Palominas Parade

We actually live in a small community called Palominas, just a few miles south of Sierra Vista. When I say "small", I mean small. Our son played in his grade school band, which happened to be marching in the local Christmas parade. We went down to watch it, and this was one of the more colorful floats.



Apparently anyone who has the inclination is able participate in the parade. Here is living proof of that. During a temporary lull in the parade, these two characters (man and donkey) took turns pushing and butting at each other. It was pretty funny to watch.

Cold Living in the Storage Building

While we build our own house, we are staying at my inlaws' storage building that they built prior to beginning their own home next year. One side holds an RV where we eat and sleep. The other side was originally intended to be a workshop, but we have converted it to temporary "living" quarters and have installed a couch, satellite TV, washer/dryer, and a water bed. The building isn't insulated, though, and it isn't heated with anything other than the small space heater that is visible under the table, so it gets damn chilly in there during these winter evenings as we watch TV. Here my wife is bundled up in just about everything she could find, including a skull cap. My son is wearing a black ski mask with eye slits and has a down comforter wrapped around himself.

Some day we'll laugh about all of this, just as you are no doubt doing now as you view this.

We received some snow just before Christmas. The storm dumped another couple of inches just after this picture was taken, but most of it was gone a few days later.

Stow Concrete Mixer

The normal way to build a house with ICFs (Insulated Concrete Forms) is to put up several courses of the panels and then bring in a concrete pumper to push the grout through a heavy hose into the blocks. It is a very quick and effective way to do it if you can afford to put everything up at once and brace it well. My wife and I wouldn't be able to do that, since the two of us would take a lot longer than a normal crew, and we didn't want to invest a lot of time and money into bracing. Putting up the panels a few at a time meant that we'd either need to bring a pumper out to the lot several times (big expense), or we'd have to mix our own concrete and pour it little by little ourselves (lots of heavy work). We voted for the heavy work and bought a commercial 9 cubic foot concrete mixer. We went with the electric version with a 1.5 hp motor since we had electricity at the lot already and felt that it would be a lot less hassle than dealing with gas tanks.

Speaking of hard work ... each mixer load will use almost 100 pounds of portland cement, 250 pounds of sand, 250 pounds of pea gravel, and 60 pounds of water. To fully complete the house, we will need to mix approximately 1000 loads. I believe we're looking at a few months work here. Before you write us off as being sadly deranged or merely stupid, keep in mind that we dug 355 feet of 2ft by 2ft trench in a rocky hillside mostly by hand ...

We bought the mixer over the internet, by the way. Cool, huh? It was delivered to our door in less than a week.

Bull and Ravine

This is a range bull that showed up one day. My wife thought it looked thirsty and gave it some water, which of course caused it to hang around for several more days before finally wandering off. This picture was taken about 30 feet from our living quarters.

A large ravine runs across the entire southern edge of the lot. This view shows a portion of the ravine looking eastward. The national forest boundary is just to the right of this picture.

Looking South and Cooling Off

Here's another view of our lot from about a half mile away, looking south. Our lot is in the exact center of the picture. Some of the foreground, and all of the hillside background, is part of the Coronado National Forest.



Here is our ten year old son helping my wife dig trenches. It had something to do with the water from the squirt gun cooling her off. My wife wasn't buying it.

Caterpillar Skid Steer Tractor

When we decided to build a house ourselves, we realized that we would need a tractor of some sort to move dirt and materials around the lot. We settled on a new Caterpillar model 252 skid steer tractor from Empire Southwest in Mesa. These machines hold their value really well, and the new one was not much more money than a used one in good shape. It is rated to lift 2400 lbs, but I'm pretty sure I've had more than that in the bucket as I moved rocks around on the site. The thing is simply a brute ... fun to drive also.




We bought several attachments for the skid steer, such as a toothed bucket, a set of pallet forks, and a backhoe attachment. The backhoe attachment didn't look very heavy duty, but we figured it would help out on some of the trenches. Much to my surprise, the backhoe turned out to be a lifesaver. It wasn't the easiest thing to use in tight spaces since it doesn't pivot like more expensive ones do ... we had to drive and pivot the entire tractor as we dug the dirt and dumped it to the side. It has proven itself to be indestructible (so far), however, and we lifted out some huge rocks and busted up others with it. It digs a pretty ragged trench because of all the rocks we have, but in decent soil it worked very cleanly.

One of the side effects of the skid steer action is that I would mess up the layout lines on the ground as I dug backwards. I solved that problem by placing some stakes well out in front of me that were aligned with the layout lines. I simply sighted along them as I moved backward.

Construction Plans

We wanted to build a roomy adobe-style home with an exterior of earth-tone stucco and rock
facing that would blend reasonably well with the site. The lot has a considerable slope (about
16% grade), so we are building the house with some different levels to minimize cutting and
backfilling, although there will still be plenty of that. The hillside is loaded with granite rock of
all sizes ... which provides us with a lot of facing material, but makes digging a nightmare.




