Wanna build your ideal own house? Here's how

[james armstrong]

Wanna build your ideal own house? Here's how.
If you know of a better way lets hear it. If you don’t, lets do it.
Wanna end private land ownership as a way of exploiting people especially their housing needs? Read on.
Five things are needed to build a house.  A site with pp., labour, management, materials and an income from work.
Two significant things are not required.  Large savings,  a mortgage and  paying an absurdly inflated high price for a 'market house'
Sites.
I know of twenty locations earmarked as possible sites which qualify for pp., and are owned by a Community Land Trust.
Their ethos is to stop the people of the CLT being exploited housewise by land owners and landlords as they were systematically until recently.
They have a secondary ethos, to spread the word  that CLT's is the way forward to stop housing exploitation.   Can you get such a site? Read on.
Labour. 
 Building a house is not rocket science. I am self taught and have built two houses and currently finishing  a module of a third house complete with double glazing, mahogany doors, central heating, wash basin, well insulated floor etc ceiling, stunning lighting, power points, telephone etc.
 If you have the skill you can teach others If you don’t I  andothers can teach you while you  wiork on someone else's house.   There is a potential free labour force of such people willing to work in return for their keep to complete someone else's dream house to learn how to build their own.
Management.
Drawing up the plan, submitting the building regs and laying out the site is straightforward. I have done it so you can too, with help from me and others.  If you have a construction skill, are an architect etc you will be a teacher of others.
Materials
Available in any builders' merchants at a very high price or, as I have done, salvaged the very best  quality materials from shop fitters who invariably are glad that excellent glass,   plywood, 4x2, facings, flooring , electric and plumbing fittings are not thrown away.   Virtually all my materials currently come from one shop and one refitted house.   A minority from the local a recycling yard at one tenth the price of new and only odds and ends have had to be bought.  Collecting , storing, cataloguing and delivering salvaged building materials 'packaged for one house' and catalogued to be viewed on the internet , is environ friendly, often free, local, convenient, saves 'material miles' , saves    dwindling land-fill sites and is eminently possible.  It has already been successfully done - see the Tyers Street House built  in Kensington  of recycled materials and sold at £200,000 to aid Nicaragua.
No mortgage is needed.  Nor any high 'market' price- 
The cost of materials in a traditional  may be £60,000, using recycled materials a target would be  £30,000 .  The key thing is that it is savable   from income, and is needed only incrementally as you work on the house at weekends and holidays.
You don’t need a mortgage. Though it may be possible to get central funding to tide you over.
A mortgage is not required
There was a time when Building Societies had the ethos of mutual help. By converting to a bank they have abandoned mutuality and patently embraced exploitation of the weaker , more stressed's need for housing, the more desperate  the better in the eyes of the banks, the corporate builders and of the Chancellor.  
Ambition and aim
To stimulate self build housing as a way of beating the system and making a significant contribution to Housing supply  in UK (as it is in the continent and the world, but not in UK)
A self build CLT will co-operate to buy land . When the moverment is reproduced the ambition is for the political significance to  gather strength and be recognised and the movement grow in many areas as an alternative scenario  to private land ownership. 
With political will and   public demand the first steps will be taken to 'buy' all the land.   The key difficulty is the price of land, but the legislation already exists for buying the land required for public use at pre development value prices. Only the benighted re-actionary government don’t implement this legislation except to buy up perfectly good houses to destroy and present large -oven ready- sites in city centres  to corporate house builders  to make profits from.
This also is a key belief- that as self build grows in significance it will be recognised that it si a human right to provide your own house for homemaking. This relaisation will chage the ethos from exploiting peole through  monopoly of the land   to recognising that land is a universal resource. And that self providing your own desirable house is a human currently denied.  

Action
People   interested in putting together a team  which provides labour to build, and also systematically salvages high quality building materials , and subscribes to the ethos above shold contact me. 

We can start small. And offer the team to this CLT to build one house to set the ball rolling.
A Mercedes van  could store the materials .Team members living in  any of the  conurbations are ideally suited to salvage catalogue and store materials.

The project qualifies for funding and sponsorship 
Part of the whole project is publicity and a film of work in progress, and a travelling workshop at the festivals will gather adherants.
Can  people interested in joining a team contact me and   we'll call a meeting and take off.

                                                           Self build CLT proposal
James     


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