In this article of Pagosa Country Living there are several houses featured. The homes are lovely, well-built and mostly standard in design and construction. Most people building in this area desire the quality and security of standard design and construction. There are, however, a number of people who move here with a more individual and adventurous spirit. These folks have taken on the task of designing and building their own homes or have a major role in the home’s design and construction. While these homes seldom have the quality of design and construction of the professionally built home, they do reflect the personal ambitions and needs of the residents.

In the first case, the folks order up X number of bed and bathrooms, sometimes get creative about the kitchen/living room and make their life fit into the spaces. In the second case, the people style the home for their exact needs and usually design for the home to evolve over time. It becomes like an old leather glove that, for its owner, becomes a perfect fit.

Your writer is an owner-builder. I wanted to display the spectrum of Pagosa Country home building in this web magazine, and decided to use my own home as an example of both an owner-built house and a home that uses many non-standard or alternate systems. (Continued below...)

There are many things that motivate people to come to a small community in the mountains and build a home and lifestyle. There is a framed message that hangs at our home’s entrance and is shown above. It is a statement of our most basic motivations.

Set into the hillside, our post and beam and log house faces south to catch the warmth of the sun. Entry is through the solar greenhouse on the left. The front door is just to the right of the greenhouse glazing. The solar panels are just in front of the glazing. The walkway into the house is via this greenhouse. A second greenhouse sets low in front of and below the house. You can just see its roofline on either side of and under the enclosed deck. There are garden beds in front of the greenhouse. Those glass panels in the house are four feet wide and run from floor to ceiling. We keep dozens of hanging and potted plants behind the windows. It is also just right for starting seeds early in spring. The solar heat gain keeps the house warmish all winter. It is a nice comfortable home but one with a difference.

The "Alternative Home" Philosophy!

If you want to go the alternate route you must be prepared to make it a lifestyle that requires a major chunk of your time. When you combine water collection, solar electricity, gardening, firewood collection, sanitation, and others, it is a job. You must consider it as such and plan your lifestyle around it. If you are thinking of doing alternate energy systems there are a few things you should consider first. These things can be thought of as a philosophy.

Almost any homeowner can include a few alternate systems to save environmental resources and money. For example, having a water well productive enough for a garden is not likely in large portions of the mountains. An owner can collect and store snow melt-off and rain in drums or tanks for garden and outdoor uses. The price to pay is installing the gutters and storage tank and a way to pump or drain water for use. Not much extra work! On the other hand, if you want to collect all or most of your yearly water resource from the sky you will have to build extensive water tanks and collection systems and be prepared to allow time to work the system. The water must be tested and the gutters have to be maintained year round along with filters and pipes. Also, the water cannot be allowed to freeze. A lot of work!

Doing alternate systems will save a large amount of money, money that you would otherwise have to earn to pay someone to provide the work or resource. Doing alternate systems must be considered as part of your work and income, fortunately it is untaxed income! The bottom line is, don't plan on a full alternate lifestyle if you have to work a full­time job.

Our House: The Particulars

A large walk-in pantry offers a large variety of stored food. The “pantry island” is made of inexpensive narrow house doors stacked with 4x8 inch wood lengths spacing each level. The north and west walls, shown here, are underground. There is a small door behind the island leading into an old fashioned root cellar.

We have a total of 2640 sq. ft of floor space including first and second floors, shop and greenhouse space and a mudroom. The basic structure is made of 6x8 inch double tongue and groove logs with a 2x6 inch framed 34 foot by ten-foot section projecting out on the front or south side.

The roof is supported by 6x8 inch beams on four-foot centers. The roof is 2x8 inch boards with two inches of foam on top and four inches of foam under the boards, between the interior beams. The front framed projection has six inch fiberglass insulation. Most of our log walls above ground have two inches of foam insulation on the exterior surface with one-inch pine boards as a covering.

The house is set into the hillside so the edge of the roof on the northwest corner is just above ground level. The entire north and most of the west wall are earth covered over four inches of foam insulation. Building all or part underground and earth berming is an excellent idea but a compression layer of foam and old corrugated roofing tin or similar compressible material should be used between wall and dirt. Water should be vented away from the walls. More than one wall has been pushed in due to wet freezing dirt.       

