PWAC Victoria: Lyn Hancock, Writing Sample

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The Man Who Wanted to Live in a Barrel

by Lyn Hancock © 2001

Want to raise a family in 1,000 square feet of house you build yourself for $6,000 over 20 years? Meet Grant Krause, one of Lyn's more unusual friends, who built his dream house out of a water barrel at the top of a tree. Published in Cottage Magazine, Jan./Feb. 2002.

Ever since Grant Kruse spent weekends and school holidays helping out with chores and building tree forts on his cousins' farm in Alberta, he dreamed of one day designing and building his own house--totally, a house that would make the least impact on the environment. He imagined doing this with a wife and raising their children with the same values. He would build the walls and furniture, she would sew the curtains and fashion the upholstery, the kids would play with toys that the family created themselves. Grant didn't pursue his childhood goal of becoming an architect, but he studied carpentry and drafting in high school, took jobs around the country in all facets of construction, and started his own business as a concrete form contractor.

As a young man, his travels brought him to Duncan on Vancouver Island where he sought others of like interests, specifically to a commune called "The Farm." He recalled, "About 30 of us hippies lived in tents, barns and other outbuildings. Even now I never pass a barn, a shed, a chicken coop, without thinking how they can be converted into cosy homes for people."

Now, a middle-aged "hippie" of 50 and devoted single parent to three children, Zeke 12, Holly 10, and Gideon 8, he lives by a swamp in a wooded island of tranquility off Cherry Point Road near Cowichan Bay, a world apart from the trailer park, subdivision, and subdividable lots that surround it.

His peaceful oasis is all that is left of the original Lambourn Estates, once the 160-acre property of the Earl of Lambourn, an English aristocrat who in the early years of the 20th century came to Canada to hunt and fish. His palatial home, the Lambourn Inn with its 15 fireplaces, burned down in 1965, but there still exist a few vestiges of its former grandeur--a stone retaining wall, some original stairs and railings, a stone pillar, an urn.

Lambourn Holdings, which now owns and has subdivided much of the original property, wish to sell the remaining parcels, including one 15-acre parcel in the centre edged by dense woods and old-growth cedars where Grant has built his home and lived for 20 years. Grant would dearly love to buy the land and keep its trees, fields and ponds a public parkland but with his and two other non-conforming buildings on the property, and his non-capitalist lifestyle, he cannot raise a mortgage on the asking price of $299,000.

Non-conforming it may be officially, but to a Peter Pan and Wendy type like me, Grant's unusual cottage--a balconied Tudor-style wood and stucco, four-storey, 40-foot tower enclosed by maple trees, and a neighbouring cluster of other tree houses linked by bridges, ramps and ladders--conjure images of an enchanted forest, home to Robin Hood, Bottom and Titania, Tarzan and Jane, or Zena the Warrior Princess.

Beside these fantasyland buildings (or bizarre living quarters, according to your perception) is a well-equipped workshop, a large tipi for firewood, several mini-gardens, and play areas with names like Camelot and Pallet City. They are reminiscent of the play places Grant built as a child on the farm. "I'm having it all again now with my kids," Grant chuckles, as he takes me around his multi-levelled property while Zeke, Holly and Gideon tend to a cook-out of chicken, corn, potatoes and parsnips on the outside brick and stone fireplace.

Originally, I wanted to live in a barrel. In the film Cannery Row, Nick Nolte and Debra Winger were living in a boat, they had a fight, and she moved out and had to live in a barrel, a long metal barrel that was probably a gasoline tank or a boiler.
My buddy, Denny Williams, the son of the owner of Lambourn Estates, showed me this water tower. It had been built by the Earl in 1912 and used right up to 1960 or thereabouts. We saw it in 1981 when it was rotting and its splayed wooden legs ready to fall over. We climbed up the ladder onto a platform with a 14- by 14-foot framed wooden box on top, and inside the box was a wooden barrel, 9 feet high, 9 feet diameter, made of 68 pieces of vertical beveled cedar held by 10 metal hoops. I thought it could make a neat little room, I could add a workshop and live in it. So I arranged a lifetime lease with Denny's dad, Kelly Williams who I was working for at the time, and I started disassembling and assembling the barrel. With my concrete business not working out well in 1982, I wanted to scrounge, recycle and live as simply as possible.

