At some point in the next few weeks, Casa de Buckethead will undergo a change in venue. The current CdB is a modest but comfortable split-level suburban home south of Alexandria, with a nice big yard and a friendly neighborhood. It has been a pleasant place to live these last three years. While my parents have been extraordinarily kind to let us live there (the house was once the home of my stepgrandfather) they need the money that the house represents to more fully retire. Mrs. Buckethead and I considered purchasing the house ourselves – not least because it would mean dodging a move – but as we pondered what it is, exactly, that we want – we realized that in most respects suburban life is deeply unsatisfying to us.
Suburban life is at best an awkward compromise. You have most of the crowding of living in a city, yet none of the convenience of being able to walk to restaurants, shops and, dare I say, cultural activities. A big yard may be nice, but if you’re going to have to drive everywhere anyway, why not live in the country and have a really, really big yard? City life is fast-paced, exciting, and even mildly dangerous. I’ve done that, and liked it, even if it was a relatively small Midwestern city. Yet now, I have a wife, two kids, a dog and between one and three cats. I am arguably in my mid thirties, but just barely. I have little desire to live in the city myself, and none whatsoever to subject my children to that.
One of the biggest objections to the country is the commute if you still work in the city. But for the last year, I have found myself in the ridiculous position of commuting over an hour completely across the Washington Metro area twice a day. Since my commute is that long, why not use that hour to get out into the country? Further, I’ve been able to work at home more and more, which would ease the commuting burden.
So, the country. Having made the decision to get out of the city, and not to buy another suburban house, we were still left with many questions to answer. How far out? What kind of house? And then Mrs. Buckethead asked one more question. A Zen kind of question, the sort that when answered rearranges your whole outlook. She asked, “You know that dream house you’ve talked about – is there anyway we can build it?”
My dream house has been for almost two decades now a colonial style fieldstone house. (My first dream house was a very large castle with secret passages. Earlier, it was an orbital space fortress with secret passages. Then it was a Dr. No-style evil lair, with secret passages. I haven’t given up on the secret passages.) We typed “Build your own stone house” into the magical google search field, and lo, we found this.
It is, apparently, a relatively simple if labor intensive process to build your own fieldstone house. Especially if you eschew the traditional method of stone masonry and adopt a hybrid method called “Slipform Stone Masonry.” Essentially, you have wooden forms, and you line the inside of the forms with fieldstone. In the middle, you place rebar and then pour in concrete. The concrete holds the stones together, and the rebar holds the concrete together. What you end up with is a reinforced concrete wall that looks like a traditional stone house. (There are many variations that take into account insulation, passive solar, interior construction, etc.)
The advantages of this method are many. First, the resultant wall is immensely strong. Second, it requires very little skill to create one. Third, and most important, it is stupendously cheap compared to most other methods of construction more advanced than a mud hut. In the country, in rural farming areas, there are typically large piles of fieldstone that farmers have removed from their fields. They are, we are told, eager to get rid of them. Concrete is inexpensive, as is rebar in the quantities we’re talking about. So, the main component of the house, the load-bearing walls, is essentially free.
After a few moments to convince myself that these hippies weren’t on the pipe when they wrote that, I became very excited. I almost smiled, even. For the rest of the weekend, and most of the next week, the Missus and I could talk or think about little else. We scoured the web for more information, and tried to assemble it into a coherent plan. We calmed down a little, and let the ideas percolate in the background. A couple weeks later, we hauled them back out, and they still looked good. We gave new orders to our real estate agent, and began looking for properties that fit the plan. Last weekend, we found what we think is a suitable property, and tomorrow we will return to examine it further. We know that it has gorgeous views of the Shenandoah Valley. It is twenty acres, which means more than adequate acreage to split the property. And best of all, it includes a very large pile of fieldstone. If the interior of the house is acceptable, and a tour of the lot passes the test, we’ll make an offer.
So here’s the plan. Mrs. Buckethead came up with the initial idea of building our own house. I came up with an idea that might make this not only affordable, but even profitable.
Step 1: buy a large plot of land in the country, one that has a decent house on it, and – this is key – is sub-dividable.
Step 2: build a new house on the other side of the property from the existing house.
Step 3: move into the new house, and sell the pre-existing house.
Now, we have fine-tuned the details a bit. Originally, we thought we would build a garage using all the techniques that we’d be using in the house. This would serve the dual purpose of training us in the methods without any significant risk, on a smaller project; and assuring that we could work happily together on a project like this. Both of us like working like this – I turned to IT at least in part because manual labor pays fuck-all. But the Missus came up with a better idea – practice by building an addition to the existing structure, which would also increase the value of that house when we go to sell it.
