7 ms·

I always like these kinds of stories, and then I wonder what the after-story is. A couple hundred thousand in repairs, renovation and remodeling, I'm guessing t

by bane 11y ago

I always like these kinds of stories, and then I wonder what the after-story is. A couple hundred thousand in repairs, renovation and remodeling, I'm guessing the occasional B&B guest doesn't provide a huge amount of income. What do people who do this (move out to extreme rural areas and buy enormous and expensive to maintain offbeat homes like schools, churches, power plants and missile silos) do for a living to afford this? I'd love to go out to random-rural-county and buy 20 acres of land and a school and turn it into a huge home, but then I'd be hours away from where I need to go to make the money to do that. There's always some other parts of the financial story that never seems to come through in these kinds of articles.

ljk 11y ago
this is just a guess - maybe they're not doing it for money, but as a form of a hobby
- mhurron 11y ago
  Well yes, but they still have to pay for it. For most people that means working, and that's time out of a day, most days a week. They included what it used to cost to heat and power the school for a year, but never mention what it is now. Details that are interesting to the story but probably take away from the 'feel good' type of article they were trying to make.
- scott_s 11y ago
  That's fine, but that still doesn't answer bane's question: how does this family earn the income which they use to live?
  - ljk 11y ago
    good point, it would be interesting to see how they can afford this
  - tdicola 11y ago
    Earn it, inherit it, or win the lottery. Does it really matter what they did to acquire it?
    - scott_s 11y ago
      If they are earning their living living far away from their old jobs, it's interesting to know how they are doing that.
    - bane 11y ago
      I always feel there's kind of a weird slant to these kinds of stories...a "hey, look at how these clever people are living, isn't that a great idea hint hint maybe you can do it too!". And you'll see this kind of living referenced in all kinds of alternative living magazines and websites and whatever. It's like the tiny house movement, where you read about some daring young family who've moved into a 300 sqft shed with a composter out back. What you never hear is what life is like 2, 3 or 4 years later. (actually you do, and it's usually stories of people about to go crazy for lack of places to go just to have normal time alone after a year or so) I think it potentially paints a false picture of what it takes to do this. For example, it mentions that the school was listed for $256k, has 10,600 sq ft of space and 8 acres of land. It sounds like a steal and so obvious that only idiots wouldn't think this sounds like a great idea. But wait, it gets better! They actually only paid $190k for it! Well shit, I should sell my house, quit me job and cash in my 401(k) so I can live the highlife like these folks in my slightly oddball, yet roomy estate. Sure it was a little bit of a fixer upper, but that's nothing some elbow grease won't fix. Heating bill is $4k/mo? No problem, I'll just bring the kids out and we'll chop wood. It sounds like for under a quarter million these folks ended up with a little slice of consequence free paradise. But that's obviously not true. "After much searching he found a plumber who was willing to make the drive to the south-east corner of the county to help him get the new system running. Loads of insulation and 60 new windows were in place. Suddenly everything came together and they were all blissfully warm." Okay, so that's like what, $60-100k in windows. $10-15k for a wood pellet boiler they could never install. Probably thousands of dollars in plumber bills (I can't get mine to come out to even look at a sink for anything under a couple hundred dollars). What do you want to bet that the school was packed full of asbestos they had to replace? It talks about ways they save some money, gardening for vegetables (in those great long Canadian growing seasons) and run a B&B with 3 whole rooms (only in the summer months). "Last summer, for example, all five of them planted seeds for growing organic corn. When the corn was ripe, the girls earned their own money for new tablets by selling it at a roadside table." Well isn't that nice. That's a lot of corn. Are they basically just farming the property? 