I bought this gadget about a month ago. I have it attached to the tap in my bathroom, and I love it! It allows me to turn the bathroom tap into a cool, bubbly drinking fountain with the flick of a finger. To fit it on the tap I had to take the aerator off the end of the faucet, but I find I like the water better (both for washing and drinking) when it hasn't passed through the aerator.

I have arthritis and my hands are weak, so instead of pinching the tapi to create the fountain I just fold the end of it over, and this works very well. I think it would be easy for a child to operate. It comes in a variety of colors, and only costs around $6.

When you get sick and tired of reapplying those adhesive felt furniture feet to all your furniture every time they come off (go ahead, look under something; a lot of them are coming off or missing aren't they?), you can get these improved ones that I found a few years ago.

The round metal rivet hammers easily into the end of the leg with a tack hammer, and the metal part doesn't break like the kind with the single skinny nail in the center. (And the adhesive kind, as you no doubt have noticed, do not stay properly attached for very long at all.) I have never had one of these fail yet.

This vendor has them for a good price; they have a $25 minimum, which means you have to order about 80. However, you can also get them at Amazon.

This is a battery operated cat door that unlocks (going inside) by reading the cat's microchip. Our cat was chipped at our shelter for around $10, but commercial vets are also able to do it for a bit more. No need to worry about lost collar keys, or magnets. Keeps out unprogrammed animals. The door also has the standard four-setting mechanical overide locking feature of: in-out, in only, out only, locked. If your cat is not chipped, you can also use an RFID collar key (not included).

We previously had a magnetically keyed cat door, but you then have the choice of using a safety collar and losing the (not cheap) key every now and then, or using a non-safety collar and risking the cat strangling itself.

Raccoons eventually defeated our magnetically keyed door. They haven't defeated this one (yet), although the mechanical parts of the latching action are similar.

The uber American dream is to build your own comfy place on the edge of wilderness with your own hands. The attraction of this self-reliance is the chance to rewind civilization personally, to start over and do it your way. To own your own progress. Thoreau wrote the prime document of lifestyle self-reliance in his shed at Walden pond, an hour’s walk away from his home. Walden is still worth reading as a how-to and why-to book. Yet as the world’s wilderness shrinks, each generation seeks the wild further afield in order to retell the story of sprouting kernel of humanity in a small homestead.

There’s a lot to be learned from the few diehards who have homesteaded far off the grid in modern times, and who have written honestly about the practicalities of this adventure. I found three recent accounts to be most helpful. Listening to them you get to see how much of a subsidy civilization gives us, and how challenging it is to recreate it in even a small measure.

In An Island To Oneself, Tom Neale took over an uninhabited island in the Pacific in the 1950s and constructed a beach shack for his solitary home. He’s a sort of Robinson Crusoe, or Cast Away, for real. He voluntarily lived alone, separated from the nearest human by hundreds of miles of open sea. He had to be his own contractor, gardener, shipbuilder, fisherman, and doctor. The amount of household stuff he recreated from scratch is amazing. Neale had a lot of leisure as a full-time beach bum, but it’s a surprise how constantly he worked, and how thoroughly he had to prepare for everything. His account supplies great details about the reality of living on a deserted island. In a place like his the littlest mistakes could be fatal. His journal is a page turner with one small upset after another. It was no day at the beach.

In a parallel world up in the cold wilds of Alaska, Dick Proenneke flew to a remote lake and built himself a log cabin to live year-round alone among the snow, bears, and blueberries. This achievement is not uncommon for Alaska. What makes his account in One Man’s Wilderness special and useful is that Proenneke thoroughly documented his work in 16mm film movies, photos, and diaries. From his meticulously vivid accounts you get a clear and exact recipe for what it takes to chop trees with an axe, peel them by hand, and erect an airtight cabin. And then to heat it all winter in minus 30 degrees. Proenneke complicated his chores by filming and photographing himself the whole time while doing them, no easy feat with bulky, balky film movie cameras of the 1970s. While his “video” clips are fascinating, I found his journal far more helpful, more impressive, and more inspirational. One Man’s Wilderness is a great account of how to build a tidy cabin from logs you cut and hew, and keep warm and content in the northern wilderness.

Somewhat related to the Alaska romance is the story of Sylvan Hart, who called himself the last mountain man. In the 1960s and 70s Hart homesteaded in a remote part of Idaho. He lived near a road, and had neighbors and mail delivery, but he spent a lot of time making his own tools, and practicing what are now called primitive survival skills. He mined copper, made metal, forged iron, made his own guns, and hunted bear for food and clothing. In other words he was trying to bootstrap civilization as much as he could. His story, written by a sympathetic journalist in the book The Last Mountain Man, gives a somewhat romantic picture of Hart’s life, but even this dramatic view will quell most fantasies with how bootstrapping it is.

