The Foundation Forms are assembled

Joe and his crew are setting up forms. The forms in the lower right are footers for the framed garage. The forms in the center are roughly 2'x2' in profile and will require 2" foamboard insulation on outside to protect them.


Forms for the guest bedrooms are being assembled.





The concrete crew from Advanced Concrete Solutions showed up on site Tuesday May 20th to begin setting up forms for the foundation. The foundation is a complex design which is a mix of deep footers with stemwalls for the framed portion (the garage) and shallow frost protected areas for the Double adobe walls. Since the walls are 24 inches thick our Structural engineer, Jeff Ruppert tried to minimize the amount of concrete required to support the walls where possible. In addition, there is also a 6' tall retaining wall where the guest bedrooms step up from the main floor (this was to accomodate the sloped site and to allow for south facing windows in this area for more solar gain). The north side of the guest bedrooms are 4' below grade which required a retaining wall as well.


Joe Hernandez and his crew were amazingly quick in understanding the layout and getting it forms in place. In spite of rain Thursday & Friday, they had the forms ready the following Thursday.

A concrete pour date was set for Monday June 2nd. Now it is our turn in the trenches to place electrical, media, water, and radiant plumbing in the forms.

Earth Day Earth Work Begins

By early February, the snow was over 4' deep and didn't melt off until early April.

Late April: Mark cuts into the slope, Kenny moves it down slope, and I compact it.

Our site looking across Horse Gulch. Looks a bit like a sand and gravel pit from here. It will take a lot of native grass seed to restore the site

Jenny and I set stakes for the house corners. We used triangulations based on a CAD model I created.

Filling and compacting engineered fill in the footer trenches.


After an incredible winter that saw a snow accumulation of well over 4 feet, we finally got back on the site on Earth Day. The site is now level, footer trenches are cut, and we have been compacting a foot of engineered fill into the trenches. We should be able to start setting foundation forms by the end of next week.

Since the wiring and some plumbing goes into a 4" gap between the double adobe walls and under the concrete slab, there is a tremendous amount of desk work at this point. There will be no going back if we forget something. This is the reason wood floor structures over a crawl space are such a popular construction method. They are much easier to plumb and wire. However, they lack thermal mass, which means they are unable to store passive solar energy and instead act as a heat loss, requiring more fossil fuel to heat the house. Our double-wall adobe will have plenty of thermal mass and hopefully require very little energy to heat.

We have been struggling with the budget and continuing to get bids for things that seem unreasonable. High fuel prices are causing many materials to skyrocket. On the plus side, lumber prices have dropped due to the subprime lending debacle causing fewer houses to be built with a resulting lower demand for lumber. To bad we aren't using much wood. Another problem is getting experienced, but not over-qualified, crews to do the adobe work. All of this has definitely resulted in sticker shock. We continue to look for every opportunity to control costs.