8 acres isn't a lot of land to support commercial farming. Now toss in the expense of farming equipment, seed, etc. I believe (based on the description in the article), that this is the place https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9341989,-77.1030939,358m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9341989,-77.1030939,358m/dat... If so, they lose about 2 acres to the school, the tennis courts, the entrance and the back lot behind the building. From google earth it looks like they have about a quarter acre under cultivation right now...but the sports fields to the West look like they may have something growing. Some googling shows that you can get about $300 per acre for corn with costs of about $250/ac to grow it. So if they put all 6 available acres under cultivation they might get about $300/year in profit. Those poor girls must have been selling corn at that stand for years before they could all get tablets. Actually it also look like they're planting trees that will eliminate lots of their arable property. That may be what's going on in the old sports fields. "They have already planted 1,000 trees and aim to plant many more. “We are treeing the land just as quickly as I can possibly do it,” Mr. Parker says." Maybe this is a desperate attempt to cut down on the crazy heating bills? Either way, they aren't paying for heating with roadside corn and 3 months of 3 room B&B overflow. So either they started off wealthy and this is just some kind of "get back to the earth and spend time with our family" early retirement, or they're living in virtual poverty conditions. Wait until they need to spend $100k to reroof that school. I really wish these kinds of stories would talk more about how these families make ends meet because otherwise it comes off as a little idealistic and even fantastic. These are incredibly expensive fantasies in these stories and I think lots of people believe it's not.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
DanBC 11y ago
UK TV series Grand Designs features people who self-build homes, or sometimes convert weird buildings (water towers for example) into homes. The show talks a little bit about the finances, and how people often start over-spending on details. In England this can save some money over just buying something as big / distinctive. And if the homeowners DIY there are further savings. And some people are just very fussy about details, so self-build or conversions allow them to have total control. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Designs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Designs
- ZeroGravitas 11y ago
  I was expecting you to bring up the point about how many of the people featured simply seem to have much more money than sense. One that particularly sticks in the mind for me was a nice old gent who got heavily into drugs in his teens so his family trust fund was taken out of his control. He had to ask permission from the trustees to build a £350,000 custom designed house,specifically designed around him, even though he hated houses and had lived most of his life in a mobile houseboat and never spent much time in one place.
- vram22 11y ago
  >people who self-build homes There seem to be some people doing it. I've been reading about this a bit lately, and also had been to a remote place recently, where someone had built a rather big "earthship" and was living pretty much off the grid. It looked, very roughly, like the Brighton Earthship shown in the Example section here, but was round, not rectangular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship
  - pessimizer 11y ago
    Self-builds don't have to be primitive or science-fictiony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Segal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Segal http://www.ianwhite.info/walter_segal_buildings.html http://www.ianwhite.info/walter_segal_buildings.html https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxrtid_gd-s12-e12_news?start=0 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxrtid_gd-s12-e12_news?sta... (Grand Designs) http://www.ianwhite.info/THE_SEGAL_METHOD.pdf http://www.ianwhite.info/THE_SEGAL_METHOD.pdf (Architects Journal article with detail explanation)
zyxley 11y ago
Why do people open restaurants when the overwhelming majority of new restaurants go bankrupt in short order?
- radnor 11y ago
  I imagine a lot of them think, "It can't be that hard!" After the money disappears they realize that yes, it is very hard. Then someone else comes along, sees their failed restaurant and says, "It can't be that hard..."
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    I began writing a C++ compiler by thinking "it can't be that hard".
    - Scoundreller 11y ago
      But you only had to exchange your time to learn, not your time and life savings (I hope!).
    - tamana 11y ago
      How much money does it make? Running a restaurant is easy, if you don't have to cover any expenses.
  - learc83 11y ago
    The vast majority of decent new restaurants fail because they don't have enough money to last until business picks up. Most small restaurant owners have just enough money to open, and they assume they'll be making enough to pay expenses within a month or two. But unless you're in a fantastic location, or already have a great reputation before you open, it takes time to build a steady customer base.
