How to Build a House In One Day

It ain’t pretty, but it has a story!

According to Welsh oral tradition, this is a “Tŷ unnos” or “one-night house.” 

Back when land was free/common, people could find an empty spot and just start building. If they had four walls and smoke coming out the chimney by sunrise, the house was theirs. 

They could then claim all the land within the distance they could hurl an axe from each of the four corners of the house. 

After that, they could put on a roof and finish the interior at their own pace:

Similar customs have been found in Ireland, Italy, France, and Turkey — all prior to the mass land enclosures of the 17th to 19th centuries. (Read: monopolization and theft by wealthy elites.)

Friends: Intentional communities could easily build one-day homes. 

In fact, in 2009, the woodland charity Coed Cymru built one for the Smithsonian.

(Heck, the Amish regularly raise entire barns by suppertime!) 

I’m praying for land and the chance to build hundreds of one-day homes in my lifetime.

Shelter shouldn’t cost a lifetime of toil to banksters and land-lorders.

Why in the world should all of humanity pay land-lorders who’ve monopolized shelter in order to extract wealth from working contributors?

Why in the world should all of humanity pay banksters who didn’t build the house and didn’t even earn the money they loaned the mortgagor?

Greed and exploitation are costing us all 30+ years of needless work and payments to parasites that could be spent on serving others.

But back to one-day houses.

The date carved on the fireplace of this particular house is 1475.

548 years of human shelter for one night’s work.

All we need to do is reject the hyper-individualism of our age, find like-minded people, and unite together against the forces of greed that enslave our world.

A better way is possible. It’s been done before, and we can do it again.