Yes, you can build a home in the wilderness using only hand tools, but as all each of these stories make clear, self reliance is relative. Thoreau went to town to do his laundry, Neale brought a boatload of supplies with him, and Proenneke in Alaska had the bulk of his food flown in every month. The larger lesson from these books, and the reason they are cool tools, is that every small step we take toward self reliance is rewarded with heaps of wholeness, self-knowledge, and personal clarity. These books will give you confidence and tips on taking your own small steps toward doing things yourself.

An Island to Oneself
Tom Neale
1966 (1990), 255 pages
$25
Available from Amazon

On August 4, 1953 -- ten months after I had landed -- I welcomed my first visitors.

It was unexpected because I had long since stopped wondering whether one day I would wake up to discover a strange yacht or schooner anchored in the lagoon. I had become so engrossed with my life on Suvarov that I rarely gave a thought to the outside world.

They were very happy days. I was never lonely, though now and again I would walk along the reef wishing somebody could be with me -- not because I wanted company but just because all this beauty seemed too perfect to keep to myself.

*

Fishing in the shallows with a single pronged spear.

The evening's haul. I was never short of fish.

*
Of course, I had heard of this great lagoon, with its coral reef stretching nearly fifty miles in circumference, but I had never been there, for it was off the trade routes, and shipping rarely passed that way.

Because its reef is submerged at high tide -- leaving only a line of writhing white foam to warn the navigator of its perils -- Suvarov, however, is clearly marked on all maps. Yet Suvarov is not the name of an island, but of an atoll, and the small islets inside the lagoon each have their own names. The islets vary in size from Anchorage, the largest, which is half a mile long, to One Tree Island, the smallest, which is merely a mushroom of coral. The atoll lies in the centre of the Pacific, five hundred and thirteen miles north of Rarotonga, and the nearest inhabited island is Manihiki, two hundred miles distant.

*
Morning and evening from that moment on I scattered the split uto nuts on the square of ground where the run was to be built, and then banged lustily on the old iron crowbar made from the transmission shaft of a Model T Ford I had acquired in a Raro junkyard. The result was really extraordinary. Up till now I had spent weeks unsuccessfully trying to cajole the fowls into a regular feeding tie. Now, within a week, they were recognizing the familiar sound of the beaten crowbar, and cam running as fast as they could, determined not to miss a good feed. They brought all sorts of surprises with them too -- in the shape of at least two clutches of chicks which I had no idea even existed. Although this achievement did not immediately solve my egg-collecting problems, at least I was able to keep track of the island's hen population, and now I started building the chicken run in earnest.

*
I knew the portents only too well (that trite old phrase about the calm before the storm) and strode back to the shack. There was no immediate hurry -- but equally there was no doubt that serious trouble was on the way. Before doing anything else, I checked my survival cache of tools, making sure my extra matches in their sealed tin were dry, and then took the box over to the "burial hole" in the outhouse. Next I lit a good fire on my brick hearth, and while it was burning, went out with my spear for a concentrated hour of fishing. It seemed provident to lay in some emergency rations, for there was no telling with a big storm; it could last a few hours or a few days.

I had plenty of cooked uto, but I foraged around for a couple of dozen more, which I cooked, and then I laid out double rations for the fowls. Next -- as the first puffs of wind ruffled the palms -- I inspected the garden for any ripe fruit which would be mercilessly blown off the plants when the inevitable storm broke.

I had sufficient uto to withstand a siege of several days -- and in a way it was rather like preparing for a siege against an implacable foe. In the outhouse I had a plentiful supply of wood, and in the kai room a good stock of arrowroot, plenty of fresh vegetables, including yams, cucumbers, tomatoes, spinach and onions. A dozen drinking nuts, a couple of ripe breadfruit and a stem of bananas completed my emergency rations.

By mid-afternoon gigantic seas were visible breaking all along the reef to the north, and before sunset, when the storm was beginning to reach its height, seas more huge than I had ever seen before began breaking right across the half-mile width of the entrance to the passage.
*

One Man's Wilderness
Sam Keith, from the journals and photographs of Richard Proenneke
1999 (2010), 223 pages
$12

Available from Amazon

Video embed:

Part 1
Part 2

Sample excerpts:

Learn to use an axe and respect it and you can't help but love it. Abuse one and it will wear your hands raw and open your foot like an overcooked sausage. Each blade was nursed to a perfect edge, and the keenness of its bright arc made my strokes more accurate and more deliberate. No sloppy moves with that deadly beauty! Before I started on a tree I carefully cleared obstructions that might tangle in the backswing. It was fun planning where each should fall, and notching it for direction. Snuck! Snuck! The ax made a solid sound as it bit deeply into the white wood.

*
Anyone living alone has to get things down to a system -- know where things are and what the next move is going to be. Chores are easier if forethought is given to them and they are looked upon as little pleasures to perform instead of inconveniences that steal time and try the patience.