The key structural elements of the house are:

• standard concrete footings
• poured concrete slab
• retaining walls and above-slab walls built with hollow styrofoam panels filled with concrete
• (click here for information on insulated foam blocks)
• 3/4 inch copper plumbing runs
• standard roof trusses to allow space for HVAC ducts, plumbing, and electrical runs
• 3/4 inch plywood sheathing on roof
• large dual pane windows and multiple skylights
• stucco exterior, liberally accented with site-found rock masonry

Because of the fairly steep hillside lot, the slab for the downhill side of the house (the bottom
side of the floor plan above) will be above grade by six to seven feet, meaning that the walls on
that side of the house are retaining walls that have to hold back the soil under the slab. On the
other side of the house (the top of the floor plan above), the grade will be cut down by a similar
amount to reach slab level and the soil that is removed will be used to provide the fill behind the
downhill walls.

We will therefore lay the footings for the downhill walls first so that the retaining walls can be
built. The footings for the uphill walls will be dug after the cut and fill has been completed. The
green lines above show the first set of footings. The red lines show footings that are being
delayed to allow the concrete mixer trucks room to maneuver as they deliver their load.

Hillside Leaves

The summer "monsoon" rains came about mid-July and the trees responded with a whole new set of leaves. This picture of the same hillside was taken in early August, just six weeks after the upper one.

The summer of 2002 was very dry down here. The scrub oak trees started out the spring in full foliage, but dropped about 90% of their leaves by late May as a defensive effort to conserve moisture. By the end of June all of the leaves had gone, and the hillside just across the ravine looked like part of the Rodeo fire that was tearing up the Rim about that same time.

Critters and Rocks

There are lots of interesting critters around here. This summer (2002) during the monsoon rains we twice had a tarantula creep into the building we are living in. They show up at night, so it can be a bit startling to come across one in the dark. They are quite harmless, though, so I took this one outside the next morning and got some photos of it before it crept off into the weeds. It hard to tell the size from the picture, but it was about six inches across the tips of it's legs ... a small one.

As I mentioned, we've been collecting the rocks we pulled out of the trenches as we dug them. We carried them or rolled them into the bucket of the skid steer tractor, then dumped them into piles around the periphery of the build site. This pile represents about 5% of those we've collected so far. The larger rocks (top and foreground) are about three feet across. In case you're wondering ... yes, it was a lot of work.

Primitive Quarters and Hillside Well

We're living in fairly primitive quarters while we build our own home. My wife's parents built a workshop/RV storage building on their own lot that is located about 1000 feet down the hill from ours. Since they won't be starting on their house for several more months we've been living in their RV and the workshop, which we've converted to semi-habitable living space. We have satellite TV, satellite internet, a washer/drier, and a full bathroom. It isn't insulated and gets chilly, but it works fine for us ... for the time being.

Our well is located up the hillside above our lot and produces plenty of water, which is a bit unusual for this area. Since there is 120 feet difference in vertical elevation between the well and our house, we are able to store the water in this holding tank (now buried) and get lots of water pressure just by gravity feed. Here's the interesting part ... the well diggers first hit water at a depth of 55 feet, meaning the water table is about 70 feet higher than where our house will be just 400 feet away. It makes for interesting speculation to consider what might happen if an earth tremor should put a crack in whatever layer of rock is holding all that water back.

Septic System

Cochise County has adopted some rather stringent new requirements for septic systems, based
upon a soil analysis instead of the old perculation tests. Even though there will only be three
full-time residents of our home, we have enough bathrooms and fixtures to require a pretty
extensive drain field for the septic tank per the new criteria. You're looking at three runs of
vented plastic shroud three feet across (a half cylinder configuration) ... each run being 95 feet
long, for a total of 285 feet. I'm going to have to drink a lot more beer to ever make use of it all.

Construction Model

We built a model of our house using vinyl faced foam poster board available at most craft shops. It cuts easily with a razor blade, and we used transparent tape to assemble the pieces. The scale is the same as the construction plans for the house ... 1/4 inch to the foot. It was easy to trace the drawing onto the poster board for the layout and cut to shape. This view looks toward the main entry.

Future House

My wife and I are pursuing a long-time goal of building our own house. We plan to do as much of the work as possible by ourselves, including digging foundation trenches and putting up the walls and roof. We have several friends who want to keep track of our progress so we decided to set up this web site for that purpose. It's also possible that others who want to someday build their own home may learn from whatever mistakes we make.National Forest in the Huachuca Mountains, about two miles north of the Mexican border near Sierra Vista, Arizona. It is located at the tip of the white line in the picture above (which looks west-southwest from about one mile away). The elevation is 5200 feet above sea level and the lot is populated with scrub oak trees and various other high desert plants.

We purchased our four acre lot in 1997. It lies on a rocky hillside adjacent to the Coronado National Forest in the Huachuca Mountains, about two miles north of the Mexican border near Sierra Vista, Arizona. It is located at the tip of the white line in the picture above (which looks west-southwest from about one mile away). The elevation is 5200 feet above sea level and the lot is populated with scrub oak trees and various other high desert plants.

The view is quite nice in all directions ... the Huachuca Mountains to the west and the San Pedro River valley to the east. Here's the view southeast into Mexico from what will one day be the dining room: