Tiny House

The Time Poor.

How to escape time poverty and join the free.

By Brad Beckstrom

My oldest son came home a bit stressed out the other night. He recently started driving and has started to experience the chaos of rush hour traffic. I enjoy having everyone home for dinner and gave him a hard time about being late. I told him he needed to start managing his time better.

I sounded like one of my first bosses who used to say “We start at 8 Beckstrom, not 8:07 am or 8:11 am” or whatever the exact number of minutes I was late by was, as he tapped his Patek Philippe watch. At the time, I fixed the problem by planning to arrive at 7:45 AM. That worked for a while, until I realized putting on a suit and commuting to an office would not be my path.

Later, as an entrepreneur,I took time management to a whole new level, using day timers, Palm pilots, Treo phones (remember those?) I created multiple to do lists and scheduled my day to the minute, starting early and often finishing late. It was my turn to give people a hard time about being late. I was time poor.

The Time Poor from the book Vagabonding

“Sierra Club founder John Muir used to express amazement at the well-heeled travelers who would visit Yosemite only to rush away after a few hours of sightseeing. Muir called these folks the “time poor”- people so obsessed with their material wealth and social standing that they couldn’t spare the time to truly experience the splendor of California’s Sierra wilderness.”

120 years later, this hasn’t changed. Despite more people being fortunate enough to be able to travel, many, including myself often take only one week to see a place like Ireland or a day or two to see Rome as part of some whirlwind European trip. Staying in nice hotels, eating expensive meals but never really seeing a place. “Yep kids, look there’s big Ben Parliament.” Chevy Chase from European Family Vacation.

Many have chosen stuff and material wealth over time as a way of life. We tell ourselves we’ll take that long trip someday, spend more time with family, friends. Will take some time to get healthy again when things “slow down” a little or after we retire. Some of us fool ourselves into believing that by working harder we can buy ourselves some time, only to find out that managing more work and acquiring the finest, biggest stuff only makes us more time poor. Even the wealthiest billionaire cannot buy more time on this planet. In many cases, a high stress lifestyle will shorten your life versus lengthening it.

Bigger homes, bigger cars, bigger jobs, longer commutes only escalate time poverty. For years I was a victim of time poverty. In my 50 some odd years on this planet there are few things I wish I had picked up on a lot earlier. The good news is we’re fortunate enough in this century to fix the time poverty problem and it’s never too late to start.

So here are a few things I would’ve told my 25-year-old self.

Develop core principles and a philosophy of life. [Read more…] about The Time Poor.

Trending Minimalist. Looking for less.

07/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

By Brad Beckstrom

Tiny houses, bring em on. Tiny house on the beach, even better, less lawn care. Less yard work, absolutely. In fact, tiny everything, that would be perfect.

Spent several hours last weekend pulling huge weeds in 95° heat. I like to take a stoic approach to work around the house. I should be thankful to have a yard, some people have no weeds to pull. I’m fortunate to have the rain and subtropical heat that helped create these epic tree-like weeds. Some people’s yards, somewhere, are burning up, literally, droughts, forest fires. So yeah, bring those weeds on, glad to have them. If I get too hot, there is a ton of stuff to do inside as well.

Years of Work

In fact, there is easily a couple of years of work waiting for me in the house. Closets, drawers, the basement and garage to clean out. You see, I am trending minimalist. I’m defining this as “moving in the general direction towards less” less clutter, less stuff. The thinking behind minimalism is freeing your life of stuff and possessions to focus on whats important.

Maximist
[Read more…] about Trending Minimalist. Looking for less.

Your next home may come out of a 3-D printer and cost about 1/3 of what you’d pay today.

01/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

By Brad Beckstrom

By now you’ve probably read all the buzz surrounding 3-D printing. Designers and engineers are creating 3-D printed inventions like body parts, prosthetics, and custom surgical kits adapted to the patient.

I toured the factory of a potential client who makes kits used by surgeons for spinal surgery. They showed me prototypes for surgical kits that sell for five figures each. In the near future, these will be custom designed and printed for the patient and the type of surgery.

I knew 3D printing had arrived even before I stumbled into a 3-D print shop at the mall. If you read this blog you know malls give me hives, so it’s very rare I step into one. But there I was, on my way to a restaurant, when I saw shop windows full of 3-D printers in action. Printing out all kinds of prototypes for new products and dreams which users had paid hundreds of dollars to rent the machine to print out their invention.

So I’d seen my share of small 3-D printers printing small things but then I stumbled upon the 3-D printed house. There is a lot of innovation going on in jumbo scale 3-D printing. This factory in China can print out 10 houses a day out of poured concrete mortar.

Winsun 3-D Printed Home $5000

The finished product is the bit rough around the edges, literally. It’s a bit like that old concrete block garage out behind your grandfather’s house. When you have housing demands like China does, this may be a solid, affordable solution at about $5000 US .

The next generation of these is already in the works. Students at the University of South Carolina are working on a portable jobsite printer capable of creating buildings on site. Because the buildings are 3-D printed, the insides of the concrete walls can be hollow or custom configured with spaces for windows, electrical, and plumbing.

University of South Carolina contour printer.

I think it safe to say that this is still a few years off and the early job site versions of it will most likely be expensive.

3D Houses Here and Now [Read more…] about Your next home may come out of a 3-D printer and cost about 1/3 of what you’d pay today.

The $300 Vacation Home

12/14 by The Frug Leave a Comment

Shack Builder Is Part of a Movement.

By Brad Beckstrom

Derek Diedricksen, or “Deek” for short, doesn’t fit the mold of someone who would be sought out to lecture at MIT. He’s not a famous physicist or a Nobel Laureate.

He builds tiny houses which he likes to call “relax shacks.” His yard is filled with these shacks in various stages of development. He also collects all types of salvage, often from the side of the road and trash dumps, to give his his small structures a one-of-a-kind appearance.

Looking at his backyard you might think, ”I’m glad this guy’s not my neighbor.” As a turns out, the neighbors love what he does and even let him build some structures on their land as well. In fact, people come from all over to purchase these shacks as fast as he can build them.

Shelter as Art

The Lunar Lander

If you look closely, you’ll see that each one of these shacks is really a piece of art. A piece of art you can sleep in. Deek spends a lot of time creating these structures in wild pen and ink drawings and then brings them to life using innovative, low-cost building techniques.

The results of his efforts become summer cabins, artist studios, home offices, lakeside retreats. Deek has years worth of designs he hasn’t built yet. He’s been doing some very cool hands-on, relax-shacks workshops up and down the East Coast. At this workshop, a small group (limited to 20 attendees) can actually bring one of his designs to life. He teaches people how to use hand tools, framing techniques, window repair, and salvage construction.

Burning Man or MIT

The future will require less space.

10/14 by The Frug Leave a Comment

By Brad Beckstrom AKA The Frug

As I write this, I’m sitting in an office filled with a lot of books and dusty CDs, but the future will be different. I’ve been paring down books for years. Getting rid of old tech manuals and binders, DVDs, and other junk. Only keeping books I would want to re-read or give away.

I know that the digital world will require less space.

For many, music, books, and movies have already moved to digital. And the digital world requires less space. When I say the digital world, I’m not just talking about music or movie downloads on iTunes or downloading Kindle books on a tablet. I’m talking about something better than owning or downloading stuff and taking care of it, storing it, getting rid of it. I’m talking about accessing anything on an as-needed basis via high tech sharing or streaming for small rental fee.

This is now

In the future [Read more…] about The future will require less space.