Free Made by Hand by Mark Frauenfelder Page B

the trailer. The built-in cabinetry was distressed, windows were broken, and fixtures were missing. Eric’s friend, a thin, intense, quiet man named Phoenix, had been spending the weekend stripping the paint from the aluminum interior walls with a variety of volatile solvents, which were lined up on a counter in the trailer’s kitchen. I started feeling queasy from inhaling those toxic chemicals inside the stuffy enclosure.
    I shepherded my kids outside to find Julia and Lynette bringing out lunch, a smorgasbord of homemade dishes prepared from produce grown on the property. Julia had baked bread, and Sarina helped herself to two pieces. Erik and Kelly had brought humongous pink and yellow tomatoes, sliced into discs roughly the size of 45 rpm records.
    Jane wasn’t hungry, so she and Emmet climbed in a tree while the adults ate and talked about everything from the recent presidential-election results to homesteading tips. I asked Erik and Julia what vegetables were good to grow in the winter and when I could expect my hens (which were about four or five weeks old) to start laying eggs and how long they’d reliably lay them.
    When I mentioned that I’d planted garlic earlier in the morning, Kelly said she usually waits until Thanksgiving to plant hers but that it was probably fine to plant the cloves now.
    “You can plant individual garlic cloves ?” I asked. “I planted the whole bulb.”
    Kelly explained that you were supposed to break apart a bulb and plant the cloves. What’s more, she told me, I could have used inexpensive garlic from the grocery store or farmers’ market instead of buying the bulbs from a nursery. I told them how the instructions clearly showed and stated that the entire bulb should be planted. Mister Jalopy got a good chuckle out of that.
    “You plant three bulbs and you get three bulbs,” he observed.
    After lunch, we took a look at the shack Eric and Phoenix had built on the side of the hill. They’d based the design on a photo I’d come across online a few months earlier of architect Jeffery Broadhurst’s shack, a little getaway retreat he’d built in the hills of West Virginia. Erected on stilts, with a single sloped tin roof and wide doors opening onto a small deck, the simple structure was cheerful and airy. I could imagine myself spending hours of every day in a shack like this one.
    Julia told me that they’d been thinking of building a zip line that would go from the shack all the way to the garden down at the bottom of the property, but now the trailer was blocking the route.
    When we got home from our day at the Ramshackle compound, I made dinner with more of our garden’s vegetables. I crushed the shells of the eggs we’d eaten earlier to feed to the chickens, then I chopped up a head of cabbage, added salt, and put it in a quart-sized mason jar to turn into sauerkraut. Sarina told me she liked the Ramshackle shack and said she had been scoping out the trees in our yard for zip lines and treehouses. When we were finished eating, she led me around the yard, explaining the pros and cons of the different trees. That evening Jane, Sarina, and I sat down and went through several treehouse books written by David Stiles, regarded by many as the king of treehouse architecture. We highlighted our favorites with Post-it notes.
    I was just a few months into my DIY life experiment, and already I felt more connected to what I ate, the property around my house, the cycles of the seasons, the neighbors who shared my interests, and best of all my kids.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ALFIE
    It wasn’t always so blissfully DIY at our place. Many a day would pass when my family would eat fast food and watch lots of DVDs and play hours of video games, or I’d sit in front of my computer all day, working to the exclusion of everything else. I started to feel guilty about not doing enough on my DIY to-do list. Sometimes I’d rush things, like preparing a bowl of persimmons for drying or tending to