This Couple's $39k DIY Home is a Financial Masterpiece

This is our passive solar home that we affordably built in nine months for $39,000. With one costly mistake. Come on in and we'll show you around. Welcome to my kitchen. It's where I spend most of the time and it works very well. It is small, but it is very efficient. And to me, that is very important in a kitchen that you don't have to be moving from one corner to the other while you're working. It's just all right there a few steps from each other and you can get a lot done in a little bit of time. One thing I've learned from experience in our other house build is I had my kitchen on the south side of the house and it was so bright and so hot. So I wanted it in the shade. So we did it on the north wall. That is something to keep in mind when you are building is the location of like your main workspace that it is a convenient place to work no matter what time of the day. This part of the kitchen is my main work station. On this side of the stove, we have just a small soapstone countertop. And that is so anytime I need to take a kettle off the stove, I have a place to put it that I don't have to worry about it burning the countertop without getting some kind of a hot pad protection on the countertop. So that's the purpose of this soapstone here. And as far as the colors that we chose in here, our home is a Southwestern themed home. And I wanted not just bright aqua cabinets, but I wanted it kind of in that family. So I'm really pleased with this kind of blue green color that it turned out. Our countertops are walnut. We got them from a friend up the road and James cut them down and finished them off. And they are very, very beautiful. And I don't have any doors on my cabinets because doors are in the way. And people say, well, don't you have problems with them being messy all the time? Not really. It's raw right here. And it's very easy just to quick, quick, quick, you know, rearrange it so it looks okay. But the overall efficiency of it, I like it. And I have no lack of storage space. I have 11 drawers here and we put all drawers in our lowers instead of doors with shelves because it's just so much easier to see what's in your drawers. Here is my corner pantry. And the reason I love a corner pantry, if you have your cabinets come clear to the corner, it is a very inefficient use of your space. You have these lazy Susans and they're just hard to get to and you lose a lot of space. But when you make a pantry in the corner, you lose no space. And it's not that big. I mean, you know, it's like so. But I have all kinds of storage in here. One, two, three, four, five, six shelves. Yeah, just all my miscellaneous baking stuff and whatever else I want to store in there that I don't want anybody to see. Just come out, shut the door and there it is. It can be messy in there and nobody knows the difference. Here we are at my island and I have a commercial sink. I am in love with commercial sinks. I had one in my bus. This one has two sinks. My bus actually had three. But being as I have a dishwasher, I decided I could get by with two sinks. But one of my real selling points that I love about my sink here is I have a cutting board here and this is where I do all my prep work for my food, my meat, veggies, whatever. And it's very much easy cleanup. It's right in the sink, not on your countertop. And so that is what I really love about it. Concrete countertops here. James did that. He molded them or shaped them so all the water drains to the sink. I never have to worry about water coming off the sink. There are all kinds of dimensions of commercial sinks, different sizes. And I wanted just a certain size of sink. So we actually ended up ordering this one from Home Depot. We positioned our island like this, a triangular kitchen with this island on an angle makes the most efficient use of your space. Everything is close. My fridge is close. My stove is close. And so it makes it a very easy kitchen to work in. Another thing I love about this island is when I'm working here, I have these most amazing views and that is very uplifting when you're doing the dirty work of doing your dishes. So from the other side of the sink is the bar here. And I like to have a bar on the outside of my kitchen so when my grandkids come over, they can sit on the bar and entertain me while I'm cooking. And James will sit here quite a bit and we'll talk while I'm in the kitchen. It's just a good social space to have. Coming in from my kitchen, there's the island. And then this cabinet here is our coffee bar. That's the main purpose of it. And numerous more drawers for cutlery, junk drawer, whatever. And then my dishes are here. Yeah, it's just a very nice place. And when I stumble in here in the mornings, my coffee is made already by my barista husband. And I look out the windows and enjoy the views and it's just a very nice way to wake up in the morning. We're in the living room now. The design here has to do with our views. So we got a lot of windows on the east and the south and our views are beautiful. And that's why we arranged this area like we did. This coffee table comes from the house we built before. And this was the biggest log that we had from that house. I have my own sawmill. So all of the wood in here, I cut myself. This log was from the wood that I cut for the other house. And this was the largest piece and I thought it was really cool. And so I saved it and made a coffee table out of it. And the bottom is actually beer kegs that I just cut in half and polished. And that's one cool thing about building southwestern style. It's a little more rustic. So like cutting your own wood, it goes with that. So yeah, it all turns out cool. It's also very economical. So it's a