  - rzzzt 11y ago
    An article in Slate from 2005, describing the same way of thinking: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitter_brew.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitt...
rayiner 11y ago
> I'd love to go out to random-rural-county and buy 20 acres of land and a school and turn it into a huge home, but then I'd be hours away from where I need to go to make the money to do that. Being a rural doctor is a sweet gig. They get paid as much or more than doctors in urban areas, so you can be making $300k in the middle of nowhere, Iowa.
- Scoundreller 11y ago
  Same in Ontario. You might even get paid more for working in a rural area than one would in the city. Plus no worry about insurance paying or whether your patients can afford the co-pay (that's all someone else's problem).
cgh 11y ago
They sold their house in Toronto, one of the most expensive cities in North America, and probably made a couple of million or so. The school was only $190,000 plus whatever it took to fix it up. As the article states, the area is a tourism hub so their B&B is probably quite busy. Otherwise, assuming they own the school free and clear and grow a lot of their own food, I imagine they don't have many expenses.
- bane 11y ago
  I mean, that's cool. It'd be interesting if the article mentioned how much they made from selling their home. They could have sold their house underwater and are still servicing their old mortgage too. We don't know from the article what the story is. Suppose they made money and have a million in the bank, how long can they ride on that before they have to pack it in and move back to a place where they can get jobs? What about their kid's future expenses, how are those sorted out? The article mentions a couple things about their B&B: - 3 rooms - they get overflow from other B&Bs, not their own business. - they only operate during the summer So that puts an upper limit to what they can earn from that. Going rate for Milford, ON B&B is about $200/night. That's about $600/day. That's $54k/year before costs assuming full occupancy 7 days per week during the in-season.
  - zdw 11y ago
    The music camp alone is $900 to attend, with 50 students, and probably fills. That's 45K gross for a 5 day gig - I'd imagine they make 1/3 to 1/5 of that in rent: https://oldschoolbluegrasscamp.wordpress.com/register/ https://oldschoolbluegrasscamp.wordpress.com/register/ I couldn't find a time when their AirBNB sites weren't booked, but they probably command a premium given the size and amenities and tolerance for animals/kids. The math on a lot of this appears to be a lot of "slow and steady"
- goodJobWalrus 11y ago
  You seem to think that they owned their house in Toronto outright, which is rare for a young family, especially in such expensive area. Also, median detached house price in Toronto is just over a million, so if they got a couple of million, they had above average house as well, so it's still not clear how are they affording all of that. But, I don't think that's the point of the article, maybe they are trust fund babies, who cares.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
That is a great question, but it kind of takes the shine off don't you think? :-) One of the things I look at from time to time is what sort of burn rate I'd be willing to tolerate while 'retired' (which is code for just doing what ever the hell I want without having to fit it into other agendas). And, because it showed up here on HN once, ran the numbers on a missile silo. The one I was looking at was less than a million dollars to purchase but my brother in law, the civil engineer, gave me a list of things that would have to be vetted/fixed before occupancy. Since it was a vertical silo I was thinking a 10 story living arrangement built inside the silo itself, with floors going down from the circular top floor and an elevator in the middle. We figured that construction, retrofits, and infrastructure would cost about 3 - 6 million (depending on how much corrosion and toxic waste cleanup was required to remediate). Power for pumps to keep it dry during the wet season, insurance, maintenance about 7K a month (it costs a lot to pump water up a 100'). We figured you'd have to start with about $10M to exit the other side with a "self sustaining" environment you could live and work in (but a seriously "fun" environment to hang out in. You could pay someone $12K a year just to come out once a week and restock the larder with consumables. The school looks like a much simpler setup.
- bane 11y ago
  It would definitely be something I'd explore if I had sufficient FU money. Drop out, drop off and just do whatever I felt like. I have enough things I'm interested in to keep me self-occupied for at least 20-30 years I'm sure.

