We had one of our biggest snows of the season this week, which revealed the true beauty of the foothills we’ll be living in soon! Isn’t it amazing how the snow flocks on the Pinon-Juniper woodland outside our new windows?
… And of course, the Spanish Peaks were looking lovely in their snowy white trim!
Not to be outdone, our brand new garage door was installed yesterday!
We are now ready for the delivery of our kitchen cabinets and miscellaneous other things this week.
Some have asked me, how do you build a home in the winter in Colorado? You just work around the weather and pray for the occasional 70 degree day!
The pace is certainly starting to pick up on our new home in the foothills west of here. Today on our trip out there we found a handsome new steel roof, light-colored to keep it extra cool in the summer!
The garage door goes on Monday and the kitchen cabinets should arrive this week too!
We are also now ready for the plumbing. We had to make a run to Home Depot in Pueblo to purchase the tub, etc. before the plumber could come back. So right now we have a bath tub and shower pan in our van, and a bathroom sink in our living room… Now that’s a first for me!
We decided we would give each other a new house for Valentine’s Day this year!
So nice to go up to see our new home this morning and find all of our lovely red Hurd windows and sliding doors installed, and the interior of the house all clean and neat. This dream is finally becoming a reality!
Stay tuned for pics of our beautiful steel roof!!!
We plan to have the outside of our home stuccoed in an adobe earth-tone, something I call dusty rose. I love the names of the stucco tones we’ve chosen. So far it’s between ‘solitude’ ‘daiquiri’ and ‘nirvana.’ We’re leaning towards nirvana of course!
Lee Adams is our builder. Thanks Lee for working so hard to bring this all together for us! Next comes the plumbing and the electrical… time to go buy that tub!
OK, back to this week’s progress on our solar home…
This week our home became almost completely dried-in. This means the building shell is sufficiently completed to keep out the weather. As you can see, the roof is now completely covered with weather sealing, and the windows are going in.
The steel roof happens next week…
We love the HURD windows Mike chose for the house! He remembered seeing them in new construction while growing up in California, so he checked them out for quality and price when we started construction.
Mike found Hurd to be the best deal while looking for windows whose parts are pressure-treated with preservatives so they will not rot later. He’s had some bad experiences with some of the better-known national brands and refuses to use them ever again!
When the windows and doors are all in, we will begin on the electrical and plumbing. The insulation and interior dry walling come next.
Click on these cool cloud photos to enlarge! This one is looking up at our house…
The East Spanish Peak was peeking out of the clouds in a lovely, Taoist way…
Time to get to work ordering the kitchen cabinets.
As we continue building our new solar home from scratch up in the foothills west of here, it often occurs to me why most don’t put themselves through this process ever in a lifetime.
And I discovered only recently, the reasons why others might not want to build their own home can be the same reasons why we wanted to.
The most obvious one is the constant decision-making! Since I’ve never done this before, I hadn’t thought so far as to realize we would need to chose every single detail of both the outside structure and the inside finishes.
How lucky am I to have a recent subscription to HGTV!
Many would not like this process, but that is also the best reason to build your own solar home. From choosing the exact angle the house faces and the thickness of your slab, to window choices, flooring and the type of supplemental heating, these are the factors that determine the comfort and future price of operating your home. If you don’t control these factors, passive solar will not work.
Then if you feel the need to raise the fire-resistant level of your home, even more factors arise. It sometimes boggles my mind! Luckily Mike has quite a bit of experience in building from scratch plus amazing research skills!
Still and all the expenses just keep going up and that can freak a person out at times. It is certainly much more expensive than your home in the suburbs, not to mention the inconvenience of moving into a rental for eight to ten months while the construction is going on…
What makes it all worthwhile? Views like these from every room in the house!
Sorry I’ve been remiss in keeping you up on our building project west of here! Just took a quick trip to Chicago to focus on midlife success for a few days… I promise to catch up on house progress tomorrow!
The pace is certainly starting to pick up on our new home in the foothills west of here. Today on our trip out there we found a handsome new steel roof, light-colored to keep it extra cool in the summer!
The garage door goes on Monday and the kitchen cabinets should arrive this week too!
We are also now ready for the plumbing. We had to make a run to Home Depot in Pueblo to purchase the tub, etc. before the plumber could come back. So right now we have a bath tub and shower pan in our van, and a bathroom sink in our living room… Now that’s a first for me!
So nice to go up to see our new home this morning and find all of our lovely red Hurd windows and sliding doors installed, and the interior of the house all clean and neat. This dream is finally becoming a reality!
Lee Adams is our builder. Thanks Lee for working so hard to bring this all together for us! Next comes the plumbing and the electrical… time to go buy that tub!
