solar construction methods
Our new house is finally looking like a home!
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!
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Our home will be “dried-in” soon!
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.
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Why most don’t build their own home
Courage is the power to let go of the familiar…
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!
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Sacred Journeys, Sacred Mountains…
After watching an episode of Sacred Journeys on PBS, one which included a bit about the sacredness of mountains in Asian thought, I realized how fundamentally important it feels to now own land with views of our own sacred mountains.
The Spanish Peaks, pictured above, have a centuries-old history of sacredness. Dating back far before the Europeans arrived, this area was a crossroads of the American West. Taos Pueblo, located in northern New Mexico today, has been a major Native American trading center for over 1,000 years. One trail headed north out of Taos into the San Luis Valley, crossing east over Sangre de Cristo Pass, through the gap between Rough Mountain and Sheep Mountain.
Various Native American tribes like the Ute, the Navajo, the Jicarilla Apache and the Comanche passed through this valley regularly. To them the Spanish Peaks stood out because they seemed to emerge out of nowhere up to 13,000 feet running east and west, not north to south like the rest of the Rocky Mountains.
The natives peoples considered this a sacred place of ceremony. As far as they were concerned, this is where mankind first emerged from the womb of the earth. In other words, this was their own Garden of Eden.
The Ute Indians named these two peaks Huajatolla (pronounced Wa-ha-toy-a), meaning the “two breasts” which translates as “Breasts of the Earth”.
I loved learning this ancient history, which I first heard about when Robert Mirabal came here to perform this past July.
We moved here to create a dynamic relationship with these mountains, this landscape and the lovely silence. Mike and I have both traveled to many parts of the world. We now find the inward journey more dynamic and essential than outward ones.
For us this is a sacred place, one where we can celebrate and appreciate the beauty of nature every single day, while continuing a long tradition of sustainable living.
Learn more about what it’s like to move from city life to the country for a slower, quieter, more sustainable life in my new memoir. Just send me an e-mail for a great price!
MidlifeCrisisQueen@gmail.com
Adventures of the NEW??? Old Farts 