Build Your Own Stone House [antikvár]

Preface to the Revised EditionHumans and houses need the passage of time to prove their mettle. Nearly twenty years have gone by since we moved to Vermont and began using Helen and Scott Nearing's slipform method to build our stone house. We are happy to report that the house has stood up well. Had we done as well, we would be gerontological wonders.Perhaps the intervening twenty years has made us overcautious, for we approached this revision with some qualms. Our concerns were several. We feared that the age of instant gratification, "New Age" values, and the availability of cheaply built mobile homes would have made stone houses passé, obsolete, or even undesirable. At the very least, we fretted, we would be overwhelmed by an avalanche of new building materials. As it turns out, there was no cause for worry. First, for whatever reasons (and there are many), stone houses continue as the hallmark of solid domesticity. Second, we were surprised to find that the limited choice of worthy new building materials has not altered building methods significantly.One thing that has altered significantly has been our credo as we expressed it in the "Cross Sections" chapter. Although we were insight ful enough to point out that our views could and should change with time, it is the nature of a credo that we did not truly believe it.The late Hubert Dukes, a man whom we admired greatly, summarized it best when he said, "One of those immutable facts of life is that credos are inexorably mutable."But written credos serve a good purpose, especially if you can review them after the passage of some time. You can look upon them as a kind of personal test: If you have not changed your beliefs in twenty years, you may conclude that you are either dead from the shoulders up or from the tombstone down.Much as it galls us, we no longer believe, for example, that we can avoid specialization. Axiomatically, this becomes truer with age. For example, no matter how much imagination we employed or how carefully we planned our house, we did not realistically anticipate the needs of aging parents with increasing physical limitations. Our "determination" to "do for ourselves," while rationally pure, now occasionally gives way to compromise and even to convenience.For us, living more simply and more creatively are still goals, but experience makes simplicity more complex and it rots creativity with exigency. Coping with complexity and exigency is an affirmative sign