If you are embarking on your
homesteading experience and faced with building your home on vacant land,
popular opinion says that you need three things- a banker, a contractor, and
an employer. One to lend you money, one to use it all up for you while
building your house, and one to pay you while you pay back the banker for
the next 30 years.
In this book, Rob Roy gives hope to
the un-lendable and challenges everyone else to do the unusual.
He takes us step by step from
finding and purchasing land, to constructing a temporary shelter, to the
actual building of a home that will not only be a reflection of the family
who inhabits it, but will be totally or mostly unencumbered by something
most people take for granted as unavoidable as death and taxes- a
conventional mortgage.
In 344 pages of clear, sensible
writing, Rob Roy not only takes the dream of an owner-built home from the
realm of impossible fantasy to stunning reality, but by the time you close
the book at the last page, the idea of going the ‘conventional’ route seems
positively ludicrous.
An excerpt shows how tunnel-visioned
we have become, yet holds out hope:
“On a world scale, only a small
percentage of people live in mortgaged homes, but in North America,
particularly middle-class North America, the problem is endemic. Still,
there are millions of mainstream people in the United States and Canada who
have managed to avoid the death pledge.”
For all budding
homesteaders daunted and depressed by the cost of doing things the ‘normal’
way- this book is guaranteed to transform you into ‘the Little Homesteader
Who Could’. All together now - “I think I can, I think I can, I KNOW I
can……”