He decided to recycle the barrel into siding for the back of his workshop wall, and started work instead on the box as his main room.

The floor was rotten in places and the worst place was beneath the stairwell. It was a tricky process but I jacked up the exterior walls and replaced the sole plates and flooring beneath the walls. The exterior walls on the first two floors were in-filled with stick framing and insulation, and floors and walls were clad with 3/4-inch plywood recycled from concrete forms.
It's a post-and-beam structure. The 9 posts that support the tower are braced with heavy 2 x 6 wooden beams that give it its Tudor look. There are no square walls in the building, everything leans in, everything has an angle, it's very awkward to work around, so I built on a two-storey lean-to which gave me two more rooms, about 900 square foot of space. That made a footprint of about 30 feet by 14 feet. I added insulation, scrounged doors and windows, gyproced the walls, wired them for electricity, put in a 40-foot chimney and wood stove, and started collecting weathered barn boards for the siding.

After a few years of collecting, the black building paper began to look a bit ragged and the property owner, Kelly Williams, volunteered to pay for stucco just to get rid of what he called an eyesore. So we stuccoed the first two stories with 1/2-inch stucco and kept the original siding on the top floor and repeated some of that horizontal bevelled siding on the ground floor addition.

Typical of Grant, he built around the maple trees that would eventually reach to 100 feet, carefully removed more than 20 birds' nests complete with eggs that he found between each floor joist and later stuffed the nests back between the new floor joists. "For the first few years all kinds of birds and bats kept flying in to my house looking for their home so I had some real close-up experiences with hummingbirds and other birds flying right into my hands." Again, always mindful of the simplest and non-consumptive way of doing things, he used rebar instead of nails to joint the beams. "When I pulled the old beams apart, I found them jointed with 1-1/2-inch steel pipes, not nails, so I did this too. They're stronger than nails."

He always had local electricity, a propane hot water tank and cook stove as well as emergency kerosene lanterns and candles, but conventional plumbing in the form of showers and flush toilets didn't come until the third year when he hooked up to the wells and reservoir of the Lambourn Estates system. "For the first year I packed water in buckets from a neighbour and dug several outhouses and the second year I got water from a standpipe."

After his wife, Linda, a Dene woman from Fort Simpson in the Northwest Territories, left their young children (Gideon was still a baby at the time) in the care of their father and returned north in 1993 to her original family, Grant decided in 1999 to build a second batten-and-board extension to the first extension, the only square side of the building, and thus added 300 square feet to the main floor, giving him a private 8 feet by 4 feet bedroom of his own. He now figures he has over 1,000 square feet of living space for a total cost of $6,000 over 20 years.

Finding his 40-foot chimney too hard to clean as well as dangerous, he moved it to the extension so it is now only 10 feet high. He uses a Norwegian Ulefos woodstove sized 16 inches by 16 inches by 16 inches.

"It's a pretty cheap place to heat, tall and thin. We use about three cords of scrounged firewood a year. Zeke did a school experiment to read the electricity meter and he found that we used only about $25 of electricity a month. We don't waste energy like a lot of other people. In fact, we don't waste anything around here, we're fanatics about that."

Zeke, Holly and Gideon each have their own multi-roomed houses in the cluster joined by bridges and cedar limb railings, and each is different.

Zeke's, the most conservative of the three, is two storeys high and partially sided with the cants off cedar logs. He has a workshop of his own, the hockey posters, war toys and telescopes you'd find in an average kid's bedroom, and a conspicuous cedar round with the following words carved into the wood that read, "Thank you Mom for all the Memories."

Holly's is a three-storey, green-and-white batten-and-board wood structure set inside three trees with a birdcage-like cedar branch balcony attached to one of the trees, a ladder to the middle storey on one side, an inside staircase to the top storey on the other, and a ramp that leads to her personal trail in the adjacent woods. On the ground level is an open storefront with a sign that says "Happy 7th Birthday, Holly." Interested in arts and crafts, Holly has postered her walls with her own drawings and stories.

Gideon says his house is a pirate ship. One of his rooms is a chart room, and his furniture includes a couple of treasure chests that creak when they open, an anchor, paddles, flags, and a life-saving tire from a boat that reads Lambourn. Gideon doesn't climb into his house as his brother and sister do, he swings in by rope through a tipi-shaped door frame and then, launching from a pad of truck tires on his ground floor, he swings into the main part of his house, a canvas tipi-style tent covered with a blue tarp.

