The Barn Bungalow

by Beth

Oh, 2018, where have you gone? The frost is here, so it’s official: the stars didn’t align to build the dome this year. The concrete that seals the shell won’t set in freezing weather.

It’s a bummer. We try to attack projects, but our “forever dome” hasn’t been receptive to that approach. We want to make sure it’s done right, but it’s been tough finding skilled labor willing to drive out to our county (passing booming Gatlinburg on the way, which is full of fancy 2nd homes waiting to be rebuilt with insurance dollars after the wildfires). That means waiting on professionals we trust while painstakingly learning parts of the build ourselves, on nights and weekends.

We’ve learned a lot: how to read architectural drawings and take-offs, how to bid work, how to tie rebar, how to firm up a gravel driveway, how to be patient.

We also learned we don’t want to rent anymore, even though we rent here, and it’s beautiful.

We’ve loved “coming dome” to this cove, thanks to the neighbors and the big, central field where the dogs and deer play. There’s an apple orchard around the corner with delicious cider. It’s a quick drive to our land, the National Park, and the Appalachian Trail. Did I mention the neighbors? They’re our closest friends here.

We planned to rent the yellow dome – the building that inspired us to build our own dome – until our own dome was ready. Early this year, we thought. Summer at the latest. We never meant to rent this long.

2018 taught us that, sometimes, the harder you push, the more you find out how powerless you are. No amount of creativity, tap-dancing, or telekinesis would make our dome go up. Then, our rent did.

And That’s Our Cue to Exit
Our landlord is a 90-year-old litterbug who built the yellow dome 20 years ago and thinks he should still be building it now. By “building,” I mean replacing working things with stuff he finds at the dump. If he’s not running loud tools, he’s running an ancient, combustible-looking tractor with faulty brakes. Or both; the tractor’s starter is broken, so he doesn’t like to turn it off.

Once he left the tractor running in our driveway and left for the day. We’re not sure if he couldn’t turn it off (it took Chris and a neighbor 45 minutes to figure it out) or meant to come back the next day to an already running tractor for ease of use.

He lives 45 minutes away, but that’s not too far for him to show up any day of the week, weekend and holiday inclusive, between 7-8:30 a.m. He promised not to arrive before 8 but stated he’s on self-designated year-round Daylight Savings. He kicks up the tractor first thing and spends most of the day in a cloud of diesel fumes running over things we like.

Worse, he sets fires. Scattered, surprise bonfires of treated lumber and plastic garbage he doesn’t feel like throwing in the back of his pickup to blow out onto neighbors’ lawns. Then he leaves, so we have to run out and douse the fires before, or as, they spread. We’ve asked him in many direct and clear ways to stop with the fires, but he’s not hearing it. We don’t know what else to do. The last time I asked him to put one out, under a dead hemlock when winds were gusting at 30 mph, he raised the rent.

If you haven’t experienced it, it’s impossible to know the torment of a fire-setting third party haunting your home. There’s a reason the right to privacy is woven intricately into our nation’s Constitution.

Besides that, it’s one thing to pay astronomical rent for a fine home, but while this rental dome is special, it’s not fine. It was built with scrap material and no common sense. Exposed wires in the basement shocked Chris so hard he lost feeling in his arm for a week. I have 2 broken toes and a forehead dent from moments of clumsiness that made me vulnerable to the hella sharp rough-cut lumber he used as trim work. The salvaged water heater helped us get to know the local volunteer fire department. It was plumbed to leak on itself and equipped with an old breaker that didn’t trip. The oven, grabbed off the curb after the neighbor threw it out (we know this because the neighbor still chuckles about it), lasted a year before it caught fire, too. A shallow, ill-sealed well fills the toilets with brown silt. None of the doors seal either, so utility bills are out of control. Despite the doors letting in plenty of fresh air, the house smells of sewer gas and dead rodent. In between rodent die offs, it smells of sewer gas and rodent urine, which is better than rodent decomposition, trust me.

If you’re saying, How can this be? There are rules and codes! You’re sort of right, except there’s no code enforcement in the unannexed part of our county. Even where rules are more clear than in rural Tennessee, it can be tricky to challenge a landlord.

We’ve learned to close off most rooms in winter and live mostly in the den, to filter our water, to stop using any lights with switches that make a sizzling noise, and so on. At a do-able rent and with our own dome in the works, we thought we could live with almost anything. We were probably wrong. It’s been rough. When the rent was hiked, we hit our limit.

So, where to? Do we rent somewhere else? I made the mistake of adding up the rent we’ve paid for the privilege of being terrorized by our landlord so far: $40,000. Instead of paying to move so we can keep paying rent somewhere else, we’ve decided it’s time to find a way to live on our own land ASAP, whatever that looks like.

