Water Culvert

One of the things we didn't expect to require so much work was the road along our lot. We had to spend quite a bit of money grading and surfacing it when we first began work on the house, and it's an ongoing consideration in terms of water runoff and damage caused by Border Patrol agents and stray vehicles. We recently decided to add a culvert where the road curves to go uphill just past our lot. We wanted to replace a simple water bar (ditch and mound) with something that would do a better job.

With the help of the folks who own the lot above us, we first dug a trench and lined it with rebar. About half of the rebar is shown in this picture ... you can never have too much of it, you know.

We put in the concrete in three stages ... first the floor of the trench, then the wider sidewalls that support a cattle grate, then the outside walls. As usual, we mixed the concrete ourselves (six cu yds). The walls and floor were 6-8 inches thick.

A nearby landowner gave me a massive old cattle guard and I cut it up into 3 sections, each two feet wide and just under eight feet long. They sit end to end on the ledge we built into the walls of the culvert, shown here where the water enters.

Here's a view of the completed culvert looking down toward our lot. We found a nice big rock to cover the entrance so errant vehicles wouldn't drop a wheel into it. Plus it made nice landscaping.

And here's what it looks like from below. The total length is 34 feet, 23 of which is covered by the cattle guard sections. No, those aren't illegals sitting by the road, although these ones work pretty cheaply. That's my wife and the owner of the adjacent lot. His wife also worked with us almost every day, especially the hard ones (digging dirt and mixing concrete), but she wasn't here when I took this picture.

Double Rainbow

The sunsets here are really pretty even on an average day, but are especially so after a rainstorm. With a little dust or mist in the the air, the sky gets a deep purple cast that is beautiful. This picture doesn't really do it justice, though ... the purple hue is really more pronounced in real life. The double rainbow was nice, though.

The mountain in the distance is in Mexico.

As the rainbow got brighter and brighter I noticed that it had almost exactly the same curvature as a flower stalk from a nearby yucca plant, so I repositioned the camera to backlight the yucca stalk. It kind of makes it look like it was on fire.

Old Adobe Hut

This is an old adobe hut within easy hiking distance of our lot that apparently was once used in conjunction with cattle or horse ranching in the area. At some point somebody covered it with cement stucco. It is now in disrepair and not used any more that I can tell.

You can see Thompson Peak in the background of this picture, as well as the beginnings of the house we are building (just below the tip of the arrow).

You can also see the cement stucco over the short mud adobe wall in the foreground. The wall was broken long ago, but the adobe underneath has held up pretty well against the rain and wind.

This is a view from the inside of the hut showing the sun-dried mud bricks and the wood door frames. The primary walls were completely intact, and I think the building goes back to at least the 1940's ... maybe earlier.

Exterior Stucco

Note: We originally (and naively) planned to stucco the house ourselves, but common sense eventually overcame us and we ended up sub-contracting the job to a local tradesman. The shear weight and effort involved to cover 11,000 square feet of wall would have killed us. It was an interesting experience to try to teach myself how to mix and apply stucco, though, so I've left the information below pretty much intact in case anyone else might be interested in doing their own small job ... or stupid enough to tackle a large one.

We want to have the surface of the exterior walls have a stucco appearance. After investigating all sorts of alternative approaches (synthetic stucco, one coat stucco, etc), we decided to use a traditional 3-coat system for its durability and cost-effectiveness. The only problem is that we've never done it, and there is quite some knowledge and experience required to do it correctly. There is lots of contradictory information on the internet, but most sources pointed to the following system:

1. Metal lath securely fastened to the substrate. In our case we'll use one or two layers of wire mesh screwed every 12 inches to the metal furring strips of the foam wall panels. I was thinking of using two layers of mesh perpendicular to each other to assure a good grip of the stucco to the lath so that the inner layer forces the outer layer to stand off the foam panel, but some tests I ran later proved that was unnecessary..

2. A first layer (called the "scratch coat") comprised of (by volume) one part portland cement, one part hydrated lime, and three parts sharp sand (relatively coarse). Many sources recommended the inclusion of some sort of fibers as a binder in this layer to reduce cracking. I found out that although fiberglass is often used for this, the alkalai in the cement literally destroys fiberglass within about three weeks, making it functional only during application. Nylon or polypropylene holds up indefinitely and provides long term integrity. A company called Nycon (www.nycon.com) sells nylon fibers for many concrete applications in both small and large quantities, so I bought a few packets for my tests (see below). I applied a scratch coat layer both with and without the nylon fibers. The fibers made the stucco easier to apply and gave no shrinkage cracks. The portion without the fibers showed some cracks wherever the underlying lath was not lapped well.

The scratch coat gets raked horizontally with a serrated trowel before it sets too firmly to provide a mechanical bond for the next layer.

3. A second layer (called the "brown coat") comprised of one part portland cement, one part hydrated lime, and four parts sharp sand. This layer goes on as smoothly as the coarse sand will allow, which isn't very smooth although it can be troweled flat. I played around with applying a section, letting it cure for a couple of days, and then applying an adjacent section. I wanted to see what the effect on cracks and appearance of the joints would be. Cracks don't seem to be a problem (yet, anyway), but I found it useful to feather both edges of the joints (at different times, of course) with a wire brush to virtually eliminate any visible lap.

4. A finish layer (called the "finish layer", surprisingly enough) comprised of one part portland cement, one part hydrated lime, and three parts #30 silica sand (very fine).

Most sources called out the use of rods and screeds to achieve flat layers, but I found that the sand grains pretty much set the layer thickness if you let them, and the only leveling required is if the underlying wall surface is uneven. Our foam panels are holding pretty true, so I don't think that will be an issue.

So I built a 4ft x 8ft artificial wall using 2x4's and plywood, covered it with lath, and started trying to teach myself the art of stucco work. The results can be seen in the picture below. Most of the panel now has the finish layer on it, which we'll use to test various methods of colorizing. I left all three stucco layers visible in this section of the panel for illustration and also to see what happens to each with time and weathering.

Terrific Adobe Style Home

The Habitat for Humanity organization in Sierra Vista sponsored a tour of some local homes last month, one of which was this terrific adobe-style home that's on the National Register of Historic Places. It part of the Kinjockity Ranch, which was built by a very wealthy fellow back in the 1930's and is located about a mile north of us. I'd love to capture this same warm, rounded appearance with our house, but I don't think we'll be able to with the construction technique we're using. Still, I plan to steal a few ideas from what I saw as I was going through it.

Here's a picture from inside the house. I believe this room was added more recently, and it has the same feel we hope to build into our home, with maybe a few less decorative items.

Addendum: The Kinjockity Ranch has now been sold to a developer, and the new property is being called Kings Ranch Estates. From what I've been told, the developer is planning to convert this old adobe home to an upscale restaurant.

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.