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Introducing The Handmade House Project....and Club

  • Writer: Nick J Miller
    Nick J Miller
  • Nov 2, 2016
  • 5 min read

Updated: Jul 31, 2020

When I published my post-Yestival thoughts on Medium last week, I had no idea how well it would go down. I had an inkling that there were people out there with similar frustrations and ideas but the response has been overwhelming (in the best way possible). And the ball is starting to roll.

I’m going to try and put down as concisely as possible my plan of action for the moment. If you think you can help out, I’d love to hear from you (if I haven’t already). But first up, a few things worth saying….

  1. Really annoyingly, I’m about to get stuck into the busiest part of my year. My next day off from work is Christmas Day, and evenings just don’t exist until January as far as I’m concerned. So this isn’t exactly ideal timing to try and launch a big new project. That said, I just had to get these ideas out there and I’m super glad I did. But I’m not actually going to have much time over the next 10 weeks to do much in the way of moving and shaking so you’ll have to bear with me if things don’t happen as quickly as they could.

  2. If I haven’t responded to your message or email yet, don’t worry — I will do soon. I’ve just been drowning in email and work the past few days and have only just made it back to the surface and been able to think clearly.

  3. I’m going to be 100% transparent and open about the development of this idea of mine. Because it’s not just my idea (it was formed by many discussions with many people at Yestival), and even it was, ideas are made to be shared. I’d like to lead this project, but would also like to encourage you to get involved as much as you can. Everybody can help out somehow. We can make this happen. And make a big difference. So I’m going to say “we” a fair bit, despite it really being just me at the moment.

In short, the following has happened since last Thursday…

  • I have been pledged several thousands pounds towards this project. You know who you are and I can’t thank you enough.

  • I’ve put in a formal offer on the land in Wales and will wait to hear (but am not that confident it will come to anything — more on that later).

  • I’ve gone through a whirlwind of emotions including “what the hell have I just done?”, “this is the best move I’ve ever made in this great game called life” and everything in between. At the moment, I’m leaning towards the latter.

  • I awoke yesterday morning (1st Nov) with a plan that we can get started on immediately. This is that plan:

The Handmade House Project

This is the name I’ve come up with at the moment for this project. I think it is simple and to the point and sums up succinctly what this is all about. I’m going to start a Facebook group when I next get a hour or two spare (and maybe put together a quick website) and hopefully we can keep the conversation going there. I’ll post anything on there that I think will help move this project forward.


The Handmade House Club

This is something I want to start building straight away. Essentially (and initially) it will be a showcase of selected handmade houses from around the world. I’m going to start putting the word out in various groups online that I’ve been involved with while building my house-bus. The focus will be on people who have built homes themselves, that live in them full-time (or at least that these homes are their only or main home), and that cost less than £25,000 to build. While mine only cost £10k-ish and a lot of handmade homes are built for this or less, I want see what’s out there at this end of the spectrum. I’m hoping that doing this will bring together a core community of like-minded individuals to help bring my dream to life. The pool of resources, knowledge and skills that this club will amount to will no doubt be enormous, and incredibly useful for anybody thinking of jumping aboard this good ship themselves.


If you know of anybody who has handmade their home, or have seen something on youtube or elsewhere online, please let me know and I will try and get them involved.


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Land and funding

In the past few days, I have had several quite considerable offers of cash to get this thing off the ground / buy that plot of land in Wales I’ve had my eye on. I’m enormously grateful and humbled by this but just want to take some time to think this through a bit more. Although I’m all up for making spur-of-the-moment decisions (like buying a 53-seater bus), I’m conscious that this isn’t my money and I don’t really know what I’m doing (who does?).

I’m beginning to think that more of an impact could be made (although it would be a bit harder) if we put the land idea on hold for the moment, and focused our energy and headspace elsewhere. The Wales land is still up for grabs but they have received offers way above the £5000 asking price (“significantly above twice the asking price”, to be precise — so less than £15k). This is still incredibly cheap, relatively speaking, but I don’t have the time right now to put together all the legal stuff to get this purchase made properly (especially as it’s not my money). I’ve never bought property before so it’s all new to me. That said, I haven’t gone off the idea completely so maybe we’ll manage to pull it off somehow.

If anyone wants to buy it outright that would be amazing and then we could perhaps come to some sort of arrangement down the line. I can send you all the details, put you in touch with the agent etc. Wales has by far the most liberal planning policies in the UK, so the potential is huge. This place is 1.7 acres, is in one of the most stunning parts of the country, has its own waterfall, freshwater stream, and “lake” (ex reservoir) and is on the edge of a beautiful woodland.

Even if we don’t own some land yet, there is so much land in the UK being wasted/unused and there have got to be a couple of landowners interested in this project. I think there is a massive opportunity to create some kind of a matchmaking service between land-owners and handmade house builders. In exchange for a small corner of a farm to build a low-impact off-grid dwelling, we could offer to help maintain land, woods, etc or offer any number of other skills (did anyone else hear that farmers are struggling these days?!). Growing up in the countryside, I happen to know quite a few farmers. I’m going to send some letters and see what takes. I will also put together some kind of “manifesto” that explains in more detail what we are trying to achieve. This will give you something to send in the direction of any liberal landowners you may know too!

As before, if anybody knows anybody who can help me, I’d love to hear from you. You can find me on Facebook here.


Let’s do this…

 
 
 

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