David N. Cook

David Cook was born in London, England and lived there with his mother, sister, two aunts and grandmother until the age of thirteen, at which time his mother took him and his sister to Australia to meet their father. At the age of eighteen David’s drive for adventure prompted him to leave Australia. He borrowed five dollars, left a note for his mother and boarded a Swedish ship for places unknown. It wasn’t until he was on the high seas that David asked where the ship was bound. After stops in several ports, he arrived at the ship’s final destination, which was San Francisco, California. He never looked back, settled there and is the proud father of two beautiful and accomplished daughters, Emily and Elizabeth.

While working full time as a television salesman, David and his wife took advantage of the burgeoning California real estate market. They bought and sold several houses and dabbled a little in DIY before that was trendy. Then they bought a vacant lot and had a contractor build a house, which they immediately sold. That experience awakened something in David; an idea he became extremely excited about. He wanted to build his own house!

He began to investigate the possibilities. He enrolled in classes about various topics around owner building, knowing that his dream could come to fruition. Quickly following his studies, David and his wife purchased a larger property. This was it! He was going to build a house with his own hands. Using their small business to help finance the effort, David and Marcia worked out the details and David started materializing his dream. Marcia ran the business while David took over many of the responsibilities of raising their young daughters and building the house while the children were in school.

Here is where the extraordinary unconventionality that characterizes David Cook starts to show again. Remember the kid who got a job on a ship sailing to an unknown destination with five dollars to his name? This is a man who has done some fix-it-up repairs who is now going to build his own house. And, it is not going to be a regular house by any means.

David had started collecting materials to use for his Dream house project. A dismantled industrial steel building, Doors and windows from an auction for ten dollars each, a truck load of tile from Brazil for fifty dollars and even recycled one-inch maple flooring for seventy five cents a square foot!

David’s house was designed around materials that already existed, thereby giving them a second life. Think of it! For nine hundred dollars, he had the main frame for his new home; possibly saving it from the landfill.

This was only the beginning of the creativity and the savings. He posted an ad at UC Berkeley for a graduate architect student to design a home around unusual materials for a thesis and found an experienced architect who was new to the US to design the home at the student rate in an effort to establish his credentials in the California.

After completing his house David wrote a book “Build Your Dream House for a Song” so that he could share his experience of bringing vision to life. The book documents his progressive and imaginative thinking and the joy of building a simple but beautiful house for pennies on the dollar. Based on his book, David created a seminar that he taught for the next ten years, “How to Build Your Dream House for a Song” at colleges around the country. His book is now in its fourth edition and is being released in Spanish in January 2011.

David wants to make a TV show to illustrate how a beautiful, incredible and “Green” house can be built for very little money using his forward thinking techniques. This show will inspire people everywhere to do the same, to be empowered, to be independent and to live the life they would like without having the mortgage yoke around their neck for thirty years.