CP/QF Crazy: Follow-up On Family of 9 Living in a Garage

How freaking crazy can you be?  No, seriously. 

Lots of people dream of living a completely debt-free life.  In the absence of being independently wealthy, most people decide to manage debt responsibly by restricting debt to secured debt like loans to purchase a new or used car or a house, debt that raises the income of the person like educational debt and limiting the amount of unsecured debt like credit cards.  On a more personal level, people committed to living debt free chose to delay child-bearing until one or both people are in secure careers and often choose to limit their family size.  Homes are quite expensive and large families cost more money. 

On the other hand, a lot of CP/QF large families live in poverty while idolizing families who live in even more extreme circumstances.   A common lament of huge CP/QF families where the mother is reaching the end of her reproductive years is that domestic foster care and adoption has ridiculous requirements like that prospective adoptive families who will be adopting unrelated children can show income over the federal poverty level for their new family size.   For new readers, the federal poverty income guidelines in the US are agreed to be absurdly low by people who work in poverty prevention.  A good rule of thumb is that most families need at least 200% of the poverty guidelines to live a frugal middle class life - so the US poverty guideline of  $20,730 for a family of three should be closer to $42,000.    To size this up to QF families, Kimberly at Raising Olives used to complain that their family of 12 kids and two adults couldn't adopt domestically because the family lived on less than $72,620 per year. 

Back in 2005, Amy at Raising Arrows wrote a blog post about a family she idolized who had nine kids living in a garage for one year so they could build the home of their dreams.   In 2018, I wrote my response to the major reasons I could think of why living in a garage is probably illegal; my more obvious concerns were a lack of exits, too little area of windows,  too little square footage per person, infestation prevention issues and the fact that the taxable value of the land is affected by having a second dwelling onsite.  It turns out that Amy managed to get a hold of that family and write a follow-up in 2017; I'll refrain from guessing as to why it took 12 years to catch up with them. 

Turns out some of my unspoken assumptions were just plain wrong.  Silly me - I assumed that living in the garage would start when the family had all of the money set aside to build the house so that the time living in the outbuilding would be limited to a single building season.  Oh, boy, was I naive!  FIVE YEARS!  The family lived in a garage for 5 freaking years! 

I'm still shocked and horrified - so I guess I'll start with the size of the garage.  The family says that the garage was 24' by 30' and at least partially built to purpose for living in.  The square footage is 720 square feet.   Now, the 1986 guidelines for safe living spaces stated that the minimum square footage could be calculated by 150 + 100(n-1) so a family of nine would need 150 + 100(8) or 950 square feet minimum.

Now, if I was living in a garage, I would be on like 5 forms of birth control - including "we're not having sex until we get a real house or apartment" followed by 4 other forms.  Apparently, I'm crazy because the family happily admits that two children were conceived and born while living in the garage.  That pushes the minimum square footage to 1150 feet - but I'm more horrified at the idea of adding two newborns sequentially to a garage home.   The family mentions that the time they lived in the garage was extended because of unexpected building costs and high medical bills.  I wonder how much of those medical bills were due to two labor and deliveries; childbirth is expensive even when everything goes perfectly.

In terms of exits, the garage did have two external doors that were not garage doors.  Assuming the drawing provided by the family was reasonably accurate, the garage was not compliant in terms of emergency window egresses from the bedrooms.  Personally, I'd be very worried about exiting from the kids' bedroom in case of a fire.  There was one small window, an internal exit towards the main area of the garage and an external exit across the room where the washer, dryer and hot water heater were located.  If anything happened involving the washer, dryer or hot water heater, the kids' fastest exit would be compromised. 

Speaking of the garage doors, the "front" of the garage included a large standard garage door.  This threw me a bit at first; why would a family waste that much wall space on a garage door when they were making plans like building 10 foot ceilings on the garage to make it a workable future temporary home?  Then I remembered - the local tax authority would notice in real time if a family wanted to build a second home on a plot.  Silly me and my beliefs about obeying civil codes and taxation.

Really, the author of post sums it up better than I can.  The 5+ years of living in the garage are great in hindsight.   Looking back at my life, I have a lot of memories that are far more fun in hindsight than they were at the time.  After all, memories allow me to enjoy the fun, exciting or satisfying bits without reliving the pain, frustration or tedium.  For example, I chaperoned a group of teens on a mission trip to Beaver Island when I was around 26.  I had lots of fun on the trip - but I also broke my tailbone early in the trip, one of the other chaperones was having what I can only describe as an untreated manic episode, and I was going on slightly less than 5 hours of sleep a night for over a week.   My memories are of teaching my small group to pain sets and watching sunsets over the lake - not the pain of hiking miles each day with a light pack with a broken tailbone. 

Be cautious of taking advice from people who enjoyed an experience only in hindsight.

CP/QF Crazy: Family with 9 Kids Lives in Garage.....

