I remember my Dad’s tales of the building process. He knew nothing about construction when he started. But showing up to the excavated basement hole was a shock. He did all the foundation work and block walls. One funny story was when they were going to pour the floor. It was just him and his brother. The first truck shows up and the guy looks down in the hole, seeing two naive guys looking up. “Just you two?” they nodded. “I’ll take my time with the next load”. Well, they busted can moving and screeding off that first load and collapsed exhausted just as they heard the next load coming down the road…
We grew up in a large city also with a postage stamp yard. But by the time I was 9 crime was getting out of control, so we moved north into an old farmhouse on over 100 acres. The house needed a lot of work which my dad spent 5 years doing. When I was 13, I started to help after school and on weekends. My oldest brother still owns the place, but it’s expanded from 1,500sq/ft to over 3,000sq/ft. It’s not a working farm. None of us ever had any interest in farming.
If and that’s a big IF, it would just be my brother and myself and a place for the my kids, we (brother and I) would find land and buy it and then split it up, each owns their own plot… Lot’s of things would have to be worked out down to one of us passing on and what happens to their property, we would involve layer(s) to wright it all up… Like I said, just options, and dreaming… lol
I see a paywall when I click on the link in the 1st post, can only read the comments on the forum…
Not sure what you are trying to get me to read… lol
BTW family compound is probably the wrong word for it, it would be more like a modern family homestead cluster that we would only be sharing a garden, pond (maybe), and some animals used for food if needed or wanted, fresh eggs and some meat type stuff… We would have our own homes, utility’s and land…
I have already posted about Zero-Lot-Lines in Texas, but the home we built in the early '90s was not much better… The house was to be only 5-feet from the side property line…
The contractor bought an old family estate that was falling down and in disrepair… It was almost two-thirds of the city block (it included the lots 1328, 1324, 1320, and 1316), four of the seven lots… (marked by the white rectangle…)
All four lots were ready for construction to start when we were re-assigned to San Angelo, TX. We liked the plans and we bought the first lot (noted by the Green Arrow), after a careful review of the plans and finding out the next house was to be built only 5-feet away (10-feet between the side walls of each house, we bought the adjacent lot too. That lot is noted by the Orange Arrow…
We lived there for about 4-years before being reassigned to Tucson, AZ. Sometime around 2010, the owners sold off the extra lot and a home was built on that lot…
I am guessing that the two neighbors are not too friendly as that front fence runs all the way to the street and no one is too interested in appearances, storing trashcans in the front yard… Yuck!
In the late '1950s, we moved down from the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate NY to near Albany… Several of my friends lived in basements or cellars… Their fathers were working WWII and Korean War Vets who were building their homes one board at a time and years later when the last shingle was nailed on and the doorbell installed, their homes were paid off with no mortgage…
Now, going back to San Angelo, TX, on the map above, the house marked with the Red Arrows is one of those basement homes that never got finished…
When we lived there, the basement home was still owned by the old Vet who built it… He claimed that when it was time to continue construction of the house he got into a p i s s I n g contest with Zoning and the Plans and Permits Department. He sued and lost and could not build what-ever it was he wanted and just gave up and 40-years later, he was still living there…
I imagine he was long since passed, and apparently someone bought it and it remains a neighborhood curiosity…
Back to the topic noted in the thread’s title…
I just got my renewal, and the increase in premiums was “only” $54.
This represents a 3% increase, but I guess that I shouldn’t be too upset by that increase because it is less than the current year-over-year increase in consumer prices.