Extreme Simplicity: Homesteading in the City

Extreme Simplicity: Homesteading in the City

[Nyerges is the co-author of “Extreme Simplicity: Homesteading in the City,” and other books. He also conducts on-going classes.  He can be reached at www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com]

Since there has been an increase in popularity in our “Extreme Simplicity” book, published in 2002, I wanted to share some of that book. The ideas expressed in the book are somewhat timeless, and are every bit as relevant today as when the book was written.

 “Everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.”  -- Leo Tolstoy.

THE HOUSE

When we purchased our home in the mid-1980s, it was one of the most dilapidated places in the neighborhood.  Clearly we had work ahead of us.  A duplex rental with a distant owner and many tenants, the building had been sorely neglected.  Yet, we were glad to discover as those first weeks and months went by that the damages due to neglect were mostly cosmetic or easily repaired.

There were no serious problems with the building’s structure, apart from a leaky roof, which we replaced as soon as we could afford to.   The water pressure could be better, which would mean replacing some of the pipes.  And the electrical system, though surely fine for the 1950s, would need to be modernized.

Our need to make these improvements gave us an opportunity to reconsider our priorities for the house in light of our longer-term goals.  We wanted our various projects to steer us in the direction of self-reliance – even in an urban setting – and in the direction of living our lives lightly.  All this we proposed to do within a modest budget on a city lot in Los Angeles.

The interior of the building was generally shabby, and the back section was especially very run-down.  We re-tiled the front kitchen and bathroom and painted all the walls in the front section of the duplex so we could rent it out for income.

We removed the garbage disposals from both kitchens and put them in the city’s recycling bin. These costly and noisy appliances aren’t necessary and cause endless plumbing problems.  Plus, think about it: What are we doing when we use a garbage disposal?  Using extra water and extra electricity to grind up “garbage” so it can pass down the sewer lines and end up eventually in the ocean.  Our choice is to give our food scraps to our animals, or our worm farm/ compost pit.

We also removed the automatic dishwashes from each kitchen. We’ve heard interesting debates about whether these modern devices use more or less water than simply washing dishes by hand. Usually electrical use is not factored into such debates, and besides, we find that the quiet time spent washing dishes, looking out the window toward the chicken coop, is a waking meditation.  We salvaged whatever hardware we could from the dishwashers, and sent the rest to the recycling center.

Although the house came with two natural-gas wall heaters, one was dangerously corroded and we had it disabled.  The other we used only when necessary.  Eventually, we installed a fireplace in the back, unheated section. Many people have been surprised, even shocked, to learn that we had no “modern” heating – our merino wool sweaters and our fireplace were usually adequate during the Southern California winters.

Nor did we have “central cooling.”  In the summer, however, we discovered that our location had very still air, and we didn’t get much of a breeze through the house. Partly, this was due to the fact that we closed and locked our doors at night.  Over the years, we replaced regular screen doors with steel security doors, so we could leave the doors open to the air all night without worrying about a break-in.   This has made a terrific difference, allowing cooler air to flow through the house.

We mentioned the old roof, which leaked terribly during winter rains, but we couldn’t afford the expense of a new roof right away, and we were convinced that the existing dark brown roofing would keep the house much hotter in summer than necessary.  We researched the many “liquid rubber” roofing products on the market.  For a few hundred dollars, we painted the whole roof with a coat of white Roofer’s Best, which is sold primarily for use on the metal roofs of trailers to help keep down solar-heat absorption, and not as a roof sealant.  It did, however, seal most of our leaks.  Its main value has been to keep the house 15 to 20 degrees cooler during that summer than it had been with the dark roof.  It is amazing to be inside a cool house, with no air conditioner, when outside summer temperatures are over 100 degrees f.   We simply used natural principles – in this case, the reflective properties of a white roof.  Eventually, we had our roof professionally reshingled in the lightest color available.

Keep in mind that we lived within Los Angeles city boundaries – a major metropolitan area. We were not living out in the country, nor were we living off-the-grid, supplying all our household power with solar, or going without electricity altogether.  Yet, we feel that all too many city dwellers have used an urban home as their excuse not to adopt some of the methods practiced by country people, thereby missing all kinds of opportunities for special learning and savings. Even given the constraints of urban life, we have tried to grow as much of our food and provide as much of our own oxygen as possible, recycling whatever we can, collecting rainwater, and living our lives with no excessive use of resources.

THE YARD

While the house wasn’t in dire shape, the yard was a wasteland. The previous residents had used the front yard alongside the driveway to park and work on their cars, resulting in soil as hard-packed as adobe.  Some weeds and crabgrass had managed to pop up here and there after rains, but otherwise it was a barren wasteland.

The garage door was broken and fall off and had been propped up with a two-by-four.  One of our first projects was to have an aluminum garage door installed, which is lighter, easier to operate, and need no maintenance.  Instantly, we had another usable enclosed space.

The front courtyard was a hodgepodge of introduced ornamental plants.  A stand of banana trees in a planter had never been thinned, and the expanding roots were breaking the brickwork.  We had to think the bananas and rebuild the brickwork.

Over time, we gradually replanted vegetation in the front yard and courtyard, including several fruit and nut trees.  There was a large pine tree in a very tight spot by the corner of the house.  Severely malformed, it grew at a 30 degree angle into the neighbor’s yard.  We don’t ordinarily approve of cutting down trees, but we made an exception in this case because we saw no way to right the tree, and because of the fire hazard of a pine tree so close to the house.  So we felled, split, and dried it, and eventually it became firewood.

As we cleaned up around the back of the house, we discovered that the porch area had a patio of bricks that had been completely covered with dead grass and soil.

The back yard was mostly bare except for some grasses in the lower area.  There was only one tree, a grapefruit, growing in the backyard, and we often wished aloud that we’d inherited any other kind of fruit tree.  After all, grapefruits were way down on our list of desirable fruits.  And yet, a few years after moving in, we finally juiced the tree’s fruit and found ourselves enjoying one of the best juices we’ve ever had.

In the following 20+ years that we lived there, we planted many more trees in the back yard – at least a dozen fruit trees.

One of our first building projects out back was a compost pit and worm farm, because we don’t believe in tossing out recyclable garbage for the city workers to take to the dump.  We also made a vegetable garden, and a coop and yard for our chickens and potbellied pig.  We placed our rabbit hutch (which we built) directly over the compost pit so that urine and droppings continued to feed the earthworms, and we rarely had to clean out the  hutch.

We regarded our small urban homestead as a research station.  Here we were able to try out many gardening, recycling, and building ideas to see if they will really work or if they need refining.  We endeavored to let our living home laboratory be truly an extension of our values and our thinking.

We also realized that one’s home is much more than the physical structure, and that one can improve upon and elevate mundane physicality by thinking more broadly and more clearly.  This we strived to do in little ways and big ways, which we relate in the book.  We are aware that how we do things is as important (if not more important) that what we do.