A wildfire started in Horseshoe Canyon yesterday around noon. The winds have been fierce and from the south. The fire started due west of us and headed north. We seem out of its way for now, but many of our friends and neighbors are in its path. More news as we get it.
Update
Written by brad on May 9th, 2011Heavy lifting
Written by karen on May 2nd, 2011After having our first neighborhood party yesterday (which was great fun; we have such good neighbors), we began work on the vigas (wood beams) today. We needed to move the first two, which will be beams that run vertically from floor to ceiling to support the clerestory windows. (The rest of the vigas, which are roughly twice as long, will run along the width of the ceiling in the great room.)
Even though they are smaller, these first two weigh roughly 250 pounds each, so we had to be clever about how to move them.
First, we took them off the pile and stood them up, no small task in and of itself.
Then we built a contraption to balance the viga on the wheelbarrow.
Our poor wheelbarrow!
Then on to the slab.
Obviously, there were parts of this process that remain unphotographed because it took both of our focused attention (and brawn:).
Now, we’re leveling off the bottoms to prepare for mounting them to the slab, which will involve drilling holes and epoxying bolts in.
First blooms
Written by karen on May 2nd, 2011
Asparagus and Pomegranates
Written by brad on April 19th, 2011One of the myriad of interesting neighbors around here gave us enough starters for five nice sized asparagus plants. Yum. His are awesome and I can be sure of that because Karen cooked up a mess (as Craig called it) of it that we got along with the plants to grow our own. One thing I didn’t know about asparagus is that it’s ready to eat pretty early in the year–maybe as early as February. That’s great news. One thing about growing your own food is that there are times when nothing is ready. You have to work at finding things that produce in the off times.
Craig did warn me that these can be a bit of a pest. All the ones he gave me were volunteers growing right where they were not wanted. (Mostly in the middle of his garlic.) We planted ours down near the solar panels which may become the perennials area. We have two pomegranate plants there already.
Asparagus crowns waiting for planting
Asparagus in its new home
Five new asparagus in their desert home
A pomegranate tree/bush year one, planted in the fall
Transforming the Lizard House
Written by karen on April 12th, 2011My plants are doing just great with both tomatoes and eggplants getting buds on them. They will be blooming soon, but are still in the house due to gale force winds this week. I have put them out to “harden” a few times and cringed watching them get beaten by the wind.
Today Brad decided to do something about that and set out to transform the lizard house (also known as the greenhouse) into a real greenhouse.
He began by building plastic covered frames (in my office only temporarily).
He then bolted them to the greenhouse posts, which should protect the plants from the wind, while still letting in sun. The bit of airspace above and below should keep it from becoming a steamroom.
Oh and Brad’s garlic are doing just great too. (They’re envious of the enclosed greenhouse though.)
New kinds of visitors
Written by karen on April 9th, 2011We had two “firsts” at the ranch this week…visitors who come with their own accommodations…
And a canine guest… Mattie sure loved running on the open range!
And of course, we enjoyed our time with Don and Nora so much!
This week has made me reflect on how much support we’ve gotten from our family and friends for our little project here. To all of you who read the blog, keep up on us, visit us out here, and cheer us on, THANK YOU! It is so much nicer doing this with all of your encouragement.
In an unrelated note, baseball is back at Bisbee at the oldest professional ballpark in the U.S. We’ll be going to some games this summer.
Always something new
Written by karen on April 5th, 2011
My baby plants outside to start “hardening”
Current state of the houses
Spring is in full swing here. It has been warm and lovely all week. The wind has finally died down, and the garden is thriving. We ate our first spinach of the year. Brad’s garlic are shooting up in height and doing great (under some cover now being protected from the quails). Peas, lettuce, and arugula are all doing well outside. The tomatoes and eggplants are outgrowing their pots and have started venturing outside in preparation for transplant, which I hope will be within a week or so.