*
I included in the first trip a .30-06 converted Army Springfield, a box of cartridges, a .357 magnum pistol with cartridge belt and holster, the backboard, the camera gear (8mm movie and 35mm reflex), cartons of film, the foodstuffs (oatmeal, powdered milk, flour, salt, pepper, sugar, honey, rice, onions, baking soda, dehydrated potatoes, dried fruit, a few tins of butter, half a slab of bacon), and a jar of Mary Alsworth's ageless sourdough starter.

The second pile consisted of binoculars, spotting scope, tripod, a double-bitted axe, fishing gear, a sleeping bag, packages of seeds, A Field Guide to Western Birds, my ten-inch pack, and the clothing. More bulk than weight.

The third pile held the hand tools such as wood augers, files, chisels, drawknife, saws, saw set, honing stone, vise grips, screwdrivers, adze, plumb bob and line, string level, square, chalk, chalk line, and carpenter pencils; a galvanized pail containing such things as masking tape, nails, sheet metal screws, haywire, clothesline, needles and thread, wooden matches, a magnifying glass, and various repair items; a bag of plaster of Paris; and some oakum.

*
It is always interesting to see what a fish has been eating. Several times I have found mice in the stomachs of lake trout and arctic char. Now how does a mouse get himself into a jackpot like that? Does he fall by accident, or does he venture for a swim? tough to be a mouse in this country.

*
It is important to put the notch on the underside of a log and fit it down over the top of the one beneath. If you notch the topside, raid will run into it instead of dripping past in a shingle effect. Water settling into the notches can cause problems.

*
Had my first building inspector at the job. A gray jay, affectionately known as camp robber, came in his drab uniform of gray and white and black to look things over from his perch on a branch end. The way he kept tilting his head and making those mewing sounds, I'd say he was being downright critical.

*

1) These simple hand tools will challenge anyone's self-reliance. 2) Notice how the notches fit snugly over the tops of the logs below them, as if fused.

*
1) Dick readies the roof poles for installation. 2) With the poles in place, the slots between the pole ends under the eaves need to be filled in. These fillers should be called "squirrel frustraters."

*
Wood to saw and split everyday. Got to keep up my payments at the Firewood Trust if I want to stay warm this winter. No real problem at all. Some folks had led me to believe it would be an everlasting job -- cut wood all day to keep warm all night.
*

The Last of the Mountain Men
Harold Peterson
1969, 160 pages
$12
Available from ">Amazon

Sample excerpts:

As a young man, dismayed by the destruction of the final frontiers, Sylvan Hart recanted civilization and marched off into this Idaho fastness armed with a few staples, an ax, a rifle, and a master's degree in engineering. There, in the last wilderness, where one winter's snow might fall into another's before a visitor came, he became the last of the Mountain Men. Son to be known as Buckskin Bill, he fashioned his own clothes of deerskin. He constructed adobe-covered building with hand-hewn timbers. He mined copper, smelted it, refined it, and made utensils. He even made his own flintlock rifles, boring them on an ingenious handmade machines, to "save the bother of sore-bought ammunition." To pay for infrequent trips to Burgdorf (pop. 6, in winter 0), where he purchased only powder, books, and Darjeeling tea, he panned gold.

*

Sylvan's pole bridge, pinned precariously to the sheer face of a cliff high above the roiling River of No Return, constitutes the only path to the outside world.

Tree houses are impractically romantic. There is no one book on how to make this recurring romance as practical as possible, but these two books by Peter Nelson contain the best suggestions and useful advice for building a real live-in tree house I’ve seen so far. The Treehouse Book has lots of fabulous examples in the US and a few chapters on how-to. His follow-up book, New Treehouses of the World, gathers inspirational examples from Thailand, New Zealand and other spots with tree-house culture, and has a short chapter on new tree-house technology. Main thing to remember when building a tree house is that trees move, over minutes and years. It’s closer to building a boat in the air. That's why there’s plenty ideas in these books for any small house, even those not arboreal.

-- KK

The Treehouse Book
Peter and Judy Nelson with David Larkin
2000, 224 pages
$20
Available from Amazon

Sample excerpts:

*

Sweet Birch -- A strong tree with shiny, waterproof bark that used to be stripped off for wintergreen or birch beer. Use in a group.

70' high -- spread 50'

*

*

**********************

New Treehouses of the World
Pete Nelson
2009, 223 pages
$25

Available from Amazon

Sample excerpts:

Trees in the northwest grow surprising quickly, so I prefer a GL (Garnier Limb) with a longer stem, the part of the GL that sticks out from the tree. While trees grow taller only at their tips, they grow in girth all long their length. As a tree puts on rings it envelops the GL, making the artificial limb even stronger. The tree will eventually push a beam out along the stem of the GL (the reason I prefer a longer stem) in much the same way the tree's roots might lift a heavy concrete sidewalk.