cheap way to build. I'll say economical, it's not cheap because if you had hired this done, it would be very expensive. But when you do it yourself, it's very inexpensive but it does cost you labor. We're back over here by the pizza oven. I've built several of these. This is probably the third or fourth pizza oven I've built. And this time I bought a kit. And the reason for that is the price of firebrick has really gone up over the last number of years like a lot of things have. And this was the most economical way that I could do this but also it was really fast. This also acts as a masonry heater and this really gets interesting. So the reason I like a pizza oven for the base of my masonry heater is a pizza oven burns really, really efficient. They actually have their own catalytic converter in the pizza oven and it's totally natural. So when you heat a pizza oven, when it gets to a certain point, the dome of your pizza oven gets hot to about, when it gets up to around 600 degrees, it does what they call flashes and it burns off the soot off the dome of the pizza oven. Once it does that, all the smoke that hits that dome ignites. So it burns completely clean, 100%, well, burns all your smoke. Every exhaust in a pizza oven is the front of the oven. So it burns across the dome, ignites the smoke and then it comes out of the exhaust and goes up. Now above this, inside of this, there's a heat exchanger and it's a 150 gallon stainless steel tank. And so this pipe goes into that tank but it goes into the tank about halfway up in the tank. And then the exhaust out of the tank is at the bottom of the tank. This is all by design. So heat rises. And when the heat goes into that tank, the hottest air goes to the top of that tank and stays there. And then your coolest air is what exhausts out the bottom. And this is especially important after you get done burning. Let's say you burn your wood in the evening, you shut it down, you go to bed and there will be air that gets into this and is being exhausted all the time. But it's always exhausting your coolest air instead of your hottest air. Your hottest air is gonna stay at the top of that dome. And in a masonry stove jargon, that's called a bell. So these bells are placed to hold the hottest air. And that way you're not exhausting the hottest air out of your base constantly. And the way I did this one, I bricked this all up and then stuccoed it. But before I got done bricking with just a little gap at the top, I actually filled this all up with sand. So there's about 12,000 pounds worth of sand inside of this. Well, the whole thing has about 12,000 pounds of mass. So when you burn this, it burns really efficient because you burn it wide open. You never choke it back. You never have creosote. It burns up in there, but your heat is stored in that sand. So this heat will last for days. It's really a cool concept. It's been used for years and years in Northern Europe, Russia especially. In fact, it has the name, a Russian fireplace. That's how this whole system works. I know it's a little bit complicated, but if you wanna look it up, you can look it up. Masonry stoves, heat storage, Russian fireplaces, bells of Russian fireplaces. It gives you the concepts that I used in this. We were living in a bus for the last probably four years, three years, and we thought we would be traveling. And the closer it got to traveling, the more we realized that we didn't wanna travel. We are not rolling stones, and that's fine for anybody that wants to do that, but we decided we wanted to stay here. So we bought this piece of property. We have this house on 35 acres. Different states are different, but here in Colorado, you have to have at least 35 acres to have what they call a domestic well. If it's smaller than 35 acres, you can only get a permit for what they call an in-house well, and that's exactly what that means. You cannot water your lawn. You can't have animals outside. You can't have anything outside of your house. It's only in the house. And we paid right at 100,000 for this 35 acres. Then we had to drill a well, and that was, what, about 15,000-something in that price range, I think. 17, I think it was. Okay, 17,000. That was the only real expense we had as far as buying the property and the well. We moved to Colorado because our daughter lived in the area. This is one thing I do recommend when you are looking for a piece of property. It's best to move into the area and live there, which is what we did. We moved here and rented a place for a year, and we shopped for property. We did not buy the first place that we saw. We started looking in this area, and really, it was almost by chance that we found the place that we bought. It was- The first place that we bought before this one. That was the lot just to the south of here. It was for sale, but it didn't look like much from the road, and so I was out there walking across it, and when I hit the rocks kind of at the back of the place, I called Doreen and I told her, this is the place. This is the perfect place to build a house. And we built that place, lived in it. We owned that property for around 13 years, and this property was just to the north of it, and we just got very fortunate. We made an offer on this place, and the man that we bought it from was needing to sell just at the time when we needed to buy, and so yeah, we just happened to get this property at the right time. We built this house for around $39,000. Is that including the concrete mistake? So when we were pouring the floor, we made a $3,000 mistake that we didn't do our homework on. We had the concrete company put colorant in the concrete, brown, we had them do it, and we found out later that James could've bought it off of Amazon for like 300 bucks, and