[Homestead] "The King Of Scrounge" - simpler living

Lynn Wigglesworth lynnw1366 at hotmail.com
Thu Nov 20 14:37:45 EST 2008


Thanks, Bob, for posting this. The article has pictures...what a cool house. 
I save all kinds of junk, but don't often find such a good use for it. I 
have dozens of sashes I found in the trash that I intend to use for a 
movable greenhouse (a la Coleman)...one of  hundreds of projects I may never 
get to.

Lynn Wigglesworth

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "bob ford" <bobford79 at yahoo.com>
To: <homestead at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2008 2:17 PM
Subject: [Homestead] "The King Of Scrounge" - simpler living


>I picked this article up on survival blog.  The man is in rural new york 
>doing some of the type of things discussed on the list
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> King of Scrounge: North Country man finds simple living is easy
>
> by Tim Knauss, Staff writer
>
> Sunday October 19, 2008, 3:06 PM
>
> Dick Blume / The Post-Standard
>
> Jim Juczak stands in front of the home he built in the North Country from 
> salvaged materials. The walls of the 18-sided home are made of paper 
> sludge from a nearby mill.
>
> Jim Juczak hates mortgages. When he started building his home in rural 
> Jefferson County, he resolved to stay out of debt.
>
> The house he finished five years later is an 18-sided structure with 3,000 
> square feet of space. It is mortgage-free.
>
> And much of it is made from junk.
>
> The support beams are salvaged from a bowling alley that was being 
> demolished.
>
> A two-story concrete column that supports the center of the house is made 
> from scrapped manholes.
>
> Windows, interior doors, sinks, tubs and other materials were bought cheap 
> or salvaged for free after being removed from renovated buildings.
>
> And the mortar for the outer wall was made from paper sludge, a waste 
> material from a nearby mill. Juczak had to get a special permit from the 
> state Department of Environmental Conservation to divert the sludge from a 
> landfill.
>
> "Everyone gave it (the permit) with much humor, because this is basically 
> garbage," Juczak said. "You know -- 'Oh, my gosh! He's living in a house 
> made of trash!'"
>
> Among homesteading enthusiasts in the North Country, Juczak, 50, has a 
> reputation as the sultan of scrounge. His 50-acre property even contains a 
> submarine-like guest house made from an old 10,000-gallon fuel tank buried 
> into a hillside. (The windowless bedroom is, as the Realtors say, cozy.)
>
> "He's the king of scrounging everything," said Patricia Greene, of Canton, 
> a member of the Ark Community, a group that shares information about 
> sustainable living.
>
>
>
> Dick Blume / The Post-Standard
> The walls of Jim Juczak's home are lined with canned food. The family 
> grows about 40 percent of all their food as they work to live modestly and 
> frugally.
> Now Juczak is reaching out to a wider audience.
>
> He has taken a year-long leave from his job as a middle-school shop 
> teacher to spend more time spreading a message of simple living and 
> self-reliance. Among the first items on his agenda is to finish the book 
> he's writing, "The High Art and Subtle Science of Scrounging."
>
> He's also taking on speaking engagements at energy fairs and conferences 
> around the country.
>
> And he's planning to expand the number of workshops he hosts at his 
> property in Adams to a dozen a year. Topics include how to make a wind 
> turbine, how to grow and preserve your own food, and how to build a home 
> for $20,000 or less, among others.
>
> Juczak typically charges $100 a day for his workshops, which can run one 
> to four days.
>
> At the end of the year, Juczak will decide whether to return to school 
> teaching or to pursue his new calling full-time.
>
> "I like to do stuff like this," Juczak said. "I like to pass on the 
> message that you can live a bit simpler."
>
> It's a message people need to hear, Greene said.
>
> The debt-driven, energy-intensive American lifestyle is not only harmful 
> to the environment; it's also getting more difficult to achieve as oil and 
> other fossil fuels become more expensive, she said. A more self-sufficient 
> and less acquisitive lifestyle can be a rewarding alternative.
>
> "It requires a kind of mentality that looks at being poor as being rich," 
> Greene said.
>
> Richard Freudenberger, the publisher of North Carolina-based BackHome 
> magazine, has advised Juczak on sections of his book. The worse the 
> economy gets, the more books like that attract interest, he said.
>
> "When things get tough, you would be amazed at how people shift their 
> thinking," Freudenberger said.
>
> 'Less is more'
> On a recent morning, Juczak (pronounced JU-zack) chatted about 
> home-building while cutting up apples and tossing them into a big pot on 
> the stove to make applesauce. (It's a commercial-sized cast iron stove he 
> picked up for $300 when the restaurant upgraded to stainless steel.)
>
> The apples -- 12 buckets and pails worth -- were free, picked from the 
> tree of a neighbor who prefers store-bought apples.
>
> "She's very happy not to have to rake rotten apples off her lawn," Juczak 
> said.
>
> In 1996, Juczak and his wife, Krista, bought 50 acres outside of Adams 
> Center. The Juczaks grow about 40 percent of their own food. Canning jars 
> full of applesauce, string beans, jam, sauerkraut and other foods line the 
> walls.
>
> The Juczaks have opened their property to other residents who want to 
> adopt the self-reliant lifestyle. Five new households, including a family 
> of four, are planning or building homes there.
>
> The Juczaks call their place Woodhenge, "a sustainable community and 
> self-reliance educational center."
>
> Among the soon-to-be residents is Elizabeth "Lee" Brown, an Oswego County 
> native. She, her husband and two children fled their fast-paced urban life 
> in Virginia, where she had a high-paying job with a military contractor. 
> They plan to build a house constructed of straw bales at Woodhenge.