*

*

A "heavy limb," also designed by Greewood, holds up a bucket-style bracket attached to a large glue-laminated beam. There are numerous styles of artificial limbs, or tree anchor bolts (TABs).

*

An elegant platform takes shape around the old-growth Sitka spruce. Occasionally a tree will resist a building project, but this magnificent specimen remained calm and allowed us to proceed without protest.

*

This tool literally saved me thousands of dollars and incalculable emotional stress. Watercop attaches to the water main on your house and is triggered by remote RF water sensors that can be placed anywhere. When triggered, it shuts off the main and stops all water flowing into the house.

I installed the Watercop 5 years ago with remote sensors in 4 locations and it sat silently, doing absolutely nothing for all that time. A few weeks ago we got back from a week long vacation and immediately discovered that there was no water coming through our faucets. My first thought was that the Watercop had experienced a power fault and failed closed.

I went down to the basement and, in fact, the Watercop was closed. I turned it back on and heard a gusher from our furnace room. You can imagine my shock when I ran into the furnace room and discovered that the floor of our 15-year-old hot water heater had burst and the Watercop sensor in the room was submerged.

I don't even want to contemplate what would have happened during that week if there had been no automatic shutoff on the main. The damage to our house and personal possessions, along with the inevitable mold, would have been a disaster.

Not only did it work flawlessly, but you can qualify for an insurance discount if you you have it installed by a licensed plumber (you can install it yourself, but it does require decent plumbing skills). As far as setup, you can place the sensors anywhere. The only downsides I have found is that it is not cheap, you have to replace the batteries annually, and it runs on A/C power meaning that when the power fails so does the device.

Despite these few drawbacks, I can not recommend the WaterCop highly enough. This is, without a doubt, the most valuable tool I have ever purchased.

I've used various powerline adapters for several years. They now can go up to 500 megabits per second, but 85 or 200 will be cheaper. I currently use TrendNet Powerline routers.

Why not use wifi? The bands are becoming crowded. You can try to use 5Ghz N routers, and they help, but if all your other devices - your phone, iPod, Kindle all have to use the 2.4GHz wifi, it can get congested. Wireless USB peripherals and Bluetooth also use the same band. Not everything supports the 5GHz band, so your laptop might not
work, or you will need a special card or adapter for your desktop. Then there's securing things and getting the network password right. And in apartments, every one of your neighbors is using the same band.

Powerline adapters need passwords, but they are between the adapters and you only have to use the setup utility once. They are basically ethernet bridges. I have my cable router plugged in where the cable comes in and the signal is best, then have my wifi and powerline adapters plugged into that router (it has 4 ports). I've not had any problem streaming or even sending files between computers. I have several 200Mb/s refurbished models and they work well for that, but I have gigabit switches at my central computer "nerve center". The powerline adapters also make printers a lot easier to setup. I have a Brother printer that is finicky about Wifi: it can attach USB, Ethernet, or Wifi, but even after typing in the correct information when attached with one of these other methods it often "fails to associate". Instead, I just use the powerline adapter, and instantly it is on ethernet with no headaches.

Well, there is one. A powerline adapter uses up an electrical socket, which is where the "Liberator" comes in. Basically, a 3 pronged pass-through extension cord. The short plug-depth seems to play well with the powerline adapter, and the extension is hefty enough for my laser printer. The Liberators also work well with power strips or even to go sideways when space is at a premium.

There are a few rare cases where powerline adapters have problems. One is if there is something extremely electrically noisy on the same branch (and if it isn't noisy you need the passwords to prevent your neighbors from snooping). This usually involves some huge motor, arc welding, or other industrial process involving intermittent high current. Another thing is if there are any ground loops or ifhot and ground get swapped by adapters or bad wiring. Also it helps to avoid circuits with dimmers and microwaves, though I've only had the problem when some part of the house wiring was wrong enough to show bars on my old CRT TV when the microwave was on. The powerline signal cannot pass through the large (utility pole) transformers. There is a length limit, but I haven't been in a position to see how fast the signal goes at hundreds or thousands of feet.

If wifi works and the total cost of adapters and such is low, it might be a be a better solution, but for reasonable distances where there is lots of interference or if you only have ethernet, nothing beats powerline adapters.

I have a small amount of stuff that I want within easy reach at night, including my cellphone, lip balm, and a small bottle of water. I was considering housing it in a bedside caddy or organizer, but wasn't thrilled by the idea of buying a uni-tasking extra product just for that one purpose. Searching for a better solution, I stumbled across Neat Sheets sheet sets from a company called Everest Luxury Linens. These sheets come with sewn-on side pockets on the fitted sheets which serve as convenient repositories for whatever you want within reach while you're in bed.