by bane 11y ago

ljk 11y ago

this is just a guess - maybe they're not doing it for money, but as a form of a hobby

mhurron 11y ago
Well yes, but they still have to pay for it. For most people that means working, and that's time out of a day, most days a week. They included what it used to cost to heat and power the school for a year, but never mention what it is now. Details that are interesting to the story but probably take away from the 'feel good' type of article they were trying to make.
scott_s 11y ago
That's fine, but that still doesn't answer bane's question: how does this family earn the income which they use to live?
- ljk 11y ago
  good point, it would be interesting to see how they can afford this
- tdicola 11y ago
  Earn it, inherit it, or win the lottery. Does it really matter what they did to acquire it?
  - scott_s 11y ago
    If they are earning their living living far away from their old jobs, it's interesting to know how they are doing that.
  - bane 11y ago
    I always feel there's kind of a weird slant to these kinds of stories...a "hey, look at how these clever people are living, isn't that a great idea hint hint maybe you can do it too!". And you'll see this kind of living referenced in all kinds of alternative living magazines and websites and whatever. It's like the tiny house movement, where you read about some daring young family who've moved into a 300 sqft shed with a composter out back. What you never hear is what life is like 2, 3 or 4 years later. (actually you do, and it's usually stories of people about to go crazy for lack of places to go just to have normal time alone after a year or so) I think it potentially paints a false picture of what it takes to do this. For example, it mentions that the school was listed for $256k, has 10,600 sq ft of space and 8 acres of land. It sounds like a steal and so obvious that only idiots wouldn't think this sounds like a great idea. But wait, it gets better! They actually only paid $190k for it! Well shit, I should sell my house, quit me job and cash in my 401(k) so I can live the highlife like these folks in my slightly oddball, yet roomy estate. Sure it was a little bit of a fixer upper, but that's nothing some elbow grease won't fix. Heating bill is $4k/mo? No problem, I'll just bring the kids out and we'll chop wood. It sounds like for under a quarter million these folks ended up with a little slice of consequence free paradise. But that's obviously not true. "After much searching he found a plumber who was willing to make the drive to the south-east corner of the county to help him get the new system running. Loads of insulation and 60 new windows were in place. Suddenly everything came together and they were all blissfully warm." Okay, so that's like what, $60-100k in windows. $10-15k for a wood pellet boiler they could never install. Probably thousands of dollars in plumber bills (I can't get mine to come out to even look at a sink for anything under a couple hundred dollars). What do you want to bet that the school was packed full of asbestos they had to replace? It talks about ways they save some money, gardening for vegetables (in those great long Canadian growing seasons) and run a B&B with 3 whole rooms (only in the summer months). "Last summer, for example, all five of them planted seeds for growing organic corn. When the corn was ripe, the girls earned their own money for new tablets by selling it at a roadside table." Well isn't that nice. That's a lot of corn. Are they basically just farming the property? 8 acres isn't a lot of land to support commercial farming. Now toss in the expense of farming equipment, seed, etc. I believe (based on the description in the article), that this is the place https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9341989,-77.1030939,358m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@43.9341989,-77.1030939,358m/dat... If so, they lose about 2 acres to the school, the tennis courts, the entrance and the back lot behind the building. From google earth it looks like they have about a quarter acre under cultivation right now...but the sports fields to the West look like they may have something growing. Some googling shows that you can get about $300 per acre for corn with costs of about $250/ac to grow it. So if they put all 6 available acres under cultivation they might get about $300/year in profit. Those poor girls must have been selling corn at that stand for years before they could all get tablets. Actually it also look like they're planting trees that will eliminate lots of their arable property. That may be what's going on in the old sports fields. "They have already planted 1,000 trees and aim to plant many more. “We are treeing the land just as quickly as I can possibly do it,” Mr. Parker says." Maybe this is a desperate attempt to cut down on the crazy heating bills? Either way, they aren't paying for heating with roadside corn and 3 months of 3 room B&B overflow. So either they started off wealthy and this is just some kind of "get back to the earth and spend time with our family" early retirement, or they're living in virtual poverty conditions. Wait until they need to spend $100k to reroof that school. I really wish these kinds of stories would talk more about how these families make ends meet because otherwise it comes off as a little idealistic and even fantastic. These are incredibly expensive fantasies in these stories and I think lots of people believe it's not.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

DanBC 11y ago

UK TV series Grand Designs features people who self-build homes, or sometimes convert weird buildings (water towers for example) into homes. The show talks a little bit about the finances, and how people often start over-spending on details. In England this can save some money over just buying something as big / distinctive. And if the homeowners DIY there are further savings. And some people are just very fussy about details, so self-build or conversions allow them to have total control. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Designs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Designs

ZeroGravitas 11y ago
I was expecting you to bring up the point about how many of the people featured simply seem to have much more money than sense. One that particularly sticks in the mind for me was a nice old gent who got heavily into drugs in his teens so his family trust fund was taken out of his control. He had to ask permission from the trustees to build a £350,000 custom designed house,specifically designed around him, even though he hated houses and had lived most of his life in a mobile houseboat and never spent much time in one place.
vram22 11y ago
>people who self-build homes There seem to be some people doing it. I've been reading about this a bit lately, and also had been to a remote place recently, where someone had built a rather big "earthship" and was living pretty much off the grid. It looked, very roughly, like the Brighton Earthship shown in the Example section here, but was round, not rectangular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship
- pessimizer 11y ago
  Self-builds don't have to be primitive or science-fictiony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Segal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Segal http://www.ianwhite.info/walter_segal_buildings.html http://www.ianwhite.info/walter_segal_buildings.html https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxrtid_gd-s12-e12_news?start=0 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxrtid_gd-s12-e12_news?sta... (Grand Designs) http://www.ianwhite.info/THE_SEGAL_METHOD.pdf http://www.ianwhite.info/THE_SEGAL_METHOD.pdf (Architects Journal article with detail explanation)

zyxley 11y ago

Why do people open restaurants when the overwhelming majority of new restaurants go bankrupt in short order?