Large family blogs - regardless of whether they claim the Quiverfull name - are a quirky blend of great ideas mixed pell-mell with horrible ideas.   Amy, who blogs at Raising Arrows, often has sensible tips for organizing spaces - but this old post slides rapidly into "Yeah, that's illegal under housing codes and CPS have a field day with this one."

Posted two days before Christmas in 2005, Amy rhapsodizes about the minimalist simplicity that a family of 11 has achieved by living in a two-car garage to save money while building their dream home which will "hopefully" get finished next year.   The family has three-tiered bunk beds with a crib at the end for all their kids!  They have food storage and cooking equipment on self-constructed shelves!  Their living room furnishings are a couch, a chair and a chest!  It's great because the garage already has a built-in bathroom plus kitchen equipment and laundry hook-ups!  Couldn't we all learn from the simplicity of this family?

No.  This is a horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad idea.  Let's discuss why for anyone who hasn't run through why we don't all live in garages.

First, Amy works hard at making the garage seem livable by claiming the built-in bathroom plus kitchen set-up and laundry room is an  "apartment" which is always described in quotation marks.   That's a bad idea because rental units like apartments often have much stricter housing codes to follow than a "dwelling" so let's call it a "dwelling" because it's not going to make the easier codes for a dwelling. 

I've pulled up the APHA-CDC recommended minimum housing standards from 1986.   Now,  as long as the bathroom has a shower and sink, the garage manages to have the basic facilities and equipment required for habitation. 
Things fall apart in the "Fire and Safety Section".

•  A dwelling has to have two separate exits to ground level in case of fire - which many garages do not have.   
• Bedrooms located below the 4th floor of a building have to have a window large enough to act as an emergency egress.   We don't see that often on garages here in Michigan.  
• All external doors have to have a deadbolt lock or equivalent which is hard to do on a garage door.

In the "Lighting and Ventilation" section,  a dwelling must have windows in all non-bathroom spaces that are equal to at least 8% of the total square footage and the windows must be openable to allow ventilation.  In my experience, garages tend to either have horrible ventilation because of too few windows or are drafty.   The drafty ones might survive the ventilation section, but I think they will get dinged later on.  

I don't know where Amy lives - but dwellings have to have a dedicated source of heat according to Section 7.  This heating unit must be able to keep the entire living space - including the bathroom - at 68 degrees F for families that don't include the elderly, ill, or infants.  Since the family idolized in the post contains a 10 month old infant, the internal temperature must be at 70 degrees F.   In my experience, that's going to be one of the biggest challenges for this family if they want to live in the garage legally, let alone comfortably.  Garages are not generally insulated very well - or at all.  Any heat generating unit is going to bleed heat outward through all three or four external walls much faster than a standard house would.   If the family lives somewhere really warm where homes are not as heavily insulated as they are in the Great Lakes, they might not freeze to death - but the family is going to be in a world of hurt in the summer!    

The first problem my husband and I thought of when making a long list of why people don't live in garages is that the folding doors that let cars in and out of garages are impossible to rodent-proof or insect-proof to the requirements of dwellings.  I grew up in the city where we had more mice brought in the house by senile cats than entered on their own; my husband grew up in the country where people get a few mice in the house every year regardless of the number of cats they have.  We both remember seeing mice in our respective garages.    Truthfully, my bigger concern would be rats.  They have two kids sleeping at the floor level and an infant in a crib - and no one needs to wake up from a rodent bite in the night.     I can't even imagine trying to keep the garage free from ants.  Every crumb of food would need to be swept up and placed in a sealed trash can, the entire floor mopped and everyone vacuumed to remove any crumbs of food from their clothes after every meal.   

At this point, I'm thinking that the family would be better off sleeping in tents, honestly.  At least then they would have food and sleeping areas separated which would make infestations a little easier to control.

Under the "Space" requirements, the minimum square footage allowed is equal to 150 + 100(n-1) where n is the total number of occupants.  The family has 11 people in it so that's a minimum square footage of 1150 feet.  The minimum size of a two car garage is 20' by 20'  which is 400 square feet or nearly 1/3 of the minimum square footage.    For the family to fit, they would need a slightly larger than average four-car garage.

The original post was written in 2010 - but the comment section is revealing as well.  Lots of people wanted an interview with the family who did this.  Amy has had some difficulty getting the family to submit pictures or answers to questions asked by the readers.   I can think of two reasons for that.  The one that sprung to mind right away was being investigated by CPS or DHS for neglect - but Amy swears that the family is now living in a lovely, code-compliant home.  There is one other potential issue: if the family has been living in the garage and the garage is truly code-compliant, they are now  living on a property with two dwellings - which often brings an entire new set of zoning and taxation issues. 

My send off for this post involves sleeping arrangements for the parents.  Amy and her family were all over at this adorable, amazing "apartment" for 11 - but she never mentions where the two parents sleep.    Is the sofa a sleeper sofa?  Are the parents sleeping in a car away from their infant?   Do they have an air mattress?  Where do they fit in this whole mess - and were the kids being adequately supervised at night?