Neat Sheets also have sewn-on tags at the foot of the sheet, to (as the company says on its site) help you get the right corner of the sheet on the right corner of the mattress, every time. I hesitated to buy Neat Sheets, because the site had a slightly gimmicky infomercial-style vibe. But a few months ago I did buy them, and they are terrific. They are exactly what's described on the site, and I find they make my life just a tiny bit easier every single day. As a minimalist and a fan of good design, I'm really pleased.

Last year I was walking through IKEA when I saw this strange little solar-powered goosenecked lamp in the lighting section. Intrigued, I bought it and took it home to try out.

I love it. The bulb is nice and bright, perfect as a reading lamp. And the battery/solar panel unit pops out, so you can leave it by a window or on your car's dashboard, and it will fully charge while you're at work. Since then, I've gone back and bought a second one. I always have a battery pack charging on a windowsill, and I always have light for my latest book.

Oh, and we brought one of the lamps on a camping trip. It was really handy there too. I left it on one night as a sort of night light for our daughter, and in the morning, it was still shining, just not as brightly. This is one of the few solar-powered gadgets I've encountered that actually works as promised. A nice additional bonus, for every lamp sold, IKEA donates one to a child in a country with unreliable electricity.

The hexayurt is an update on Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome and is a sturdy, affordable, easy-to-build temporary shelter. The geometry has been adjusted slightly to make it easier to build domes from materials like plywood, insulation, plastic, cardboard and more. The hexayurts are made from only one kind of triangle: an 8' x 8' isosceles triangle, rather than the strangely-shaped triangles which are standard for Fuller-style geodesic domes. They are not strictly geodesic, either, but it doesn't seem to matter much in practice. The slightly stiff, angular lines look a lot like any other dome.

The most common place to see hexayurts is at Burning Man. The first one was built there in 2003, and was only a little bigger than a tent. There now range in size from 50 to nearly 500 square feet. A typical year at Burning Man will see a hundred or so of the silver huts lined up on the playa.

(photo by tonx)

The design is public domain and build-it-yourself. People using the shelter for Burning Man usually buy the materials (about $300) ahead of time, including mail ordering the hard-to-find extra wide tape which is used to hold the shelter together. It takes about a day's worth of effort to cut out the roof pieces, playa-proof the edges and do a test assembly. Putting the hexayurt together on the playa typically takes a small group of people about two hours and can be a struggle if there is wind or a dust storm which coats all the pieces in a fine layer of tape-defeating dust.

The joy of the thing is a building which stays relatively cool in the desert. The shiny surface of the hexayurt reflects away a lot of the sun's heat, and a mix of pump sprays, swamp coolers and even the occasional air conditioner make the inside quite habitable even in the middle of the day when tents are far too hot for comfort. There are lots of plans and instructional videos on the Hexayurt web site, and handy people seem to have little difficulty putting them up.

A few simpler units, made from plywood, have been tested by local charities in Sri Lanka and Haiti. The jury is still out on whether this shelter will be useful beyond recreational use in the desert, but field trials are underway.

This terrific product is perfect for dealing with minor stubborn behavior in your cat. I didn't like our cat going up on the counter behind our kitchen sink to look out the window, but every time I went outside, there she was laughing at me. I tried many different deterrents, but she was like the Borg from Star Trek. She would just adapt. SSSCat solved the problem.

SSSCat is a can of compressed air (like for cleaning the dust out of your keyboard), but with a motion sensor that sprays when the cat gets near. It doesn't harm or hurt the cat in any way, but it does condition them to avoid the area where the SSSCat has been.

We've also used it outside of our bedroom door to prevent the cat from persistently meowing and jumping up at the door in the wee hours of the morning.

The can of compressed air the unit comes with is about half the capacity of the cans you get for dusting keyboards. After it ran out, I found that I could use the keyboard duster cans. Just popped the trigger off the keyboard duster and attached the SSSCat nozzle.

Jean Luc Picard could have used this against the Borg. They never would have figured it out.

I've been using the FireDragon for the past five years to quickly and efficiently get my woodstove burning. It allows me to get a fire started using a minimal amount of tinder and kindling, and without any other firestarters. This is one of those simple, good ideas. You blow into the FireDragon to shoot a directed, bellows-like blast of air into your fire, creating a supercharging effect. This helps get larger chunks of wood to ignite and burn steadily when lighting a fire or adding a new log to a fire that isn't burning well, and it can return a smoldering fire to blazes with a few puffs.

It's basically a 3-foot long steel tube with a brass mouthpiece (that makes me think of a flattened trombone mouthpiece) and a forked end that can serve as a fire poker, log re-arranger, and coal raker. The manufacturer says they got the idea from Civil War soldiers that would take the barrels off their rifles and blow through them to fan their campfires.

