Dacha - From Russia with Love

First it was a Mongolian tent, now it's a Russian vacation home. Where will my quest for an inexpensive temporary shelter end? Before I get too far into this let me tell you that I have been reading a book that has changed my perspective and has opened my eyes to a whole new world.


The book is "Mortgage-Free! : Radical Strategies for Home Ownership" by Rob Roy. If you have not read this book, I strongly recommend that you read it. The author has built five houses for his family and has not had a mortgage on any of them. He explains how a mortgage - death pact - is a phenomenon that only exists in the middle class of the western world. He explains the amortization of a thirty year mortgage ( again DEATH PACT) and how much of the money is wasted on the interest paid on the loan.
So, how does one avoid this "Til Death Do Us Part" relationship with the large and very uncertain financial institutions of today? Easy, focus on what the true essentials of life are and be willing to sacrifice some modern "conveniences" (or complications depending on your point of view) to be able to achieve your goal.


In his book, Rob Roy discusses the importance of buying some land and building an affordable/sustainable house for your family. The first step is to buy land. Check! Got that one out of the way before ever reading the book. The next step is to build a temporary shelter (TS) to live in while you construct your main house. Mr. Roy built a 12' x 16' shed for his family to occupy during construction of their home. My plan is to build a small building, referred to as a dacha by Mark Stephen Chenail in his article titled "The Simplest House of All - The Dacha Series" on http://www.homestead.org/. I'm not sure how Mr. Chenail came to term his TS designs as dacha, but dacha is the Russian name for a seasonal or year-round second home. We plan on building something similar to the dacha 3:


This is a bit bigger than the 12' x 16' shed that Mr. Roy and family occupied during construction of their house but my family is a bit bigger than his so this one will do. Besides this is the one that Lesley likes the most, so that is reason enough.

The beauty of this design is that it will easily convert into a barn once we have moved into the main house. We were already planning on putting up a barn so we will be killing two birds with one stone.



As you can see from the layout of the dacha, we will have an open air, split floor plan with lots of cross ventilation. It is going to be such an adventure! As Lesley says, "Anyone can live in a house. How many people can say they lived in a dacha?" Man, I love that woman.





So, once we get the dacha up, we'll invite everyone over for a dacha warming party. Hopefully it will be sometime this summer so maybe we'll make it a dacha cooling party.

Remember this is only a TS. But if we like it, maybe we'll just stay in it and save all that money for our family trip around the world. Maybe we could go stay in a yurt in Mongolia and a Dacha in the Former Soviet Union. Who knows? The sky's the limit.