Home is Where the Heart Is
I was chatting it up with an old friend today who drove me over to the house she’d finished building this year. I’d last seen it back when she started, over a year or more ago, back when she was laying up bags of sand or cement or god knows what, building up a wall she could plaster over with a mix of 15% Portland cement and 85% dirt to create a dome structure, part igloo in shape, part serpentine, mostly free-form and wild.
She was worried about not getting a building permit that first site visit and asked what I thought since I’m sort of an expert on permitless architecture. Most of my structures, shops, studios, wellhouses, boatsheds, rootcellar, bike buildings, woodsheds, outhouses, greenhouse and saunas are what you might call — but I sure don’t — illegal.
Illegal. That’s a strong and seriously unsavory description. Not one I much care for, you want to know the truth. I’m not building a Taj Mahal down here — not even a slam bam condominium we can list on AirB&B to make some fast bucks. We’re building with the Full Expectation these are Temporary Structures. Sure, I could haul in an old shipping container, maybe drag up a single wide, set up shop, store our treasures. But no, I erected a small, inconspicuous, aesthetically pleasing edifice instead. And yeah, shoot me, I didn’t ask the County if it was okay. Jeez….
I told my friend, don’t worry about permits. You don’t need no stinking permit! Nobody’s going to imagine, not in a thousand bourgeois lifetimes, this alien, 300 square foot concrete igloo is going to register on the County Radar as an actual house. A domicile. A place which humans would actually live. No!
But … it is. It’s an exquisite example of Building Outside the Box. It is, without a doubt, a work of art. Glass and metal and found objects all made their way into the walls. And! The dwelling is insulated far beyond Code, requiring only a match and a fart to heat on a cold winter day.
Is it legal? If you stand inside its curved and organic walls, you wouldn’t ask if it’s legal — you’d think, it’s strangely beautiful, it’s sculptural and it’s other wordly. My friend built this by herself and she’s understandably proud. It’s an amazing feat. And more, it’s her home and it’s paid for. Well, everything but the permit fee.
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