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.