For the next several months – until Spring – we will be researching and planning. Researching all the legal restrictions, permits, codes, and whatnot. (And there are a shitload of them. Enough to make you want to become a wild-eyed Libertarian Anarchist or something. What is this country coming to?) Researching the building methods, suppliers, and design. Designing the addition and the house, and converting those designs into working drawings, bills of materials, and making timetables and schedules. And as soon as it gets warm, we’ll start building.
We hope in two years to have built our house, and sold the original. With the addition, we hope that the sale will at least cover the amount of the mortgage, leaving us with our dream house (with secret passages) free and clear. The beauty of this plan is that selling the existing house makes the land on which we build our new house effectively free. And if we sell it for enough, it might even cover construction costs. But at a minimum, it will sell for enough to cover a huge chunk of the mortgage.
Over the course of that time, I also plan to blog about the project, in what will for some be nauseating detail. I’ll be posting the details of the planning, and later the construction. But in the meantime, here are some views of the Blue Ridge from the front of what I hope will be my new house:
Those views, and the next one, all are looking out over the valley. This next one also includes the garage, which is a bit deeper than the average garage, and will make a wonderful construction workshop. The land we'd actually build on is to the right of the garage, out of the picture and across the street, but would have the same views of the mountains. (Well, mountains for east of the Mississippi, anyway.)
[wik] Addendum, writing in the year of Our Lord 2025:
So with an excess of mulish stubbornness and delusions of adequacy, this is still the plan. For the last almost exactly nineteen years, I have been working toward the fulfillment of this plan. It's kind of bittersweet reading this optimistic effusion from my two decades younger self. My son is now an adult, and now not even my only son. So much time has passed to little account - at least regarding what has remained my goal no matter what insanity has raged outside the shutters.
Not to sound maudlin, because in most regards life has been very good. But damn, the dark forces have been persistent in their alignment against the plan.
So, we never got that property. We got another property that cost a bit more and was a bit less suitable for the plan. But it seemed like we could make it work. Then, our mortgage was sold to a company that turned out to be a tad unethical. Criminal in point of fact. That, and dislocations following from my improvident choice to be working as a consultant at Freddie Mac as the 2008 financial crisis hit, led to a two year waking nightmare as the mortgage company repeatedly put the house up for sale as leverage in a quite successful attempt to suck as much money as possible out of my wallet.
We ended up just walking away from the house in 2010. Though I was fully aware of the hit I'd take to my credit score, I have never felt more relief than I did driving down the dirt road away from the house the last time.
So then there was a decade spent wandering in the rental wilderness. Occasional layoffs, constant relocations thanks to fickle landlords, seeming to always have half my belongings in boxes - this was our lot. But the more important things - Mrs. Buckethead and the Buckethead gens were always there, healthy and for the most part happy.
In 2019, we began to see light at the end of the tunnel. Sure, housing prices were creeping up, but I was advancing in salary and the bad credit had finally begun to rotate off the ass-end of my credit report. The savings account was, if not fat, certainly a bit svelte. Time to once again pull the trigger on the plan. I was looking at properties on zillow, and generally feeling a pleasant anticipatory buzz. The Buckethead clan home improvement steering committee believed that sometime in the Spring of the new year, we could get our property.
Then the Kung Flu Grippe dropped on the world like a very large heavy thing hitting a very soft and squishy thing. The company that signed my paychecks had foolishly build a successful enterprise managing logistics for large medical conferences. I was building a web registration system for them. And suddenly, large medical conferences disappeared in a puff of poorly thought out epidemiological policy making. And with that, so also my paychecks.
Mad scrambling ensued, but despite the economic dislocations we were little affected by the upheavals. We homeschooled, we didn't hang out with people. Before too long, I found employment again. But housing prices had spiked insanely and my credit took a minor hit with the new job and needed some recovery time. Our landlords decided that this was the perfect time to sell the house we were living in and cash in on the price spike. Looking at the new mid-covid rental landscape, we were frankly horrified. So we bought a camper and took a trip around the country thanks to my new full-time remote job and the miracle of Starlink internet. Saved up more money...
Finally, in 2024... we were once more property owners. 100 acres of forested hills in wild, wonderful, West Virginia of all places✶Virginia, our former home state, was simply out of our price range for any significant acreage. We've spent the last year clearing out the accumulated detritus of the former owners, and settled in, and got some chickens and turkeys. Life feels good.
At long last, I can consider once more pulling the trigger on the plan.
November 2006
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