they charged us 3,000 for it. Well, the reason we made the mistake on that is we built a small cabin. When we had the concrete delivered on that, it was a very, very small amount. I never realized how much it was costing me, but here's the thing you need to realize. This is done all the time in sales, and that is they make their money on add-ons. So the basic product, concrete, is really quite economical. Anytime you add on, just like colorant in your concrete, that's where they make their money. You need to be careful with that. We could've built this house for 36 without that. It's very economical, I realize, but if you're gonna build like that economically, you have to do your homework. You don't just start building and then gather your material. Come up with your plan and then plan on gathering your material over a period of time and then start building, because when you build this way, if you're gonna build economical, when you need something is not the time to start shopping for it. Shop for your stuff, store it, and then build, and another thing that does for you, it helps you when you're building on how you build to utilize the cheap material that you've bought. But one thing to be aware of when you build like this, it is more labor-intensive. James asked me over and over, why do I do things that is so, I mean, it takes so much work to do. I said, well, because it's cheap. So it is more labor-intensive when you collect your stuff like that than when you just go to the Home Depot and buy everything nice and new and ready to use and puts together easily. This was definitely more work. It took us about eight or nine months to build this, and that was Doreen and I doing 90% of the work. We did have help with a few of the things that were really labor-intensive that needed a lot of hands. Relationships are important. You need friends, and our friends are glad to come over and help us. We go and help them, and yeah, it took about eight or nine months. As far as what this house costs to live in, this is a passive solar, so we have no heating expense at all. No electricity. The sun provides all our energy. Really, the only expense we have is our gas bill, which is around $85 a month. The property tax here is around $1,500 a year, so that's really the only expense we have as far as just out-of-the-pocket expense to live here. Of course, we got our groceries and things like that, but as far as a house, actually living here, it's very, very economical. Another real important part of living in the area that you're thinking of building on is the local codes, your codes and your restrictions. If you're gonna be in an HOA, we actually live in an HOA, how they operate, your county and its zoning laws, all of that is important. You can buy a piece of property and be surprised with a lot of different things, and there's a lot of homework goes into this, so don't just buy a piece of property and think you're gonna build your dream because your dream might collide with the zoning laws, and that's never pleasant, so just be careful. And again, this is why it's so important to live in an area, talk to the locals, make friends, talk to people that have done what you're thinking about doing. They are a wealth of information. This thing of independence is kind of a joke. None of us can really make it on our own. We need people in our lives and people that know what they're doing, people that have gone before us, and they can help us a lot. So yeah, make friends, move into an area, live there for a year, it'll help you a lot. So this is a desk area, and we are not quite done with this area. Eventually, we're gonna have bookshelves here on the wall. This is just a piece of walnut that I bought off a neighbor, and it turned out cool. It's got this little hole in the top that works great to run your cords through so you don't have to drill your own hole. And also, I'm gonna eventually put a bank of drawers there on that side. All in all, it turned out really great. This is a beautiful piece of wood, and I think we're really gonna enjoy it. Okay, this is our little dining area. We just wanted a small table here that we could sit out while we eat our meals and enjoy the lovely views. Also, we didn't want just a square table. We bought this wood from our friend, and James cut it in wedges, and then we just kind of worked with it to make an organic shape. You can actually seat around five or six people around this small space, so it works pretty good. And then another thing I like about this spot in our windows, we have a little wider window sills. We use Saltillo tiles, and they're great for setting on. Another thing with our windows, they are just plain, clear glass. These are double-pane windows, but you do not want the low-E glass that they put in most houses everywhere because that reflects the sunshine. So it's for helping keep your house cool, but it's not good for heating your house. You just want the clear, plain glass, old-fashioned glass windows. I love the curve that is here in this corner. It breaks up the squareness of the house. In a small house, you need more details, and it's just a lovely place to have my plants. So this is the back part of the house. This is our dressing area, also utility room. We have our closed storage here, bathroom behind me, closet there. Yeah, just a multifunction room. And when you build small, of course, everybody that has done this knows this. You have to use your spaces for more than one thing, and that's what this space is. Yeah, it works very, very well. We really enjoy this space. Whenever you separate your spaces out, just like the washer and dryer here, if you would enclose this, it makes your space feel smaller, and by leaving it open, it makes your space feel