Inside the water tower, a staircase of 39 hand-planed steps and diamond willow railings corkscrews from the first floor that has the kitchen, dining, family room, homework, craft and bathroom areas, and the book, magazine and video library, to the second floor that has the kids' sleeping areas (kids can swing on a rope from bed to bed and climb and sit on branches of a tree inside one of the sleeping areas), Holly's hutch where she keeps her treasures, and Zeke's miniature world of toys, to the third and fourth floors, which house not one, but two magnificent model railways where even the logs on the pickup trucks waiting at the train station have been fashioned exquisitely, and Grant's own lifetime collection of old bottles, posters, music sheets, animal skulls, and toys. There are no doors to separate the different areas so any parental admonishment to "go to your room" is meaningless in this house.

The place is stuffed but amazingly neat. A 100-year-old Chinese box once used to hold and cut salmon was used as a cradle and diaper-changing table. Old-fashioned egg beaters hanging from the first-floor ceiling acted as mobiles when the kids were babies. A stretcher hanging from the ceiling of the attic was supposed to be for storage but the kids saw it as an aerial canoe and used it for play and sleep. Now that they have play houses and summer sleeping areas of their own, the stretcher has reverted to storage. There are shelves and shelves of collectible cans and bottles and National Geographic magazines that go back to the early 1900s, and thousands of toys, some very valuable, that Grant has bought at trade shows.

"I try not to say 'no' to my kids. When they were babies I didn't want them to hear 'no' as their first word. Otherwise, I am a strict parent. I teach them to treat objects carefully and to share everything. Something is our thing, not my thing."

With no money to buy toys or birthday presents, they make their own and win prizes for their creativity. "Zeke got first prize at a Kar Kab rally in Duncan for designing and building the best little car out of a piece of wood. He used a tin can for metal, a hair clip for a front grill, buttons for headlights, a piece of pie plate for a windshield. Holly got second place in the same competition. I was pretty proud of them."

In this house, Grant has used a wringer washing machine and cloth diapers, there are no computers, and the family's rotary phone mystifies many of the kids' playmates.

Living from babyhood in a water tower with trees inside and tree houses, rope swings and natural branch balance beams outside, Grant's kids are naturally gymnastic. They have to be.

"I taught them how to climb and they have never fallen down the stairs. A baby has no problem going upstairs but you have to teach them to go downstairs. I put the baby right on the step, take its hand and pull its foot down the step, each foot one at a time, moving each foot so the baby doesn't turn its head and try to go down headfirst. Teach them that and they have it for life. I remember when Zeke was one year old. In a Fort Smith public park, Zeke was faced by a 10-foot knoll which sloped two feet. I said, 'Are you coming?' and he turned around on the knoll and crawled down backwards after me."

Outside, the kids make fences from bedsteads, and gardens, tunnels and boats from big truck tires, and their front yard is a carpet, many carpets. "I tried to grow a lawn but it is too shady here, and too much traffic flow so I lay down old carpet. You don't have to mow it, no weeds grow through it, and you can do gymnastics on it. You just sweep it, and when it gets too grungy, you add another carpet. This one's been there 12 years. And if you want to have a picnic, you just go to your front lawn."

Grant adds, "You don't get bored around here. We use the woods and fields and ponds and swamps around us to go on safaris or teddy-bear picnics. We load up all the teddy bears in the wagons, pack up the gear and go on a trek and feel miles from home, even if the subdivisions are not far away."

The family admits their house and lifestyle are a bit "weird" (Arthur Black filmed them for his cable TV show Weird Homes on the Life Channel in the fall of 2001), but they are a peaceful, creative, close-knit family that works and plays together, attends the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and takes part in many volunteer and community activities. Grant just hopes that he gets to live in the water tower for another 20 years. If somebody buys and subdivides the remaining 15-acre parcel around him, he hopes to be able to buy or rent enough of the parcel to keep his home intact and some of the woods around as parkland for posterity.

If not, does anybody have another barrel lying around?

Lyn Hancock
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Last updated: November 3, 2003 http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/hancoc07.html