To get us started: Why Build?

Chatting with a client named Joe at work one day, the subject came 'round to house building. Turns out this gentleman and his family recently bought some rural property with plans to build a house. "Do you have a few minutes?" he asked. "Could you share some insights?"

What a golden opportunity to hear myself talk! But in the end all I managed was a rambling epic ode to eight years (and counting!) of modern homesteading, which I fear may have left Joe feeling a bit commitment-phobic on the home-building front, without providing any real insight. So this is my attempt to make amends by providing a more thoughtful, and slightly more balanced answer. Read on Joe - and other aspiring homesteaders - and consider yourselves warned!

There's much to be said for not building your own home. It costs more than buying a home. It takes up all your time. It's complicated. It means you have a perpetual To Do list hanging over your head. It does not fit well into our world of bank, insurance and building regulations. It fills your finger nails with unending grime, your hair with tangles of wood chips, your mouth, ears, eyes and clothing with permanent coatings of sheetrock dust, your arms with multi-hued layers of paint and your underwear and socks with sawdust. It leaves your hands calloused and your ankles scarred with concrete burns. The shear scope of details generally makes your brain smolder, often even erupt into flames. It frequently gives you headaches, often causes acid reflux disease, and has been known to cause arguments between otherwise mild-mannered spouses.

So why? Why climb Mount Everest? "Because it's there." For some there is simply an intrinsic drive, an internal vision that must be expressed. Why paint? Why sing? Why write? Because it's there, inside us.

"So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for."
-- George Leigh Mallory, 1922

My insight? Ask yourself first, is it there, inside you? If you look at the mountain and are filled with yearning, take on exactly as much of the climb as you are driven toward, as will give you that sheer joy. Maybe you do feel called to climb Mount Everest. Go for it. But maybe there are only components of the process toward which you yearn; find a way to answer those calls and hand the rest off to someone else. Do what sings from your soul. Because if the struggle to accomplish building your home does not bring sheer joy at the summit, well, there's just not much point in the climb.

My insight for the spouse? Remember this word: Vested. It's a good way to feel. No, not the down version (although depending on the locale and the season, down-vested is a good way to feel, too). Vested in your home. The more you become involved in the construction of your home, the more you feel vested in that home. Your home will be infused with your DNA (and that of your spouse) quite literally through the blood, sweat, tears and layers of skin that you will leave embedded in it. It will consume much of you. Likely you will never have that "sheer joy" your spouse experiences. But over time, if you allow yourself, you will become vested in your home in a way that other people are not. It is the knowledge that this is your home. It is a connectedness, a sense of being anchored. A feeling of commitment, of rightness. It is a sense of history that you have written with your spouse, family and friends. It is, like a good marriage, a quiet, deep, abiding joy.

I admit, plenty of people, including several neighbors, think we're a bit nuts for undertaking the entire project ourselves. Be prepared for the comments; not everyone sees the mountain as something that needs to be climbed. Hey, there is no good reason to climb Mount Everest either. But it is there.