bigger. And there's trade-offs. You will see the washer and dryer in here, and some people don't like that. You have to decide what's the most important to you and then just roll with that. We like it more open. We like the more expansive feel, and so that's why we have it like we do. We got onto this in our bus, and when you're in a very small space like a bus, you have to be very efficient with your space, and we really fell in love with these open compartments. What it does is it separates your clothes into sections, makes it very organized. Another thing I like is you can see it, so there's no guessing what you have here, and you can just easily pick which color, which pants, which shirt. Yeah, it's very quick. We like it. It's very efficient. I custom-built this. These are just pieces of plywood with little strips nailed on the side, and then I have a friend that has a cabinet shop. He actually put the facing on these pieces, and these are just simple little half-inch pieces of melamine. It's a very simple design, very easy, very fast to build, and very inexpensive. It was great. We're over here by the vanity. I am not done with this. I'm gonna put a mirror here on the wall and also the light fixture, but the cool thing about this is the top. This technique is called tadalact. It's a Moroccan technique, and it's really cool. If you look it up, and you would actually buy material to do this, it would be expensive, and if you would hire it done, it'd be very, very expensive, but when you do it yourself, and you just use off-the-shelf stuff, it's very inexpensive, very cheap. I made this sink just out of plywood, and then I lined the whole thing with Schluters, which is what you put in showers, and then I started with my tadalact top, so it's hydrated lime and sand. You mix that together, and you just trowel it on, and you put several coats of that on, and then to finish it is really unique. You actually use soap. I made my own soap. I made olive oil soap, and then you emulsify that in water, and then you just brush it on, and it ends up really, really cool. I didn't realize this, but homemade soap like that actually has a certain portion of wax in it, and that soaks into the lime plaster, and it has a chemical reaction. It makes this stuff completely waterproof, and I'm sorry you can't feel this because the feel is really cool. It's got a real waxy feel to it, but it turned out looking really cool, I think. So I made my shower out of slate. This would've been very expensive if I would've just gone to the store and bought it, but I had a friend that had a stack of this slate. It was actually a whole pallet full that I'd seen in his backyard for quite some time, so when I got ready to build this, I contacted him to see if I could get some off of him, and he was glad to get rid of it, so bought it for 100 bucks and installed it, so it turned out really cool. When you're gonna build inexpensive, you have to be looking for those kind of bargains, so keep your eyes peeled when you get in your friend's backyard. We tried to keep a feel throughout the house. This house is built with natural products throughout. This is natural stone, and it just all fits together, and for a good house design, that's what you wanna do. You wanna make sure and keep a certain theme throughout, and I feel like this shower answers that. Our house is off-grid. We've used composting toilets through the years for different applications, but in the county we live in, you must have a septic tank installed before you can get a building permit, so we have a septic tank, and this is a regular flush toilet, and those of you that live in town, you would think this is kind of strange, but this is the first flush toilet we've had for quite a few years. The people that visit us that aren't used to the more hippie ways, they're glad for this, but yeah, it's okay, but we still like our composting toilet pretty good. Here's our bedroom. I painted the walls dark. I decided to do that in contrast with all the light colors in all the other rooms, and I love the dark walls in here. Another thing I love about our room is the big windows. It is amazing when you're laying in bed and look out at the stars at night. It is really, really beautiful, and to wake up to the sunrise is really gorgeous also. Another thing I like about laying in bed, you look up at the ceiling and see the warm beams, the dark beams in contrast to the lighter ceiling. It creates a really nice ambience in here. Our bedroom is really very minimalistic. We only have a bed in here, and right now our bed is on the floor. Eventually, we will get a platform built maybe 16 inches off of the floor. We'll have storage under there. Oh, another thing of interest is the wall sconces in here. James made those, and they cast a really nice glow in the evening when we have them on. Yeah, this is a really nice, warm bedroom space that we really do enjoy. I wanna tell you about these roof beams. These are spruce beams. The University of Alaska has a span table for round wood for poles, so these are designed according to their tables for our snow load, and actually, our snow load here is 50 pounds per square foot, and this roof has a 100 pound per square foot design, so it wasn't like we just threw a dart at a dartboard and picked the logs. These are actually using a span table just like you would for any lumber that you would use. I put them on my sawmill and just flattened the top. By flattening them, it gives you a good flat surface to put your ceiling on, but also an easy place to take your measurements like for notching into your walls and things like that. It gives you a good place to measure off of, so that's how I did that. Then I cut my ceiling boards also, and they are ponderosa pine, so