June 26, 2006

right livlihood

“You’ll be the only general contractor in the Flathead that drives a VW bus.”

With any luck this might become a true statement sometime in the relatively near future. First I need A) the VW bus and B) a contractors license and/or a place to build. And many, many other things. These days, however, every other truck that drives by has a lumber rack with some type of ladder or something strapped to it. As someone recently said, “Sears must’ve had a sale on hammers.”

I would like to think my vision is foresight and not astigmatic. The only thing I know for sure is that hindsight is 20/20. The way I see it, however, is that this current boom is unsustainable. The good times will be coming to an end and Home Depot will be wishing it had a stricter return policy. As a cabinet guy I’ve been able to see many different homes, most oversized, overpriced with owners who are overworked and underpaid. They can’t possibly own most of their things outright. They are mostly my age (give or take 5-10 years) and we’ve never seen a real strong recession. We’ve heard about our grandparents and great grandparents living in the depression and our parents have made slight references to the 70’s, but the market crash a few years ago wasn’t really felt because housing took off so much.

Now that we have all these big fancy houses with big fancy price tags, how we gonna pay for it? And, more importantly, where are we going to live when the bank takes over our $3000 a month mortgage?

My hope is to build affordable, small but smart houses for people. Eventually I’d like to take a course on straw bale building (or volunteer) to get the skills to help owners build a house themselves. I’d help with the big details and they help pack bales around. That’s the dream. We’ll see how reality meshes with dreams in a few months. For now I’ve got just under two weeks left at my current job. Then it’s back to building houses.

posted @ 8:46 PM

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