The Half-Acre Homestead: 46 Years of Building & Gardening|Paperback (2024)

Lloyd Kahn started building more than 50 years ago and has lived in a self-built home ever since. If he’d been able to buy a wonderful, old, good-feeling house, he might have never started building. But it was always cheaper to build than to buy, and by building himself, he could design what he wanted and use materials that he wanted to live with.

Lloyd set off to learn the art of building in 1960. He liked the whole process immensely. Ideally he’d have worked with a master carpenter long enough to learn the basics, but there was never time. He learned from friends and books and by blundering his way into a process that required a certain amount of competence. His perspective was that of a novice, a homeowner, rather than a pro. As he learned, he felt that he could tell others how to build—or at least get them started on the path to creating their own homes.

Through the years, he’s personally gone from post and beam to geodesic domes to stud-frame construction. It’s been a constant learning process, and this has led him into investigating many methods of construction. For five years in the late ’60s to early ’70s, he built geodesic domes. He got into book publishing by producing Domebook One in 1970 and Domebook 2 in 1971.

He gave up on domes (as homes) and published his company’s namesake Shelter in 1973. Since then, Shelter Publications has produced books on a variety of subjects and returned to its roots with Home Work in 2004, The Barefoot Architect and Builders of the Pacific Coast in 2008, Tiny Homes in 2012, and more.

Building is Lloyd’s favorite subject. Even in this day and age, building a house with one’s own hands can save a ton of money and—if you follow it through—you can get what you want in a home.

Lesley Creed (1947–2023) moved out of San Francisco in the early ’70s, intent upon a back to-the-land lifestyle. She worked with Shelter Publications as a consulting editor, while maintaining a vegetable and flower garden and pursuing an interest in how things are made. She lived with her husband and co-author, Lloyd Kahn, in West Marin County, California, until her death in 2023.

When Lesley and I first got together, it was homesteading at first sight.

We both wanted to create a home and grow our own food. I’d been working as a carpenter for about 10 years and had built a homestead in Big Sur in the ’60s (seep. 158). Lesley had been gardening, sewing, and­practicing crafts most of her life.

We both wanted to do as much for ourselves as possible. We both wanted to avoid paying rent or getting a bank loan. And we both wanted to have ahome built of natural materials, and that was ­functional, practical, and good-feeling.

21st-century homestead When I say “homestead,” Idon’t refer to the original meaning of the word as it applied to farmers claiming land in America in the mid-1800s.

Ours is a homestead in the sense of building our own home and growing much of our own food on a (small) piece of land.

Starting We began in 1974. We had a 100´ by 200´ lot on the Northern California coast ​— ​about half an acre. (Togive you an idea of the area, a football field is roughly an acre in size.)

Here’s the story of our adventures in providing our own shelter, food, and practicing crafts on this land. There are also lists of useful tools. And it’s a look at what we see in our everyday life, inside and outside the house.

We’ve learned a lot by trial and error, and want to share our experiences with others who are interested inhomemade and handmade shelter, food, and crafts.

Skill level Our building, gardening, and cooking skills are noton the professional level. I’m an owner-builder, not a highly skilled carpenter. Lesley’s cooking is simple and delicious, notfancy. Her garden is home-oriented, not professionally landscaped. The tables I’ve made arecrude by cabinet makers’ standards; Ithink of themas folk art. The point is, these are things you canaccomplish ona do-it-yourself basis without getting hung up by the absence of perfection.

The ’60s and the ’70s It’s said that the ’60s happened in the ’70s”; that’s only partially true. The ’60s happened in the ’60s and the ’70s. Much of what we didin the ’70s was inspired by the some of the countercultural concepts of the earlier decade, which we both arrived at independently. (See brief notes on the ’60s on p. 154.)

Reinventing the wheel In the ’60s, there was ​— ​among some of us ​— ​a spirit of relearning skills of thepast. Building one’s own home, growing vegetables (and preserving the surplus), managing chickens, bees, and goats, making bread ​— ​skills that had been abandoned by our parents’ or grandparents’ generations.

It’s a juggling act ​— ​there was always more to do than time to do it. We didn’t take holidays. We mostly stayed home and kept busy ​— ​enjoying the process as well as the results.

There were maybe 35 of us building our own homes in or on the outskirts of our small town in the ’70s. It was probably amusing to the older inhabitants here to see a sudden influx of young people learning skills and crafts that previous generations had given up.

Easy living This was possible then because it was a time of great prosperity in America. You could live on very little money and take the time to experiment, try things out, learn new skills. Land was cheap (ours was $6,500), and building codes, planning codes, and fees were reasonable rather than onerous, as they are today.

Self-sufficiency It’s important to realize that self-sufficiency ​— ​like perfection ​— ​is a direction. You never get there. No one is completely self-sufficient. Nothing is perfect.

You can’t grow all your own food. You probably can’t do every bit of house building yourself. The point is to do as much for yourself as possible.

Handmade: A few things haven’t really changed much from 40 years ago. A computer is not going to build your house for you, nor plant your food (nor make quilts or shawls). These things still need to be done with human hands. Just about everything you see in these pages was done by hand.

Analog times The bulk of our house building was done before computers. Much of what we learned came from books. It was truly a different world. Wecommunicated with landline phones (when possible) and letters via the U.S. Post Office. The Whole Earth Catalog was immensely useful for a large group of like-minded people.

There was no Facebook, no Instagram, Apple, Google, Alexa, or Amazon. There was no internet!

If you wanted to build a house nowadays, what if you took all the time you now spend in the digital world (well, a lot of it), and spent it building? Just sayin.’

Assembling this book I’m the communicator (­blabbermouth) of the family. From an early age, I’vewritten about, talked about, taken photos, blogged, Instagrammed, and published books about what I run across in the world. The same here. Most of the text here is in my first-person voice.

But as I’ve watched this book develop, I’ve realized that, although I’m doing most of the writing here, these pages are a testament to Lesley’s creative skills, her arts and crafts. She’s the captain of this ship, and the food, the garden, the flowers, the quilts, the way things look and work around here is all her doing.

Could you do this nowadays? Times are way different now than they were when we did the bulk of this work.

You could do some of the things we’ve done here without devoting as much time to these pursuits as we have. You could scale it back compared to what we’ve done. This book is descriptive, not prescriptive.

For example, you could remodel an old house instead of starting from scratch. If you live in the city, you could grow parsley on your fire escape, bake bread, buy fresh ingredients at farmers’ markets. You could remodel your living space, build some of your own furniture, doyour own maintenance, make your own repairs.

For more on the possibilities of small-scale homesteading these days, see “Could You Do This Nowadays?” p. 153.

The benefits In the last few years, we’ve looked around and thought, “This is pretty good.”

The house has been upgraded, changed, remodeled, and is working well. The kitchen is a far cry from the outdoor kitchen with washtub sink that we started with. The soil in the garden is black and rich from decades of improvement. The chicken coop is working well (in its fifth incarnation). Every day we make improvements, do necessary maintenance, and tune things up.

We have no mortgage. We pay no rent. We live in a place that we love, that we’ve crafted and created with our own hands, that is ever evolving. This is our handmade world.