It all started with a bed and breakfast, I’m just not sure which one. We love to travel, and when we do, we love to stay in bed and breakfasts. The smaller and homier the better. Early in our marriage we decided that we really wanted to operate one ourselves. About that time the housing boom was in full swing, and we realized we would never, ever be able to afford a home in our community that would allow us to make a living as b&b hosts. At least, not without finding a lot of money. To make things more complicated, most of the residential zoning regulations in Tucson were rather unfriendly to some of the things we really wanted in our home.
So we started looking further and further out of town, and somewhere along the line I discovered that there were people out there who had built their own houses out of straw bales. Lots of them lived near us in southern Arizona. They had help from a huge and growing broader community of bale enthusiasts willing to share their knowledge, experience, and labor. We thought that would be fun, and that we could build our own house on our own land while getting to know a lot of new and interesting people.
Many years ago I was an architecture student for a while, and I’ve always been drawing houses since I was a little kid. As I explored straw bale building, and by extension building with natural materials in general, I found myself. My employment became less and less interesting as natural building began taking over my attention.
From that experience I realized a couple things. We work to pay the bills. The bills are high because housing is ridiculously expensive and housing is ridiculously energy inefficient. Basically, we pay a lot for houses that are not responsive to their environment and expensive to heat and cool. Further, modern construction is usually wasteful and damaging to the environment.
Homesteading is, for us, making our dreams real. We can build a house that suits our needs, is energy efficient, kind to the earth, and affordable. It can draw together family, friends, and strangers instead of encouraging distance and separation. It makes it easier, in fact necessary, to live a simpler life with fewer material possessions. By reducing our expenses, homesteading allows us to spend less time trying to earn income and more time pursuing the things that we are passionate about.
And what about the bed and breakfast? That dream is still there. Homesteading allows us to start small and grow. We have some elbow room out in the country.
