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["Toni Hawryluk" <tonihawr AT msn.com>]

tvoivozhd---Denise is getting old and set in her ways---take the advice of a 
relatively young man to keep your sourdough bubbling in a warm place---and 
keep a couple samples in bottles in the refrigerator to rebuild the bubbly if 
it goes bad for any reason.

Shows how 'old and infirm' I *am* -
with my fingers doing my thinking my
brain was out of gear - I *could* have
thought of that myself. Yeah. Right.
"Hindsight is 20-20." Well, not really,
there's only one - oops ! there are
'ladies' out there .... now LOL !
>From tonihawr AT msn.com  Tue Oct  5 16:22:04 2004
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Subject: Re: [Homestead]  Bread Addendum
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004 13:16:39 -0700
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----- Original Message ----- 
From: Tvoivozhd<mailto:tvoivozd AT infionline.net> 
>  He only made white bread though.

"White bread for white folks" - now
there's an expanding niche market !!
>From tvoivozd AT infionline.net  Tue Oct  5 16:37:36 2004
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From: Tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>
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Subject: Re: [Homestead] Homestead survival plan
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Don Bowen wrote:

> We seem to have let this thread die but I think it is much too
> important to just ignore.  Many of us are getting older and there will
> come a time when physical activity will become more difficult.  A
> small holding with a garden and shop, all constructed by ones own
> hands may be an ideal retirement but building much of that is a young
> mans game.  What if you have to start over at an older age?  Older
> people are forced into retirement at an earlier age as companies out
> source work and only hire the cheapest workers.  There are any number
> of reasons to start over so what would be a good strategy to set
> oneself up for a self sufficient retirement even with limited income
> and physical resources?
>
> Don Bowen
> Awl Knotted Up Woodworking
> Valley Center, CA             http://www.braingarage.com
>
>
tvoivozhd---yup, can't start too early.  Thought I had a lot of time
left as consistent with longevity of my immediate ancestors, didn't even
think of toxic exposure from water and air in Houston resulting in
cancer of bone marrow.  At 79 I could outrun my daughter up and down the
hills, chasing the #%&* cattle escapees.  Four years later, can't even
walk out of the house to do any useful work, tied by a late-life
umbilical cord to the Salem VA hospital.  Since I left Abaco Island in
the Bahamas (lousy medical facilities there), except from my
general-practitioner "Out Island Doctor" I once posted about, I have
always lived close to a good hospital complex, not intentionally (which
exhibits my poor judgment), but accidentally, so when a cholesystectomy
became necessary, bladder-cancer removal became a dire necessity, and a
couple of heart attacks required a double-bypass or die in an  hour, I
was driven there within thirty minutes.

So today, if I were over fifty and alone, I would choose a homesite
within thirty minutes drive (by myself, a relative, friend or emergency
ambulence service) to a hospital emergency room (make sure that exists
too---the for-profit madness has shut down a lot of ER's.  I am pretty
sure some unknown economic catastrophes are descending on us, but with
your skills that most people lack, and some machines, you can always
keep a sufficient cash-flow coming in to not only survive, but to live
in relative comfort, six-mile-wide-comet and biowarfare permitting..

If you're building in late middle age, don't worry about house
life---build the house quick with small, light building components, and
to be on the safe side, assume no help, hired or given.  I would still
use  on-site materials if available, probably compressed-earth block for
walls, possibly cordwood masonry, with latter treated for termites.  For
instant housing, if none already existed on the building site, as I
posted two or three days ago, keep an eye out for a $1000 dollar mobile
home that comes up at fairly regular intervals in a local newspaper or
trader-publication.  You don't have to wait, as I also posted a few days
ago, you should always be able to uncover one by talking to the managers
of nearby trailer-parks, leaving notes on their community bulletin
boards.  Trailer park operators don't like mobile homes over five years
old, want them out, think they degrade the appearance of their park,
reduce rental income.   Then there are the divorces, deaths that cause
distress sales of any kind of housing, particularly mobile homes which
are bad candidates for rental and damage by renters.

