December 22, 2019 Rainy Christmas Everybody!

It has rained most days since my last progress update. The past five days dropped nearly five inches on the Farm, but there's no threat of any sort of flooding. The rains took a break yesterday, allowing us outside to get some minor stuff done, but there were a few more things that got done when dodging rain storms.

Just as Laffee Taffee finished up with her pups The Cinnamon Bear went into season, so we are hosting her inside the house this week and next. We really have no time for another accidental litter and The Bear gives us eleven of the poopy little treasures every time. Cinnamon will finish up this week and go back to the temporary kennel with the others.

We have nearly finished the concrete forms for stem wall part of the foundation. This is heavy work with a bunch of parts involved, most of which were prepared prior to our last journal entry. The wood we are using is 2x12 fir, most of it is sixteen feet long so each board weighs in at about one-hundred pound dry, quite a bit more wet. Carrying these things around is tough. We got the bottom course down easily and with the help of our son Jackson we put the top course in last Tuesday. There are a lot of parts that go into the top course and we took until the very last light of day to get them all wired in. There are still a few more parts to put in before calling the County inspector and concrete people, but with luck we can get the forms poured before New Years.

A poor picture of an expensive door.
Click on it for a larger view.

This past week we bought a few things for the house once it is built. We found four interior doors on a Craig's list listing in Pacific City (on the coast south of Tillamook). The doors were reclaimed from a really nice house being remodeled there and they were once "French" door sets. This works out very well since we needed two hinged doors (with knobs) and two pocket doors (without holes or hinges). The doors are wonderfully warm hemlock with "full lights", meaning they are mostly glass. Each glass panel is etched with a beautiful wheat motif and we expect they will allow light to flow through the house. The second thing we bought was a 36" Jenn Aire range hood which we found on Craig's list in Tigard. It came in brand new (but un-boxed) condition for a very small fraction of local retail price and will go perfectly with our slightly used 36" Jenn Aire professional gas range.

Buying used or reclaimed parts is part of our global philosophy designed to get us what we want with the money we have. So, while these two kitchen items alone have cut the purchase cost of the same appliances by about eighty percent, the amount we paid is also about half of the $1000 we had initially budgeted for stove and hood. We are actually stepping up in quality while reducing budgeted costs by nearly 50%.

We are using an economic theory called the 85% rule in buying parts for the house. The rule states that: if perfection is 100% of all desired outcomes,  then  85%  of the perfect project can be achieved using only 50% of the total cash resource. This rule doesn't work for things where costs are nearly fixed, like groceries, or lumber, or where there is no aftermarket, or inventory turnover is high.

The concrete forms for the foundation
will be reused as floor joists/

Some cost savings can be won by simply using things responsibly. For example we will also save on lumber costs by re-using the wood now being used as forms for the foundation. We will nail this wood in as floor joists in the house and save a thousand dollars on lumber right away. So far we have saved a great deal on lighting fixtures, a large chunk on siding, sinks, underfloor heating, and a few other things.

We will buy resold parts where it makes sense. Many parts can be bought better simply by calling around for the best price or by finding promotional discounts. We usually wait for a somewhat regular percentage discount to arrive with our Home Depot credit card bill before making large wood purchases. We also found a resource for new windows, a big ticket extra where we buy twenty-four mostly decorative windows that we otherwise might have simply left out to save $2400 of the budgeted $5500. Shopping around for these windows cut our costs by almost 50% without sacrificing the aesthetics of the house, or any of the quality or features we desired.

There are some things found in our wildest dreams that can be cut out entirely without being missed. Like a dutch door we wanted at the back which serves no purpose we can't do without. This back door decision saves $1000 and we are still buying a very nice door (not actually going cheap). But this change also forced us to re-think the front door decision as well. So the nearly four thousand dollar front and back door budget items will come in at around eight-hundred and also match the interior doors in design as the re-claimed doors we bought this week. Total savings on doors: about one thousand dollars (85% off the budget and we still got nice doors).

All of this will save pennies and every penny will be need to be pinched (and some will be pinched more than once).

We expect Christmas this year will be the very last Christmas spent living in a tiny home. I promised Ann that we'd have room for a tree next year, and to make candy, and cookies, as we have in nearly all previous years. But I have been made a liar by circumstances in the recent past so . . .  We shall see.