Building a house from scratch seems to have been designed for one thing, and contrary to rational thought, it is not to provide you with shelter, to impress your friends, nor to provide your bank with a legal means of extortion. It is quite simply, I believe, one way to teach you sabr. Allah subhana wa ta ‘ala is your building inspector, and you must go about your business according to his code. Yes, you have a few design options like siding and floorplan, but basically He’s calling the shots.
You see, Adam and Hawa (alaihum as-salaam) didn’t have to learn patience while building a house. All of ‘Adn was their house. There was no foundation to dig, no leveling of posts and such. No mortar to slap and tamp in between logs until their hands were sore. They got the prefabricated, turn-key deal. No down payment or patience needed. (They had other lessons to learn. Like obedience.) So the rest of us D.I.Y.-ers have to actually get out and do it ourselves.
(ABOVE) Tariq and Silvano inspect the cut.
The number-one rule of thumb in building a house, which just about everyone who has ever nailed a couple of 2x4s together will never tire of telling you, is that it’ll take twice as long and double the money you saved. Brother, they ain’t lying. Which is why the house we began in 2011 is still not completely finished and here it is 2015.

(ABOVE) Tariq and Jorge build the gable .
Here’s where the patience part comes in. After a year of looking at and dreaming up our own cabin plans ‘til we couldn’t take it anymore, we whittled them down to a structure we figured we could actually put together. So out went the first plan: a hexagon cabin with a living grass roof loosely modeled after a Navajo log hogan; and the second plan, an earth-sheltered, partially underground hexagon dwelling in an open floorplan with six rooms opening out onto a central indoor fire pit. Oh yeah, we were going there. Thing is, we had to finally accept that our wallets would not take us there. Sabr has many levels, and all of them involve smacking down your nafs. So if you don’t have the ability to hire somebody to satisfy your house nafs, then you have to have the patience to smack it down a notch and make the nafs satisfied with less. Hence, we are building a 15’x15’ simple square cabin. Old school. Traditional. Pragmatic. Do-able. Insha Allah.
(ABOVE) Roof planks finally on. Photos courtesy of the author.
We designed it with the intention of it being a workshop for me and Tariq. He does leather work and makes 100% extra virgin olive oil soaps, and I make jewelry. It was supposed to go along with another house plan we scrapped: a 30’x30’ cabin with an attached greenhouse, and dual sleeping lofts for us and my daughter Atiyya. Well, after about the 44th log we had notched, drilled and pounded in place by hand, we stepped back, wiped the sweat from our brows and surveyed our handiwork. We looked at each other, then at the stack of logs still to be notched, drilled and pounded, then back at each other. And in the type of seeming-telepathy that only exists between husband and wife, we both blurted, “We could live in this, couldn’t we?” The prospect of doing this much work, again, on a house twice this size... and we’re how old?...are you kidding me?! We didn’t have that much patience. So we unintentionally became members of the Tiny House Movement.
Weather, being totally and completely beyond our control, necessitates a special kind of sabr called “laa tasta’ jil”, which means not to be in haste. We began building the cabin in August of 2011. Winter here tends to tease you a bit with a few short, light snows around the end of October. Then it sits back and waits while everybody gets fooled into forgetfulness by fabulous fall days that look like those calendar photos. Then, KA POW! From late December on, real snow every 4 or 5 days. We never had a chance. We were shut down. Sabr. Yeah, okay. Things moved like that all that first winter. And the next. And last year, too. Don’t get me wrong, we do get a few breaks and when that happens we do as much as our muscles and wallets will allow. When we’re snowed in we devise our plan of attack and dive back in when the snow clears and mud dries. Come spring, believe it or not, it’s a repeat, but this time with rain that comes almost every day around 1 o’clock or so from late April until June. And just so you don’t think you have Allah’s schedule down, it has been known to snow in July.
On days when it’s neither raining nor snowing there are big decisions to be made. Do we want shelter or do we want to plant? We tried mightily to establish a garden our first year while we were putting up the cabin, and I’ve got the sciatica to prove it. Sabr would’ve allowed us to get a little further ahead if we’d nixed the garden in favor of throwing up some more logs. So that’s exactly what we did the next year. We only planted a few things, so you couldn’t actually term the results a harvest, but we did get the roof up, a milestone in both construction and our level of patience. Sheikh Ibn Qayyim says in his wonderful book “Patience and Gratitude”: “Religion is based on two principles: determination and perseverance (patience), which are referred to in the du‘â of the Prophet (sallallahu alaihi wa salam): “O Allâh, I ask You for perseverance in all my affairs, and I ask You for the determination to stay on the straight and narrow path.” We got the determination, and if we keep up the sabr, our cabin might just pass the Inspector’s code.
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