Now I find I want the FireDragon any time I'm around a fire, so it goes along camping. It is plenty sturdy. No moving parts, and easy to use.

Hang towel on peg. Hop into shower. Step out. Pick up towel from floor. Repeat for, oh, I don't know, years.

Some of you have no idea what I'm talking about. This innovative hook is for the rest of us. Snag your towel on the hook, and gravity pinches it in place. Lift up, and once again gravity helps out by releasing the pinch. It's just beautiful in so many ways. Ingenious, visually appealing, and indescribably cool. I find myself wandering into the bathroom just to watch it work. I bring dinner guests into the bathroom to demonstrate it. (Some of them now have their own). I still consciously appreciate it after every shower. During a brief vacation away from home, my wife and I missed it daily. We've discussed buying extras to take with us when visiting relatives.

[Update: added image of installed hook.--OH]

I would haughtily sneer at someone for recommending a tool without years of solid performance, but 3 months on and I am still in love. Maybe it'll fall apart in a month (it feels sturdy, but what do I know). Maybe the springs will wear out (whoops, no springs: it works by weight). Maybe, maybe. Sneer away. I'll laugh along with you, but *my* towel will be dry.

It will also work for winter coats and heavier items as it supports up to 40 lbs, but I wouldn't suggest using it on the International Space Station.

Two things smoothed out my family's move a few years ago: designating Open First boxes for each room in our new home, so that on the first night after the move we wouldn't be missing any essentials; and this Smart Move Tape.

The clearly marked and color-coded designations (Office, Bedroom, Bedroom #2, Kitchen, Storage, etc.) made unloading go quickly for our movers, and organizing our many cardboard moving boxes much easier for us later on. No doubt we could have accomplished something similar with a handful of colored Sharpies, but it would have taken a lot of consistently careful writing to even approach the same effect -- at a time when we were looking to make less work, not more -- and the colored tapes really help make sorting a breeze.

I've lived on the California coast all my life, so I'm no stranger to homegrown architecture. I've driven by geodesic domes tucked into canyons and hiked passed shack-like mini-mansions perched on solitary hilltops. These encounters have always been brief and, most notably, from afar. As he did with the previously-reviewed Home Work, Lloyd Kahn takes us inside the structures many of us wouldn't and couldn't even stumble upon. From Northern California all the way up to British Columbia, he brings us the coastal creations of more than a dozen builders. Driftwood saunas and stairwells, wave-like green roofs, bright wide-eyed yurts, hand-carved pillars and more. A wonderful collection of imagination and possibility.

A wonderfully illustrated guide to making snow shelters. How to build with snow, how to work with snow rather than against it, and what not to do. Amazingly informative, succinct and fun. This book is the kind of expert you dream of.

My wife and I had some property, but not enough money to build a house without going into debt. We enjoyed staying in a cave B&B in France and love the Troglodyte dwellings in Trôo, France. After consulting several books, including one by Rob Roy, this book just made the most sense. The methods are so low tech, a bum could make himself a mansion. Other books get into engineering with concrete, steel, rebar, etc., which cost a fortune and don't necessarily function any better and, in some cases, maybe not as well. With this book and the videos, which are a must if you get serious, you really can build a home for the cost of a roll of plastic and a few other items, provided you do the labor by hand and scrounge materials.

Mike explains succinctly what took him years to figure out and you may might never discover otherwise: how to get in light from all four sides, how to protect untreated wood, how to connect the log post and beams together with pins made of low cost rebar, how to evenly compact the earth backfill by hand as to allow nature to finish the job (the backfill also functions as earthquake bracing keeping you tight under the surface rather than hinging at the point where the building meets the ground, a method similar to what Frank Lloyd did to prevent quake damage in Japan). Mike shows how to make a foyer or a gable to keep water flowing around the door opening rather than across it. Skylights are notorious for leaking, even on a conventional house. So Mike invented the "sun scoop," a method I used that allows natural light to shoot right through the full length of the underground complex at different times of the day and year depending on your design and desires. He also shows how to make clerestory windows to let light into the high side of the house through an uphill patio or a wraparound.

I was a bit skeptical at first. How could all of this work and be so cheap? This type of dwelling is not for everyone, but if you do it right it really does provide great shelter. There are engineering tables in the back of the book providing rule of thumb guides and safety information. It won't get you something that will pass a code inspection, but I'm of the opinion codes and building regulations are written in part to provide sales for corporations and taxes for the government. A friend of ours designed a small underground house. She wanted to go with engineers and permits. Last estimate: $1.5 million dollars. And she has yet to get it approved. Sadly, she will never build her dream. This book even has a chapter of strategies for getting around that. Keep in mind, too, this book is not a house plan. You learn how to build nearly any design you want. Just put the safe framing building blocks together in a design that suits you, keeping the important rules and directions in mind. After the basic structural requirements are met, the only limit is your imagination...

