More Solargon/Urban Homesteading Thoughts

The cat was sick on Wednesday, and it made me glad we aren't living in just 700 square feet of alternative housing. Were that the case, the entire dwelling would likely have been polluted with cat shit.

Tessa, our 11-year-old ginger cat, has been more affectionate and needy lately so I suspected she wasn't feeling well. I went out for about 20 minutes Wednesday morning and when I returned, my suspicions were confirmed.

She jumped onto a bar stool in the kitchen to be petted. When I did so my hand came away cold and wet, and when I looked I saw splotches of shit all over her back.

Tessa is growing out a lion cut, which means when her long fur was cut the groomer left a puffball at the end of her tail. That puffball looked like a paintbrush freshly dipped in brown paint. Tessa likes to walk around and switch her tail about, so she'd splattered herself and gone Jackson Pollock on some walls. I found smears and spotches here and there all over the house. If this had happened in a Solargon, the density of the catshit contamination would have rendered the home uninhabitable. As is was in 1,300 square feet with both doors open I gagged twice in the process of cleaning up.


Sick cats aside, I know a clutter counselor/organization coach who could probably show us how to live in 700 square feet of alternative housing without resorting to murder-suicide. But when I think about it, I realize we've been in this situation before.

Before we were married, Wyatt lived in separate dwellings and had a mortgage each. It was like the universe knew we were about to get ahead, because Wyatt got laid off right after we got married and a couple of months after that I was hazed into quitting my job. I managed to sell my place despite the crashing real estate market, but since then sharing a residence and mortgage has not made things as easy as I'd hoped. We both went back to school, which required some cash outflow, and the economy tanked, which sucks because both our current jobs depend on people having disposable income they want to part with.

I'm not sure what kind of devilish feedback mechanism is at work here. Perhaps it's the Law Of Conservation Of Shit To Worry About, which I wrote about here and here.

Still, when I read articles like this, I am once again prompted to obsess about alternative housing.

Theoretical Urban Homesteading

Was talking to a friend about my obsession with round alternative houses. She lives in one of those Glenwood bungalows I mentioned here. It's a great house, but like many houses built in the 1920s and 1930s in Glenwood, it needs a lot of work. I told her the larger Solargon house kits cost around $36,000. "It would almost make more sense to tear my house down and put up one of those," she said. But that's exaggerating, first because she estimates it would only cost around $20,000 to fix up her house, and also because her house has more than twice the square footage of the Solargon.

Plus there are a lot of other Solargon costs, because you'd have to factor in the price of the lot for a building site, and cost of pouring a foundation, and costs of getting somebody to put the Solargon together and wire and plumb it, new appliances, etc.

Then again the Solargon is likely to be more energy efficient and save money over time, partly because it is small. And rehabbing an old house is always more expensive and complicated than you thought it would be.

I have a large husband and two cats. I don't know how well we'd all fit into about 700 square feet laid out like this. It's not terribly different from what we have now, just smaller, but we'd certainly have to get rid of a lot of stuff. But we got rid of a lot of stuff when we got married and moved in together, and it was painful at the time but in retrospect not such a big deal. If it meant being able to jump off the hamster wheel of bills and debt, well I don't think we'd notice the lack of stuff so much.

When I think about it, the biggest space problems we'd have are related to books, kitchen stuff, clothes, and cat litter boxes. Not that cat litter boxes are all that big, but you can't put them just anywhere. Built-in storage might solve the book, kitchen stuff and clothing problem, but living in a small space with litter boxes is still going to be tricky.

I went on vacation to Mongolia one year, and spent some nights in a ger (otherwise known as a yurt). From the outside they don't look very big at all. But something about the roundness and openess of them makes them seem pretty big and comfortable on the inside. They're covered in felt. It was astonishing how cool they were in the scorching-ass heat of the Gobi desert, and how warm they were in the cold Hinti Mountains once somebody lit a horse dung fire in the stove. I love round living spaces.

That's one thing I'd want in my Solargon that might be hard to engineer and would take up valuable space: a wood stove. Though I would probably try to burn horse or cow shit in it. To hell with chopping wood. Cow or horse shit is probably one of the most renewable resources on the planet. We could sneak into pastures, or hell, maybe even get permission, and bag up free heating fuel every winter.

Our biggest obstacle is that we're already pinned down by mortgage payments, don't have enough cash handy to outright pay for land and a new Solargon, don't want to have two sets of mortgage payments, and the housing market sucks so it might take a while to sell our place. Renting makes a lot more sense in some regards. When you want to move you just give notice and leave regardless of how the real estate market looks.

More Dreamhouse Thoughts

Have been thinking a lot about the Solargon house issues mentioned in my last post, and have decided that daydreaming of the ultimate homestead site is a safe alternative to alcoholism or crack addiction, so I'm going to indulge in it.

As long as I'm dreaming, I want a geodesic greenhouse too.

And I want to put one of these freshwater fish farm and salad kits in it. The greens and herbs in the long tray are fed by fish poop, and in subsisting on fish poop they keep the water healthy for the fish in the big tank. I think it's intended for tilapia farming, but I'd probably try native bluegill in there.

It would be nice if we could live in an Eco-Village of LEED-certified houses like Solargons, maybe 20-30 of them, either in the city or somewhere within 15-20 minutes of it. I want my friend W.M. to live there. Hear that, W.M.?

More about this topic later.