The Multifarious, Multiplicitous, Multitudinous Amounts of Stuff Needed to Run An Average American McMansion

Back side of house

Front Side

Photos of the ongoing construction of our "mini McMansion" that I will have to maintain and continually upgrade.

As we get closer to getting into our new mini McMansion above, I consider all the extra things needed to live in a house instead of a collective living situation like an apartment. The single-family American home, by its very vastness, requires an additional panoply of multifarious tools to maintain and upkeep like a mini Downton Abbey. 

 

While I have some things in storage, there will be many additional things I will be compelled to buy because it is considered part of owning a home to pack it with a veritable hardware store of stuff. There is a lot of useless and unsustainable duplication of many items better shared collectively. Still, like everything in America, we have sacrificed the collective in the name of the individual. The individual is paramount in everything, the group second. Don't have a middle-class income or higher: too bad; you are SOL to buy a house, let alone maintain it. Not only is the cost of a house astronomical, but the amount of crap one needs to maintain it piles on even more.

 

It is eminently wasteful to have garages full of little-used and costly tools that would be better shared, saving both cost and full garages. I am a big fan of the idea of a "tool library" where the local public library checks out tools like everything else. Tool libraries is an idea that is seeing more traction around the country, and I hope it continues to expand. Libraries today are less about physical books than a wide array of services and offerings that help the community. The nearby Minot Public Library has a tool library, and I stopped by one day to look through their catalog binder of everything from power tools to obscure and little-used tools. What a great thing to have at a library.

 

As a former public library director, I wonder how well the tool library works in practice in a country where people cry victim and sue for their stupidity or just because they can. A library-based tool library would allow me to avoid buying all those single-use tools a homeowner always buys to avoid calling a professional. I dream of a public library with a tool library where I could check out some land to garden and the tools to work it. In our increasingly inegalitarian world, libraries that already serve an essential role in providing access could provide it in even more areas. 

 

Berkeley Public Library Tool Library, Creative Commons License Wikimedia

 

While a library could provide small power and hand tools as pictured above, it is unlikely that it could provide the veritable big box store of large powered tools needed to run an average home. A virtual giant carbon footprint of dirty little gas engines and dirtier two-cycle engines. A mower, a trimmer, a blower, a snowblower, and maybe a chainsaw just to start. The fact that chargeable batteries are slowly replacing gas engines is better, but they are still sizable resources that the consumption economy has sold us to believe we need. 

 

 I have long believed in the philosophy of Appropriate Technology, which seeks to apply the best, most low-impact, and sustainable technology to any situation. It questions the assumptions that high tech is always better than low and new is better than old. When I worked on the Oliver Kelley Farm, a demonstration and teaching farm, I used many of the tools that were replaced in the mid-twentieth century by power tools. I was surprised by how easy it was to wield many hand tools, conditioned to think they were unwieldy and physically hard to use. When I last owned a house, I used a reel mower to cut grass. I was surprised at how effortless it was, though this was only true if I cut the grass at much shorter intervals than a power mower. I was conditioned to think pushing would be hard, but it wasn't. I may get one again to have the neighbors ask me if it is a lot of work. No fuel, no batteries and plastic that will eventually become waste, just durable steel; that is the essence of Appropriate Technology.  

Consider the leaf blower, that noisy abomination that disturbs peaceful summer weekend mornings. The complex amalgam of plastics, metals, batteries or engines has replaced the humble broom or rake. We have replaced a simple, durable, long lasting, easy to use, low impact tool with a complex piece of expensive, polluting technology that is just as much work to use and hard on the ears. When it breaks, it becomes a much bigger piece of waste for the landfill.

 

The folk tale where John Henry defeats the machine is a fairy tale we enjoy listening to but don't believe any more than Grimm's Beauty and the Beast, so we go out and buy a machine. Just like many old folk tales whose origins are traceable back thousands of years, and whose truths are timeless, simple tools used since ancient times continued to be used for a reason until we bought a story that gas and electricity were always better. 

 

We like the story of John Henry because it is about the triumph of the little guy and the local over the impersonal, complex machine that robs us of our agency to do things ourselves. Stealing our agency is just what happens when we decide to buy a machine that ties us to a system where we must purchase gas, oil, electricity or take it to a special shop to repair and maintain. The latest is software updates for ultra-complex devices that tie us to a neverending cycle of obsolescence that keeps some corporate machine fed and us poor:  The Triumph of the Machine, indeed.

 

 When I was young and used to engage in the annual ritual of cleaning out grain bins filled with wheat or corn, I would engage in my own John Henryesque race against the machine. At the bottom of the bin, the auger, essentially an Archimedean screw inside a tube, would run out of grain as the pile that had filled the galvanized cylinder of steel diminished to just small banks around the circular radius of the space.

 The corners needed to be pushed into the auger by a combination of shovel and machine. I would set the bin sweep auger to one side of the bin while racing it with my shovel on the other, counting shovelfuls. Each scoop of an aluminum grain shovel is essentially a peck, and four pecks equal a bushel of grain in the ancient measuring system. I could often beat the weak little screw that would falter and struggle. Other times, I might skip the machine altogether and shovel everything, counting shovelfuls and adding bushels because it was sometimes faster, like a John Henry who had triumphed over the machine. Below is a video of an example of the infernal machine (bin sweep) with safety guards the old ones never had.

Then there is the snowblower, the quintessential Henryesque machine faced off against a person with a shovel. I have actually done this when I used to help shovel at an apartment complex. In all but the deepest snow situations, a person with a shovel could easily beat the noisy, stinky snowblower. I have never owned one, even living in a house in snowy Minnesota. In the cold desert of western North Dakota I consider snowfall an opportunity for exercise instead of having an expensive and temperamental thing sitting in my garage three hundred sixty days out of the year.

 

An enjoyable example illustrating the fallacy that complex is always better is the John Henryesque competitions in the U.K. Below a versatile BCS mower goes head-to-head with a scythe. In these competitions, the scythe almost always wins.