a good set of plans, and knowledgeable help you can build your own home.

Our current home plan calls for the following work to be hired out:

Slab – Concrete work.
Walls – mason to set initial course, mid-course set true and parge the walls when finished.
Roof – only needs to be hired out if we do standing seam metal roof.
Electrical – final connections only.
Plumbing – final connections only. Includes any propane lines that are run.

As you can see, it’s not a whole lot of work to be hired out. I chose a method of construction I know I can do. Concrete block – every kid in this country can stack blocks. I will only need a Mason 3 times for the entire home. Just that alone has reduced the cost of home construction by roughly 40%.

OK, so the inspiration for this is many fold. I was thinking about it and then saw a post on a site where a couple did the same thing for a time.

I like the idea of forming this as a weekly theme, tradition, whatever you want to call it.

The basic concept is this – For one night a week, we’ll give up a lot of the modern conveniences in order to tie ourselves to the past and in a way, to our future. During this night our activities will became more family focused, no computers, no real housework or other things to distract us. I’d like to just sit around and talk, play games, read, plan, dream and maybe sing?

For us (as with the other couple that I read about) Thursday evenings works well. If it’s not too cold (or hot) we can turn off the heat or A/C and the lights. Start a fire in the fireplace (once inspected) and light the condo with old fashioned oil lamps and candles. Dinner could be simple leftovers or finger food of some type requiring no real energy expenditure.

Anyone care to join us? Create a Pioneer Night of your own? Local friends could join us.

Ideas behind it – togetherness, energy conservation, learning to do without, enjoying what we do have and realizing the value of what we have and the luxuries it provides, realizing what life is like without those “advantages”.

The video is *not* for the squeamish!

How to book:

Gallery update with a few new photos. Go see the gallery.

We’ve completed staining, primed and gotten the first coat of paint on. Unfortunately it got too cool yesterday to put on the second coat of paint or put poly on the stained parts. So we built a mock up of the bed box (or at least the top anyway).

Hopefully we can warm the barn up enough to do the final coat of exterior paint next weekend. Then I can start on the door, windows and window cover. After that it’s the bed box that gets built.

Looks like we’ll make Thanksgiving weekend to at least spend the night in it. Granted it will be in the barn where we’ll be building it since the Vardo is not on wheels yet, but it’ll still be cool!

We also bought the Reflectix insulation on Sunday since it was on sale at nearly 50% off. Now we need to decide on the inside cloth as well so we can pick the inside paint color so that it plays off of that.

More soon

I know some of the readers like Futurama and other cartoons… Amazon.com has some really good discounts on a variety of hugely popular American cartoon miniseries box sets. Most start at $20, but the more you buy, the bigger the discount gets. If you buy 10 box sets, the normal price would go up to around $200, but Amazon will cut off $120 when you check out. So each set will cost you about $8 at the end. Not bad!

Available: Futurama (Season 1 to 4), Family Guy (Season 1 to 6), The Simpsons (Season 1 to 12), King of the hill (Season 1 to 6).

Very Cool! Offer ends November 22, 2009

Awesome Savings on Cartoon Series at Amazon!

This design by Joseph Sandy brings a lot of Wright’s work into it.

Beautiful design, flow and simplicity. I can’t wait to see the finished plan! This has really gotten me thinking!

At just under 350 sq. ft. this design is compact, yet still provides all of the necessary spaces. The kitchen is not small for a 350 sq. ft. house, and the table can easily be used for extra space when cooking. The half-booth dining table provides space for up to seven people. A queen size bed fits in the sleeping nook. There is a 25 sq. ft. closet for clothing and storage needs. The 5 ft. desk is a good place for studying and computer use. The living area has an L shaped couch that provides plenty of comfortable seating.

http://mb-soft.com/solar/saving.html

Imagine if you happened to live directly over Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Down below you, on a 95ºF hot summer day, there was all kinds of 56ºF air down in the cave! So imagine that you bored two large holes down from your house into the ceiling of the cave. You would then be able to use a standard furnace blower to draw air up one, to push it into the house through your existing heating/air conditioning ducts and registers. The second duct would be to allow your hot house air to go back down into the cave to replace the cool air you removed. Presto! You have awesome air conditioning!

The photos are out of order. When I get some time I’ll put them in order.