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.