We started our house in 2002 and had a very crude shelter within a couple months. I framed in about 2,000 square feet, made about a thousand or so fairly comfortable, and continue to expand into it as we need it. We have a studio apartment area, a master bedroom and two bathrooms, as well as a porch area with a conversation pit, uphill patio, green house and shop. We have added a large garden to raise much of our own food, a carport, wood shed and two-story rammed earth, rock and salvaged boat dock and bridge timber garage. With natural earth temps around 50 at night, only a small fire in the wood stove is required to keep things warm. The roof is a garden. It feeds and shelters us and provides a park-like setting with flowers all around. There is no exterior painting required. Nothing to become an eyesore as the paint chips and deteriorates and the shingles rot off. Sure it takes maintenance and there are issues to deal with but if you build it, you will be intimate enough with it to know what to do.

My home is growing. It's alive. It changes with time and will be here as long as we want it. Or if we leave and no one cares for it, it will someday revert back to the earth from which it came, to be just another one of natures reclaimed gardens.

-- Glenn Kangiser

The $50 and Up Underground House Book
Mike Oehler
1981, 116 pages,
$20
Available from Amazon

More info and videos available from UnderGroundHousing

Sample Excerpts:

Related items previously reviewed on Cool Tools:

Handmade Houseboats

Will Your Home Survive?

Mongolian Cloudhouses

Last time I moved I threw out my back repositioning Grandma's china cabinet for the 10th time. My latest (and hopefully last) moving experience was a dream because of the Lay-It-Out furniture templates. These unique life-sized paper furniture templates are the shape of your bed, sofa, tables, chairs, rugs, billiard table. After trimming them to the appropriate size (measurements are in inches and centimeters), we placed them on the floor and -- as I was directed to the appropriate location -- continued moving them around with no effort. I had the whole house planned out before the moving truck arrived and it cost less than the physical therapy and pain killers I had to use before. They are a breeze to use. Measure, trim, position, then reposition and reposition and reposition again... You could buy a roll of something like cheap brown crate paper of course, but I liked that Lay-it-out was ready to go, sizes already measured, and in pretty colors. You can buy a "Total Home Package" or purchase smaller packages specific to the Living Room, Dining Room, Bedroom, Game room, Accessory Tables or Rugs packages. I purchased the whole house package and used most of the pieces, except the billiard table, which I kept pinned to the wall for two weeks as a piece of pop art.

-- Rick Sievering

Lay-It-Out
$15 - 40
Available from Lay-It-Out

Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:

Furniture Sliders

Forearm Forklift

At Work at Home: Design Ideas for Your Home Workplace

This website/service can save you ten thousand dollars or more when you buy a house in certain cities. It is an online real estate broker that rebates 2/3rds of the usual agent sales commission back to you. Since you are probably doing most of the hard work in research, looking, and evaluation while shopping for a house anyway, why pay a real estate agent? On the other hand, there's a lot of paperwork, regulations, and legal issues you really don't want to handle, and a qualified agent should. So this is how Redfin works.

Redfin has a great online real estate website which we quickly found is one of the easier ones to use, with nice virtual walk thrus of each home, and good comparison data for the neighborhood. (The site is a joy to navigate, and we'd use it even if we did not get a rebate.) Then you, in the role of buyer and self-agent, do all the footwork of finding, visiting the various homes, checking out the disclosures, etc., and finally choosing which property you want. You are your own real estate agent up to this point. When you are ready to make on offer on a home, you do so online via Redfin, completing the necessary forms on the web. Then a human Redfin employee will take you through the final paperwork and signatures, and eventually visit the house with you. At the close of the deal they will rebate 2/3rds of their buyer agent commission paid by the seller, or 2% of the sale price, which in some areas of the country will mean at least ten thousand dollars.

We used this recently to purchase a home in the Bay Area and saved $15,000 this way. That is, after we closed the deal at the agreed-to price with the seller, Redfin gave us a check for $15K, in effect reducing our cost of the house by 2%. In our book that was enough to make the deal work.

The current drawback? This service is only available in a few cities in California, Washington, and a very few east coast cities. I have no experience in using Redfin in selling a house, although they claim you can save a similar amount.

-- KK

Redfin

A couple of times in your life you may need to sell a house. If you do, try to remember the advice in this book. It could be worth several thousands of dollars for a few hours of your time. The message is simple: when it comes time to sell your home, strip it of all the things that make it a personalized home, and turn it into a bland product that can be personalized by someone else. This book, the best of about half a dozen on the same theme, provides simple ideas on how to reduce your home to a house. The same philosophy also applies to rental property.

I have never made a yurt, but I'd like to. This book tells you how. It assumes you have more time than money.