we got some variation in the color of the ceiling, but it really turned out beautiful. All the other wood in here I also cut. The beams on the windows and the uprights, they're all doug fir, so we have three different species of wood in here. We have doug fir, spruce, and ponderosa pine, and then I'm gonna talk about the floor. We really like concrete floors. First of all, they're economical. You pour your floor, and that's your finished floor. Like I said earlier, we made a mistake on this. We did have them color the concrete, which is very expensive. We could have done it ourselves for a lot less, but we colored it dark because of the solar gain, and this house works together with the windows, and the way this works is the sun shines in on the floor, heats the floor up during the day, and the floor gets to around, I don't know, 95 degrees during the day, and then it radiates that heat out at night, but under the floor, this floor is about five inches thick, and under the floor, we have two inches of insulation, and that's critical for a passive solar house because if you don't do that, you'll lose all your heat into the ground. The walls are also concrete. They're just block that we stacked and then poured full of concrete, and all of that absorbs the heat from the sun during the day, and that's all part of a good passive solar design. Now, the floor, as far as a finish, I actually concocted my own finish, and it turned out working really good. Some of those things, those experiments are fails, but this one was a success, and it's just linseed oil and paint thinner, and then a little beeswax and a little carnauba wax, and mixed those together, heated them up, and right after we poured the floor, I went over and put my finish on the floor and just dumped it on the floor, kind of like just spread it out, and then used a squeegee and just squeegeed it out, and it was real fast. It probably took me, I don't know, hour or two to finish the whole floor, and then when we got done building and we're finishing in here, I went back over it with buffing pads and buffed it, and it turned out really great. I can't say that about all my experiments, but this turned out great. Our house here, we built out of a stucco block. You start out by stacking the block dry, put rebar in that, and then poured it full of concrete. Outside of that is styrofoam, and then on the exterior, it's stucco. One of the things we did is, you can see the sills are all copper. The reason I did that, it gives it kind of a classy touch. Most of the time, houses that have copper trim on them are very expensive homes, and I just thought it would be cool to do an inexpensive home with copper trim. The other thing we did is the black on that is not paint. That's a technique called shosugiban. It's a Japanese technique where you actually burn the wood, and then you go back and put oil on it, and it's very good in this locale because it resists UV rays, and it's a very durable finish. In fact, the oldest wooden building in the world is that that's the way it's finished. It's in Japan, and the finish is a burn finish like that. We did color our stucco before we put it on, so that is more than skin deep. It's the depth of the stucco, so all in all, I think it's a very durable, very nice home, turned out looking nice. The curve, it's visual. It's something that gives your house a look that kind of does away with just the old square block. This house is, on the outside, it's 32 feet square, and it's just a square box, but when you put those curves on, it gives it a little detail that kind of knocks at that look, so yeah, that's why we put them on. Inside, they look cool. Outside, they look cool, but they also cut down on the wind noise because most of your whistling comes from a house. The corners is where most of your noise comes from, from wind. As far as the maintenance is concerned, this is probably the lowest maintenance house you could build. With the wood burnt, it will never need to be painted. With the seals copper, that should never need any repairs at all. The stucco is good for 50, 60 years, and then the roof is 10, and that should last a long time, so I don't expect any maintenance at all in our lifetime. When you design a house, sometimes when you get in it, you think, well, you know, this we would have changed, that we would have changed. On this job, I would say it's as close to perfect as we could have gotten. We just really, really enjoy this house. One thing we have learned, I believe, in this build, which we continue to learn, we've been married for, what, 46 years now? Almost. We've learned to trust each other with the things that the other person is good at. We work together quite well as a team. I learned that lesson again on this project. I just let my wife do the things that I'm not good at, and it sure does lower my stress. Yeah, I would say, too, with every build that we have done together, that I've learned to trust him more. He goes fast, but when it's all said and done, it turns out looking really, really good. We've learned to work together quite well, I'd say. A lot of people do not realize how much work it actually is, and you're gonna be weary, bodily weary. It's kinda like running a marathon. It's not one, the first mile, second mile. You gotta run the whole, full marathon. It's not gonna be easy, and there are gonna be times when you question whether it was a smart thing to do, but you'll get there. And don't look at the whole project. You've only gotta accomplish one little thing at a time. But as you accomplish one little thing at a time, lo and behold, a house gets built. We wanna thank you all for watching our video. We hope it inspired you. Maybe someday you'd like to build your own. Y'all have a good day.