Any house I built would be fireproof inside and out---especially in a
rural area surrounded by flammable trees and more-flammable abandoned
and uncut hayfields.  Why my major preference at this time is CEB walls,
pre-stressed concrete roof beams for a hex-house, with standing-seam
metal roof, or even better, six triangular raised-lip ferroconcrete
pans.  For a rectangular shed-structure I would make the roof of
ferroconcrete channels, well tied to the wall bond-beam and and the
channels bolted together, with their lips covered with a through-bolted
metal or ferroconcrete cap.  Either hex or rectangular roof with a
three-foot overhang to provide summer shade, move rain away from the
(slab) foundation (no damned basement)
Ken Kern books, , Owner-Built Home, Owner-Built Homestead would be your
best building bible on all sorts of building methods, including building
his house around three sides of a move-in, move-out-to-resell, mobile home.

Hell, you and I have similar backgrounds, little different, but similar
skills, and yours are a lot more recent than mine and all are saleable
in some fashion or other, some immediately, some requiring  longer-term
preparation and some investment.  If I weren't already  counting the
days left, I would be building a house across the valley right now at
age 83---with longer life because I would be building it for my
daughter, not myself---and of course, since it is already here, I would
build out of this old barracks instead of the $1000 mobile home I would
otherwise use.

You have sold or will be selling your California property, so you know
the capital limitations you have to work within. First thing is to find
an area in which you could grow old and feeble (nobody is exempt from
that) with income potential, immediate and long-term, and right-now
hospital facilities.  The NEW REALITY is good medical care, driven by
the fact that medical care did not exist a few decades back, but now
does, so health is now the dominant demand in the market, dominant
demand on the political scene, blotting up fifteen percent of GDP and it
is unlikely any other priority will ever be higher, including National
Defense, roads etc.  In the interest of reducing healthcare costs, U.S.,
like all other nations will go to a lower-cost Universal Heathcare
System, paid entirely or almost entirely by taxes.  You have to live in
the interim, so figure out your alternative means of staying alive and
well as you can until the U.S. falls in line with other nations.

I would stay away from big cities for a variety of reasons, for me and
my daughter, Roanoke appears about right, there are other similar cities
scattered around the U.S.  Roanoke is economically stable, neither boom
or bust.  Land values are climbing, but still tolerable, a sufficient
market to produce jobs, and absorb what one decides to  produce on the
farm, garden products or products of a rural factory.  We have an area
population of about 250,000, under 100,000 in the City of Roanoke.  Amd
in hill country, there are a LOT of springs, creeks and pond-sites.  I
like ponds too, for the fish that are as free as squirrels and wild rabbits.

Take a look at my recent posts on Home Businesses or Rural Manufacturing
for generating a homestead income.  I'm working (slowly, sporadically)
on several income projects in greater detail, costed out with supplier,
subcontractor bids etc., mostly for my kids, but applicable to anyone
else.  Hope I last long enough to complete this last project, no way of
knowing whether I will or not.

Something that my youngest daughter is looking into in the area south of
Philadelphia (and any other ex-dairy farm state)
Most of the hundreds of thousands of dairy farms that were abandoned,
never found a new use or new owners.  Really distressed property, as
distressed as Okie farms that blew away in the dust storms of the 1930's.

A lot of abandoned dairy farms have structurally sound houses, barns, a
well with a repairable windmill.  The house will be unsulated, easily
and cheaply rectfied with blown-in, boric acid-treated cellulose.  Some
glass will be gone, check the roof for necessary repairs.  Anything you
find will probably be better than this old barracks we have lived in
since 1990.  Paint it if it offends your esthetic sensibilities---we
didn't.  If you have really bad taste you don't care.  Some are close
enough to midsize towns to provide jobs, markets for garden and rural
manufacturing products.  Check the proximity to good hospital(s), that
may thin out your choices a bit.

Might have to short-term rent an apartment to have a bed and roof
overhead while you make daytime sorties within a reasonable radius to
look for rural property---check tax records at the courthouse to see
what rural properties are delinquent in real estate taxes, those records
will also give the address of the landowner to whom you can write or
make a telephone call---I like snailmail better, gives you a paper trail
on any transaction that may evolve.