radnor 11y ago
I imagine a lot of them think, "It can't be that hard!" After the money disappears they realize that yes, it is very hard. Then someone else comes along, sees their failed restaurant and says, "It can't be that hard..."
- WalterBright 11y ago
  I began writing a C++ compiler by thinking "it can't be that hard".
  - Scoundreller 11y ago
    But you only had to exchange your time to learn, not your time and life savings (I hope!).
  - tamana 11y ago
    How much money does it make? Running a restaurant is easy, if you don't have to cover any expenses.
- learc83 11y ago
  The vast majority of decent new restaurants fail because they don't have enough money to last until business picks up. Most small restaurant owners have just enough money to open, and they assume they'll be making enough to pay expenses within a month or two. But unless you're in a fantastic location, or already have a great reputation before you open, it takes time to build a steady customer base.
- rzzzt 11y ago
  An article in Slate from 2005, describing the same way of thinking: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitter_brew.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitt...

rayiner 11y ago

> I'd love to go out to random-rural-county and buy 20 acres of land and a school and turn it into a huge home, but then I'd be hours away from where I need to go to make the money to do that. Being a rural doctor is a sweet gig. They get paid as much or more than doctors in urban areas, so you can be making $300k in the middle of nowhere, Iowa.

Scoundreller 11y ago
Same in Ontario. You might even get paid more for working in a rural area than one would in the city. Plus no worry about insurance paying or whether your patients can afford the co-pay (that's all someone else's problem).

cgh 11y ago

They sold their house in Toronto, one of the most expensive cities in North America, and probably made a couple of million or so. The school was only $190,000 plus whatever it took to fix it up. As the article states, the area is a tourism hub so their B&B is probably quite busy. Otherwise, assuming they own the school free and clear and grow a lot of their own food, I imagine they don't have many expenses.

bane 11y ago
I mean, that's cool. It'd be interesting if the article mentioned how much they made from selling their home. They could have sold their house underwater and are still servicing their old mortgage too. We don't know from the article what the story is. Suppose they made money and have a million in the bank, how long can they ride on that before they have to pack it in and move back to a place where they can get jobs? What about their kid's future expenses, how are those sorted out? The article mentions a couple things about their B&B: - 3 rooms - they get overflow from other B&Bs, not their own business. - they only operate during the summer So that puts an upper limit to what they can earn from that. Going rate for Milford, ON B&B is about $200/night. That's about $600/day. That's $54k/year before costs assuming full occupancy 7 days per week during the in-season.
- zdw 11y ago
  The music camp alone is $900 to attend, with 50 students, and probably fills. That's 45K gross for a 5 day gig - I'd imagine they make 1/3 to 1/5 of that in rent: https://oldschoolbluegrasscamp.wordpress.com/register/ https://oldschoolbluegrasscamp.wordpress.com/register/ I couldn't find a time when their AirBNB sites weren't booked, but they probably command a premium given the size and amenities and tolerance for animals/kids. The math on a lot of this appears to be a lot of "slow and steady"
goodJobWalrus 11y ago
You seem to think that they owned their house in Toronto outright, which is rare for a young family, especially in such expensive area. Also, median detached house price in Toronto is just over a million, so if they got a couple of million, they had above average house as well, so it's still not clear how are they affording all of that. But, I don't think that's the point of the article, maybe they are trust fund babies, who cares.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

That is a great question, but it kind of takes the shine off don't you think? :-) One of the things I look at from time to time is what sort of burn rate I'd be willing to tolerate while 'retired' (which is code for just doing what ever the hell I want without having to fit it into other agendas). And, because it showed up here on HN once, ran the numbers on a missile silo. The one I was looking at was less than a million dollars to purchase but my brother in law, the civil engineer, gave me a list of things that would have to be vetted/fixed before occupancy. Since it was a vertical silo I was thinking a 10 story living arrangement built inside the silo itself, with floors going down from the circular top floor and an elevator in the middle. We figured that construction, retrofits, and infrastructure would cost about 3 - 6 million (depending on how much corrosion and toxic waste cleanup was required to remediate). Power for pumps to keep it dry during the wet season, insurance, maintenance about 7K a month (it costs a lot to pump water up a 100'). We figured you'd have to start with about $10M to exit the other side with a "self sustaining" environment you could live and work in (but a seriously "fun" environment to hang out in. You could pay someone $12K a year just to come out once a week and restock the larder with consumables. The school looks like a much simpler setup.

bane 11y ago
It would definitely be something I'd explore if I had sufficient FU money. Drop out, drop off and just do whatever I felt like. I have enough things I'm interested in to keep me self-occupied for at least 20-30 years I'm sure.