A yurt is a temporary tent house. It's not really portable. The Mongolian version weighs 200 pounds -- strong wooden frame covered in thick felt. If you really want portable, get a modern dome tent. But if you want a compact summer house, a cabin, a seasonal shelter encased in the mythical round, then a yurt could be perfect since you can make one of these yourself, with the added bonus that you can move it if you have to.

This book is an update of a 1980s classic. It takes the hippie approach. The drawings are all you need. Their instructions are rough, approximate, but satisfyingly visual. The book is motivational simply by being clear and rustic. Precision is not required, craft-smarts are. It assumes you are a do-it-yourself person.

The Icebox tool lets you build an igloo out of any type snow. I made 4 igloos last winter - all with different types of snow: one with heavy, wet, "packing" snow, two with new powder, and one with "sugar snow" - ice crystals that pour like white sugar. No problems. But this is definitely not a kid's toy. You need to shovel snow fairly high -- the 8 foot diameter igloos that I've made stand about 8 feet tall when completed. It took me (and a helper), approximately 4 hours to build each igloo. The whole igloo is free standing. The post device is used during construction to assure a circular igloo and to properly position the blocks. It works fine, although I did need to take my gloves off to extend and shorten the pole. The only difficulty that I've had is properly angling the first course of blocks -- if you don't get the box lined up properly, you have difficulty aligning the second course of blocks.

I'm not into winter camping but the system does fold up and pack. It weighs two kilos. The guy that introduced me to the Icebox has used it for camping in the Adirondack mountains. The igloos are really quiet inside, and noticeably warmer than being outside. If you want to make igloos, this is an awesome cool (no pun intended) tool.

Imagine you were about to build your own home, perhaps with your own hands, and you wanted a few ideas of what others have done, so you set out around the world for 40 years visiting unusual homes, snapping pictures, making notes, and gathering evidence of homes that serve as a personal extension of the people living in them -- the kind of home that is most satisfying both for the owner and for their guests -- the kind of home you want.

You don't have to do that now because Lloyd Kahn has done it for you. For far less in cost, and probably with far more effectiveness, Lloyd has collected homes that work for people. He has crammed a life-time of photos, notes, and insights into this amazing catalog, overflowing with wild, zany, practical ideas, hard-won evidence of successful homes in all cultures, chock-full of amazing glimpse of genius homes, owner-built glories, unique, one-of-a-kind, offbeat, think-different homes, mindful places, sketches of long-gone shelters, bits of building wisdom, and actual how-to-advice, all offered visually, in vast color plates, at a modest price for such an intense and dense tome. The entire aim of this book is to expand your notion of what your own house could be. It works.

At least once in their life everyone should make their own shelter. This is the book I would hand to them.

Here is how I think Homework compares with the other inspirational home books I have recommended here: Architecuture Without Architects is timeless, Built by Hand is global, Home Work is contemporary and personal.

Just build it.

Oh, it's an ancient yearning. I lived on a houseboat once; you definitely need more than a log raft. But you don't need a million dollars more. The techniques here rely on modern materials (barrels and composting toilets), and cover all aspects of building and maintaining a floating cottage, mindful of the constant threat that constant water presents. In my experience, however, the main hurdle is not construction, but finding a place to dock. If you have a location, you can build it.

Step-by-step instructions for making scores of stylized ornamental bamboo fences. From Japan where they take this art seriously. Bamboo can grow anywhere most trees grow and is ideally suited to fence making.

The granddaddy of all books about hand-built homes is the legendary Architecture Without Architects. Forty years in print, it continues to inspire architects, despite its title. Savor it slowly as a black and white poem on what a house might be if you had two thousand years to refine it. These shelters have visible souls. They honor your hands and mind. I consider this small book to hold essential wisdom that no high-schooler should graduate without encountering.

Without qualification, this is the greatest account of vernacular architecture, indigenous shelter, and traditional folk-built home images ever published. And it won't likely be surpassed, since fanatical photographer Yoshio Komatsu spent 25 years traveling the globe to document the full jaw-dropping variety of shelter on earth. He's been EVERYWHERE. I can't think of a remote region of Asia, Africa, South American and Europe that he missed; most of the styles are new and stimulating to me, and I've been around. While Architecture Without Architects (see above) hints dreamily at this diversity, Built By Hand completes the thought by explicitly celebrating this abundance in vivid in-your-face technicolor. It's in a different league from all previous vernacular architecture books. This one is a stupendous 480-page cornucopic tome overflowing with 700 photographs, and thousands of details, hopes, and design ideas. Totally breathtaking, totally awesome! If this doesn't get you to grab a hammer, nothing will.

Of all the books championing tiny houses, this tiny one is my favorite. Each very tiny house -- or should we say each shack and shed -- is photographed and sufficiently rendered in orthogonal view that one could construct it, or at least borrow designs from it. Less is more. This teeny book is, as they say, huge.