Fall color is brighter on our mountain, anyway 🙂 Here’s 18 enchanting seconds of it from a drone on a windy day:

Plan A: Hail Mary on the Dome Build
Chris worked very, very hard this summer to move the dome build forward. If we could finish the exterior shell before the frost in November, the interior could be worked on over the winter, and move-in might happen before trees were colorful again (that was our thinking; not real life, but we were optimistic). That meant footers, foundation, and basement walls had to be in place by October. Our plans were ready, our driveway was mostly ready, our budget was ready, our building team was…flaky. They’re good, which means they’re busy, which they’ve been fairly clear with us about, in a builder sort of way. As a consolation prize, they’ve been coaching us on how to do some projects ourselves.

We’ve always been interested in building part of this ourselves. However, we’re also working full-time jobs, not as home builders. Learning about homebuilding is another full-time job. Actually building a home is another. As summer veered into fall, our “free time” matured into a vortex of research and manual labor. Chris traveled for work during the week, then came home to organize excavation and rebar take-offs. He found tractor forks for Greta to handle more tasks without having to rent separate equipment.

When the rent went up, Chris kicked building efforts into high gear, getting bids from subcontractors and learning the ins and outs of concrete forms. He scheduled a compaction inspection of the housepad to confirm that the dome will be on solid ground. With the pad ready, we measured and painted the outline of our future dome, an intense process that took stakes, measuring tapes, a compass, and hours of discussion. We measured and painted footer outlines. Chris had the rebar delivered so the footers and concrete could be poured.

Incredible Tiny Ideas
Even as Chris was making things happen, my focus was shifting to plan B. If the dome didn’t go up, we still needed to leave the yellow rental dome at our nearest inconvenience. Because while Chris was away for work all week, I was working from home at the yellow dome, slowly losing my last threads of sanity to the landlord on the lawn.

One weekend while helping Chris tie rebar, I played phonetag with a tiny home builder in Morristown, TN. Morristown is 45 minutes away. It’s where Calista Flockhart’s parents retired and where Randy Jones builds his Incredible Tiny Homes in the epic ruins of an industrial park.

Randy invited us to tour his tiny homes. It took under 10 minutes. Tiny homes are WYSIWYG.

We liked his new line of utilitarian container homes. We began to consider combining 2 container homes for a total of 320 heated square feet.

Going tiny is alluring the way that going off-grid is. Severing reliance on material and modern conveniences can feel like freedom. Of course, making up for a lack of grid power or storage space can be as time-consuming as working a job to pay the power bill. To each their own.

Chris and I always knew going off-grid was too strong a shift for our lifestyle. We suspected going tiny would be, too, but we considered it long enough for Chris to ask GC Doug for tiny advice.

If you haven’t read all our posts, GC stands for General Contractor, and Doug is as much our teacher as he is the GC of our dome. GC Doug asked Chris why we didn’t upfit our barn instead.

DUH
Our metal pole barn is 720 interior square feet with 360 covered square feet outside. We built it as basic storage, with metal walls and a gravel floor. Our plan was to come back to it after finishing the dome: install a real floor, a workshop, power, water, maybe septic.

But now, since the dome obviously wants to wait, we’ll do the barn first.

While the container-home solution was great and ready-made – they’re plumbed, wired, windowed, move-in-ready – there are many reasons the barn upfit is better for us, besides more than 2x the space.

We won’t have to excavate and surface another area on our land as a homepad. We won’t have to bring power, water, or septic to an area we weren’t already planning to. It’s costing about $5,000 to do that for the barn, even with power-company credits and reasonable septic-install cost. We could’ve saved a lot of money with a compost toilet or other homemade septic solution, but nahhh.

One concern was that we’d have to do for the barn what we couldn’t do this year for the dome: get builders to show. It hasn’t been as much of a problem for the barn. Probably because it’s 1/4 the size and has right angles. We’re offering bite-sized, uncomplicated jobs at a time of the year when the weather’s nice.

As of this post, the barn bungalow has a permitted and professionally installed septic tank. Plumbing is roughed in, and the slab was poured after the termite prevention went in. Windows and exterior doors are on order. Next, we frame, insulate, plumb some more, wire, run power and water, add walls, install the kitchen, plumb again, tile the shower and backsplash, move in. Something like that.

After we build the dome, we might partially dismantle the barn bungalow so it’s 1/2 garage-1/2 apartment, or we might leave it and rent it. That’s a decision for later. In the meantime, living there will mean we can finally get on with living on the domestead. Farmscaping, building gardens, planting fruit, chickens! It will put us next to the dome site, too, to help move that forward, but we’ve pledged total patience with the dome build. If you can’t enjoy the journey, what do you have?

We’ll keep keeping you posted, but for more mini updates, follow our Instagram.