Planning for Solar Gain

The front projection of our house was framed in order to have four-foot wide, floor to ceiling, glass panels facing due south. Some people get a bit zealous about solar gain and their entire house is designed to be a solar collector, but simply putting a lot of glass on the south side will gain a lot of heat in winter. If you want to keep that heat plan ahead and have some type of curtain insulation for the windows at night. Even triple pane windows lose a lot of heat when the temperature is below 0º F. Professionally insulated curtains can be purchased, and some even work automatically. We use rectangular sleeping bags hung at the window top with dowels attached to the bottom to roll them up on

Solar Electricity

Living in an area averaging a mile and a half above sea level makes for strong and bright sunlight that will produce electricity. Solar electric systems can be used to provide a bit of electricity for occasionally used cabins, all the way to the entire electric utility for full time homes.

Solar electricity is no longer an experimental science. It is "on-line" and fully useful to homes in remote areas. For a couple thousand dollars you can make enough electricity for an occasional use or low use home. For about five thousand dollars you can have lights, entertainment, and small appliance use. Cooking and refrigeration is best done using gas. For fifteen to twenty thousand dollars you can have a fully automated system with most standard utility uses. Remember, you will never get a utility bill!

Yes you can! Some people seem to think a yard full of flowers isn’t possible at high altitude. Well, it is! Starting early, using hardy plants and mixing soil with compost are steps toward that goal. We have a house and yard full of color all summer.

We have used water collection from the sky for twenty years at our house. We haul drinking water from town, but collecting water saves a lot of hauling. This area of the Rocky Mountains is considered an arid area but enough water falls, in the form of rain and snow, that collection is useful.

We tend to have a short drought in early spring so; it is a good idea to collect a lot of snow in winter in order to make it through this low water period. You will learn your water consumption but always count on more than you figure you will need. It never hurts to have too much!

It is not a good idea to put gutters on a north side roof. Ice damming is a condition where ice builds up on the roof’s edge and slowly projects itself out and down. This will push gutters off the house. Even on the south side you should use large heavy gauge gutter mounted with some type of extra support.

You will need to service the gutters from time to time. In winter an outdoor gas space heater with electric blower is useful for melting ice from gutters. If you live near a pine tree you will need to clean the needles from the roof and gutter once or twice a year. Our house has a north side gutter, but with earth beaming the gutter is at ankle level and easy to maintain.

Roof water can be used for general household use. Put a cap full of laundry bleach in your holding tank every week or so to keep bacterial and small critter life at bay. Roof water can be treated and filtered for drinking. We tried it but it was more like drinking “pine tea” so, we now haul water from town. Most people prefer to haul drinking water from town and have a separate storage and plumbing system for this water.

For extra gardening water collection you can build an in-the-ground collector. This collector requires a wide, open area. Dig a large hole in the ground. Ours is in the 20 feet in diameter and five feet deep neighborhood. Line the hole with reinforced plastic specifically made for small ponds. Build a 2x8 inch board on two-foot centers "roof" over the hole and cover with tin. If the roof is made sloping to the south, translucent greenhouse material can replace some of the roofing tin and the water will be less likely to freeze and thaw sooner. Make the short sides weatherproof. Gutter this roof and pipe the water into the tank along with roof run-off. Plan this storage position knowing there will be pipes running to it.

Cisterns

Cisterns are available in plastic and concrete. If you want an above ground cistern you must enclose it and have enough heat to keep the water from freezing. Putting a cistern in a greenhouse will allow the water to stay warm enough not to freeze most of the time; a back-up heat source is recommended. A below ground cistern can be plastic or concrete. Concrete tanks are available from septic tank services or backhoe operators. Underground tanks are buried deep to insulate against freezing. If you are in the pre-construction phase consider locating your tank at ground level under the house. Put a hatch in the floor so you can service the pump and tank. A shallow well pump can be used to fill an indoor pressure tank giving you standard household plumbing and pressure.

Unique Fireplace

The firebox is a custom made steel unit a bit larger than a 55-gallon drum. We used a drum stove for a few years but replaced the drum with this custom welded box. A drum stove door kit is mounted at the front. There are several hundred old fashion firebrick enclosing the stove. These bricks absorb heat along with making for a safer wood stove. The entire stove and bricks rest on an adobe covered concrete block foundation in the earth, separate from the house foundation. Bricks also cover the floor surrounding the stove. This makes for a wood stove utility area where embers can safely fall and kindling can be chopped. A lot of cooking is done on the large flat stovetop. All through winter teapots keep humidity flowing into the house.

A firebox that holds a chunk of firewood over a yard long needs a long "fire iron," which hangs to the right. On the left post is an antique wood stove popcorn popper.

Other alternative home-building systems and more detail can be found in separate articles in this web magazine. Choose systems carefully keeping the philosophy in mind and you can develop comfortable and refined living. Good luck!

 
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