Home building barn raising
Some mornings I wake up in the loft next to Big Country and the snoozing children, open my eyes to the cheery cedar boards above me, gaze around our little tiny house, and think, “we built this? We live here?” Home building is usually something only a team of professionals and many years’ savings can make happen.
But there are many people employing various means to secure shelter for themselves. I’m always inspired to read their stories – sometimes winding circuitously through many side roads, missteps and adventures.
And lately, with the restlessness of Spring perhaps, we’ve been revisiting our long-lost love of gorgeous wooden-sided yurts . . . but that’s a dream for another day!
If you missed it, the last Hammock Reads on all things identity, is here. Now . . .
Rural yurt on grass with blue sky
Hammock Reads May 2018: Home Building
More Than 70 Volunteers Fix Up Childhood Home so Homeless Veteran Can Move Back In, Good News Network . . . A beautiful community effort to get a man back into his childhood home.
On Round Windows, and Purple Trim, and Other Necessary Things, Esther Emery . . . Love this yurt mama’s reflections on pouring effort into fun creative projects when homestead practicality and survival demands one’s attention, too.
My 10-Year Odyssey Through America’s Housing Crisis, Ryan Dezember, The Wall Street Journal . . . From flowers in the window boxes to drug dens down the street and fires in the front yards. How did this happen to their dream home?
What Happens at an Amish Barn Raising? Amish America . . . A quick, fascinating look at the age-old way dozens of men (and the dozens of women feeding them) raise a large barn.
Live Homeless, Homesick, and Free, Jon Bloom, Desiring God . . . “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” -C.S. Lewis
Tiny Homes on the Move, Lloyd Kahn, Shelter Publications . . . Glowing with a whimsical joy and displaying a rainbow of over a thousand photographs, this book offers glimpses of lives on the move. The simplicity, beauty, craftsmanship, and quirkiness of tiny homes, cabins, yurts, trucks, vans, and sailboats are on display.