>
> "Less is more," Brown said of their decision. "Less is peaceful. Less 
> gives you space in your head to figure out what you want to do."
>
> Like the Juczak's home, two guest houses at Woodhenge represent outsized 
> feats of recycling.
>
> One of them is made from a 10,000-gallon kerosene tank recovered from a 
> factory that closed. After the tank was steam-cleaned, Juczak and friends 
> cut entry holes on either side of the 10-foot by 27-foot tank. Then they 
> buried it on one side with an earthen berm.
>
> The second is a recycled motel. When a bank in Adams planned to raze a 
> motel and build a branch, Juczak scrambled to buy the motel for $2,500. He 
> spent another $2,500 moving it.
>
> Following an interior renovation and the addition of a new roof and porch, 
> the former motel is a guest cottage with two bedrooms, a large community 
> room and a kitchen.
>
>
> Dick Blume / The Post-Standard
> Jim Juczak sits at the table of his 3,000-square-foot, mortgage-free home 
> he built using salvaged materials that otherwise would have gone straight 
> to a landfill.
> Together on the Ark
> Rich Douglass, a carpenter from St. Lawrence County who helped work on 
> Juczak's house, said finding used materials is critical for self-reliant 
> homesteads.
>
> Douglass, his wife and three young children live with no electricity, no 
> car and no running water on a 160-acre farm in Hermon. They can get by on 
> $6,000 a year, he said.
>
> "Most of our stuff is used," Douglass said. "I've never bought any 
> furniture. The only things we've ever bought for our children are socks 
> and underwear -- everything else we've gotten used."
>
> Two years ago, Douglass started the Ark Community. The group, which 
> includes Juczak, typically attracts about 40 people to its monthly 
> pot-luck dinners, mostly from the Potsdam area. Members demonstrate 
> homesteading skills or share work such as barn-raising.
>
> In rural Northern New York, Juczak is a long way from his roots. He was 
> born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island. But Juczak said he always 
> found city life too busy and wasteful.
>
> He leans toward Spartan living. During graduate school, he lived in a 
> converted school bus. If he didn't have family, he said, he would have 
> built himself a tiny house.
>
> "I would have put up a cave," he said, "One window, and bury the thing. 
> Six-foot six-inch ceilings."
>
> Juczak said his first inclination, after building the house at Woodhenge, 
> was to ring the property with barbed wire and get a pack of Rottweilers 
> "to protect myself." In his more paranoid moments, he fears there could be 
> a breakdown in society as energy grows ever more expensive, leave many 
> people unprepared and panicked.
>
> A political libertarian, Juczak has little faith in government to address 
> such a crisis.
>
> But the more he thought about it, he does have faith in community. Far 
> from putting up a fence, Juczak makes every effort to be neighborly.
>
> "Independence is good, but nobody can be completely independent," he said. 
> "The best way for me to look out for myself is to make sure others are 
> looking out for me because they know I'll help them out. ... I'd rather 
> depend upon a neighbor than a municipality or a government."
>
> Building with sludge
> Juczak started building his house in 1997 in his spare time, with help 
> from friends, relatives and hired teen-aged students from his shop 
> classes. It took five years to finish, during which he trolled the county 
> for materials.
>
> At a local concrete company, he found the discarded manholes that would 
> make the central "tower" of his house -- a massive cylindrical column made 
> of steel-reinforced concrete. Seven feet wide and 23 feet tall, the tower 
> rises through the center of the house, supporting the roof rafters and 
> second-story floor joists.
>
> It's made from sections of manholes that were rejected for minor 
> imperfections. Juczak's cost to buy and stack the manholes: $550.
>
> The tower also provides central heating. Juczak worked with a friend to 
> make a two-ton, wood-burning stove in the tower's hollow interior. He then 
> filled the column's interior 16 feet high with sand, creating a 35-ton 
> radiator that provides steady heat throughout the house.
>
> The huge roof rafters and perimeter support posts for his house were 
> salvaged, along with other lumber, from a Watertown bowling alley as it 
> was being demolished. Juczak and a part-time crew of high school kids 
> spent the better part of a summer disassembling the bowling alley's 
> 100-foot-long trusses and taking nails out of the recycled framing lumber.
>
> He paid $10,000 for the materials, but figures they were worth five times 
> that.
>
> The 16-inch log ends used in the cordwood masonry walls were cut from a 
> forest of red pine decimated by North Country ice storms. Since the dead 
> trees were too small for lumber, they were his for the taking.
>
> So was the mortar for the masonry outer wall. It was made from paper 
> sludge, the waste material that didn't make it through the filter screens 
> at a nearby paper mill. The mortar was 80 percent sludge, 20 percent 
> masonry cement.
>
> To get electricity from National Grid, Juczak would have had to pay $6,800 
> for the utility company to bring in an electric line, pole and transformer 
> to serve them, Juczak said.
>
> Instead, he built a household electric system that runs on 1-kilowatt 
> worth of solar panels and a 1-kilowatt wind turbine, with an occasional 
> boost from a gas-powered generator. And the family learned to conserve.
>
> The Juczaks and their 11-year-old daughter use just 120 kilowatt-hours a 
> month, about one-sixth what a typical household uses.
>
> "You can view me as a tree hugger or as a cheapskate," Juczak said. "The 
> end result is the same."
>
> And which is he, at heart?
>
> "A cheapskate."
>
>
> http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2008/10/king_of_scrounge_north_country.html%20
>
>
>
>
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