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  • From: bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] "The King Of Scrounge" - simpler living
  • Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:17:44 -0800 (PST)

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

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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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