We are moving ahead with building but having a few fairly major reconsiderations. One is that the on-going pursuit of someone to make adobe bricks for us is resulting in no good options. The price to have bricks made on-site here is escalating, in part because it is not a huge order. (We are only doing a few walls in adobe.) We have talked to several folks about making bricks for us elsewhere, but shipping 36,000 pounds of bricks isn’t very feasible. The project seems simultaneously not big enough and too big. So we are considering (and I am taking a deep breath as I write this) making our own bricks. We’ll see. I am still hoping for another solution, but as Brad says, we are always happier with work we can do ourselves.
Along that same line, as we were getting ready to place the final order for the SIPs for the roof, we had a second thought about that. They are quite expensive and the contract from the supplier was onerous. I wondered out loud about other options. Several phone calls and emails later, we are now considering i-joists with the same spray-in insulation we’ll use between the two external walls. The potential advantages are: 1) cost (and no contract risk) and 2) easier to do the work ourselves. If the R-value is comparable (which we are investigating), we may go this route.
Not much else going on here. We have some visitors coming this week and are also planning a very small neighborhood party for late in the month. The birds are singing, and life is good!
Make mine a double
Written by karen on March 23rd, 2011We’ve gotten the first of the double exterior walls done now. The two 2×4 walls are about 11″ wide in total and will be filled with insulation. It makes more sense to see in a picture. The deep window sills will be especially lovely.
I have a really good appreciation now for why houses make such weird sounds at night. When you build, you want everything to be square, but the materials seldom are — boards are twisted, bowed, and warped; slabs have dips and uneven spots. You do what you can to twist, pry, and cajole everything in place to be square, but it easy to imagine all the pieces cracking and popping as they settle in over the years. Add to that a very heavy roof pressing everything down. If kids knew how houses were put together, they probably wouldn’t be so scared of all those noises in the night.
We’re back
Written by karen on March 17th, 2011Ten days away was too long, but we got some good work done and worked a little downtime in as well.
Our plants were extraordinarily well cared for while we were gone and have grown amazingly. I had to repot them as soon as I got home.
Spring has also seemed to have sprung here with temperatures in the 70s and a sudden appearance of green buds on the trees and birds everywhere. I’m glad as I’m more than ready for some warm weather. This weekend I built a new pea trellis in the greenhouse and planted peas, lettuce, and arugula. I’m looking forward to growing more of our own food this year.
Brad found this interesting blog and web site from a guy in west Texas who is doing something like what we are. He talks about thinking about remaking your life and says “Rather than spend the rest of my life busting my ass so I can afford all the modern, pre-packaged conveniences that our ‘advanced’ society provides – I am putting that energy into providing for all my own needs.”
Update
Written by karen on February 28th, 2011Before we take a little hiatus from building, I thought I’d do a quick update on where we are.
It’s been an incredibly windy couple of weeks. We’ve been building walls and leaving them lying on the slab until the wind lets up enough to put the walls vertical. Sometimes that’s been several days later.
At any rate, we now have about two-thirds or so of the outside exterior walls up. (Remember that we are double-framing the exterior walls so there is still a lot to do.) The remaining outside exterior walls are the really tall ones. They will be so heavy that we will need a little help to stand them up.
We’ve also done of a few of the interior walls (of which there are very few). The bedroom and computer room walls are now up. Here’s a picture. Imagine the lovely double French doors!
We would never have gotten so far so quickly without our trusty nailgun (which we didn’t have for the other house — though we had no outside wall framing to do for that house either). It has not only saved us a lot of time but also made the walls more solid.
On other fronts, we saw a premier of a great BBC nature special that was shot in our very own Horseshoe canyon. It was fabulous. When it airs, I’ll let you all know.
And best of all, this week, we finally got a final certificate of occupancy with the right address and the right date. It’s been 10 months since we passed our final inspection. Hard to believe the effort required to get the paperwork right, but we’re very glad it’s done!