Australia is a bad place for first home buyers. Booming property prices, stagnant wages, and negative gearing have all created a real estate market that is virtually impossible to enter without some dramatic lifestyle sacrifices. Unless, of course, your parents can spot you $100,000 for a deposit.But there is actually a way to own a house cheaply. And not just any house, but a tiny house, which is exactly what it sounds like but with a design modeled around environmental sustainability.
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Nye and Tess Stewart are one such couple who have built a tiny house in Australia. They live just outside Brisbane in a place they built themselves on a block of bushland. Fighting their way into the city's overheated property market wasn't high on their agenda, so instead they dropped $20,000 to build their own place. And now they've done it, they think could do it again for half that price. We asked them how.For Nye, the first step was to spend a few years reading everything he could find about sustainability and tiny houses—and there's a lot. The internet is kind of obsessed with tiny houses. The problem is that most of them gush over tiny house aesthetics while rarely getting into the nitty gritty of construction. For that, you can't go past Robert Rich's Earth Garden Building Book, which is a bible for eco-builders.The Australian Tiny Homes Foundation is another great resource. It's a non-profit organisation that provides shelter for the homeless by building communities of tiny houses around the country. They even have tiny house plans on their website, which you can download for free.Tiny house Facebook groups also have a lot of handy information, and can be a good place to meet others with some construction experience. Nye also recommends sources like Tiny Texas Houses (the project of an American environmentalist who builds houses out of salvaged and recycled materials), Richard Olsen's book Handmade Houses: A Century of Earth-Friendly Home Design, DIY log-cabin builder Noah Bradley's Handmade Houses site, and Facebook group Living Off The Grid.
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"The info is getting better and better," Nye says. "We're also hoping to organise some workshop days and info sessions near Brisbane soon, to share ideas and knowledge." The workshops will run along similar lines to the Tiny Homes Foundation. Punters will pay a small fee to learn how to make their own tiny homes, and the finished places will be used as temporary accommodation for the homeless.Nye and Tess Stewart bought their own block of land just outside Brisbane—but if you can't afford your own site, there are alternatives. "There are loads of communal living groups around," Nye says, "and websites where you can source somewhere cheap to use as a plot of land."Check out the Cohousing Australia Initiative, which helps people to organise and promote their own rural or urban co-living communities, or the Willing Workers On Organic Farms program (WWOOF.com.au). This is where owners of organic farms often donate farm space for workers to live on, in exchange for their help around the farm. You can also find cheap land advertised on Gumtree's Land For Sale page—two kilometre square blocks in rural NSW or Victoria will set you back between $6,000 and $10,000.Unfortunately in Australia it's illegal to live full time in temporary accommodation, like a caravan or a tiny house on a trailer. But if your tiny home is anchored to the ground with a permanent foundation, you won't have any council troubles (you can find out more about different types of permanent foundations at website The Tiny House).
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What Do You Need From Your House?
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Hustle For Cheap Materials
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"The dry stuff breaks down very effectively," Nye says, "and can eventually be used as a safe compost on non-edible gardens. You have to "deal with your waste" every couple of months by storing it outside in containers, but it's really not that bad. A 12-volt fan draws air from the chamber up a pipe and through the roof, which helps to break things down and remove smells. It actually smells less than an ordinary toilet, if you can believe it. And if your budget's tight, you can build one yourself much more cheaply," Nye says—you'll find designs at sites like Permaculture News.As for the house structure itself, Nye and Tess went fully DIY with little more than "a pair of variable speed cordless drills, a good quality hand saw, a couple of G-Clamps, and some trousers with lots of pockets."They used recycled hardwood timber for the frame, plantation pine for the walls and plywood for the floor, which is "very forgiving and super strong," Nye says. The roof is made of lightweight polycarbonate sheets, with marine plywood for the exterior cladding and thin ply for the internal cladding—they're all materials you can buy at supply stores like Bunnings. They even made the windows themselves from tinted perspex. "It's awesome stuff," Nye says. "You can cut it to size with a saw and drill and screw it to a frame. It's very forgiving and much more resistant to movement and shock than glass, if you're moving your home around."
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Avoiding Bills is Actually One of the Easiest Parts
You Might Need to Downsize a Little
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But as long as you're in an area with good signal coverage, your internet and mobile access should be fine, and for essential high energy items like power tools you can use a diesel generator, or just buy lithium ion rechargeable tools. "Air con might also be out," Nye says, "but if you design the house well and have good airflow you shouldn't need it.""The only costs we have are the food we eat, some cleaning products and council land rates," Nye says. "Gas for cooking and hot water might be a couple of hundred bucks a year."But of course, doing away with rent and regular bills is only a small part of the motivation for most people who get off the grid. "I feel better ethically that I know how our power is produced," Nye says. "I have a much greater feeling of self-determination, that I'm not at the whim of Big Brother and subject to the price rises of energy and other resources. I feel connected to how we live and get great satisfaction every time I have a hot shower, turn on a light or open the fridge."I very much enjoy watching the batteries charge on our energy monitoring screen with a cup of coffee in the morning. These things may sound silly, but all this has made me profoundly happier."Follow Nick on Twitter