Building from recycled, free and salvage material runs the very big risk that the house will look like a slum admixture. Even poor families, while grateful for having access to ownership, will either decline, or be embarrassed about a slummy looking house. And you haven't helped them when you build such a house.

Awareness of design is easy. There needs to be repetition and unity. Repetition requires repeating textures, colors, and shapes in various ways throughout the house. Unity involves consistency of scale, shape, texture and color. That's it.

• Literally anything can be used for building, provided there is the possibility of repetition. If I have 100 of "these," and 300 of "those," I have the possibility of repeating. It makes no difference what "these" and "those" are. I have used hickory nuts, aluminum cans, chicken eggs, branches, beer cartons, soup-can labels, tile shards, broken concrete and the whole range of structurally oriented materials. Texture and repetition create pattern. Texture and repetition create pattern. Texture and repetition create pattern. If I pick up a handful of pebbles from the driveway, I can make a pattern. If I take avocado pits, dry them, and glue them in a pattern, I have created a design. Sit down on the living room floor with a hundred of anything, and play. Before long you'll get some ideas. If you continue the idea throughout the house, you achieve unity. It is as simple as that.
  
• Jangled about different styles of doors? Paint them the same color, or add a unifying appliqué on the front of each.
  
• Are your windows different? Put one style on this wall, another style on another.
  
• Do you have one spectacular light fixture, but not a second to complete unity in the living areas? Feature it as an accent, and unify subsidiary fixtures in other ways.
• Do you have lots of tile, but not enough of any one style or color to do a floor? Give them a hammer treatment and create a mottled panel or simply mix all colors together to yield a randomly "pink" or randomly "gray" floor, for instance.
  
• Do you have lots of donated paint, but not enough of any one color to use efficiently? Mix similar paints together to yield enough paint for a room, for instance. Mixing different brand names together can degrade the quality of the paint, but if it doesn' need to be high-performance paint, it makes no difference. Closets need painting too. When inter-mixing paints, do your best to preserve similarity of characteristics. That is, don't mix water-base latex with oil paints, for instance.