Corrugated metal

The walls are a combination of sheet metal and stucco. The metal started going up today. It is really beautiful - quite striking in the New Mexico light.

The 13 foot wall outside the front door

An alcove outside the living room on the patio

Windows

All of the windows arrived and are installed. They are beautiful, though it's bit difficult to see with all the stickers and protective plastic coatings.

These are the windows in the upstairs bedroom. The slider will go out to the deck.

Trombe Wall

The block walls - both exterior and interior - are going up rapidly.

This is the tall southern wall in the living room. The block actually looks quite a bit like granite; the mortar is a yellow/earth color that is one of the tones in the block. We're not quite certain about the mortar color - we'll live with it for a couple of weeks and see. 

This photo doesn't quite capture the color or smooth texture of the block.

Roof and stairs and other things.

There's been much progress in the last week that doesn't show in photos. Much of the roof is done, the concrete blocks for the trombe wall are waiting to be laid next week and there is a lovely staircase that I haven't been successful in photographing well.

Sunset

The color is more like a green Fiat than this photo

Overhangs and Fascia

The framers are now working on the inside framing and building the overhangs and trim. 

This view of the north side shows how the fascia on the overhangs will complete the look of the design. It moves the house a bit from the "contemporary" look of the dramatic roof lines to the "mid century" style we referenced when first working on the design. 

The neighbors

Sandhill cranes in the next door field

You can see the sculpture now

We leave for 2 days and look what happens

The walls are going up - very quickly. It's wonderful to see the drawings come to life!

Michael is sitting where the couch will be. 

And this is the view from the couch. 

We have a floor

--that's it, under the water.

The foundation and entire floor were both poured today, colored a medium brown that is quite similar to the ground. The surface was immaculately finished. Then the entire area was flooded, to help the concrete cure more evenly. 

Tomorrow, the patio and walkways will be formed, then poured. 

Now there are pipes in the ground -

The concrete guys, plumbers and electricians have all been there this week. There are visible signs of progress. The concrete footings, floor and patio are supposed to be poured next week!

We've broken ground!

 And moved vast amounts of it around, too.

That's Mark Feldman, the architect/builder on the left.

Photos just simply do not convey the amount of digging and change to the landscape that have occurred in the last 2 weeks. After excavating the required 2 feet below ground level, the County-required geologist decided that 4 feet would be better. This made a hole that was about 70 by 100 feet, 4 feet deep. All of that space had to be filled with a mixture of the caliche that had been dug up and a sandier fill from elsewhere.

This was the hole when it was only about 1-2 feet deep

Also, the house has to be elevated 2 feet above ground (flood) level. The rest of the remaining caliche has been spread around the house area. Picture about a half acre of land now covered with 1-2 feet of extra dirt.

This is after the hole has been filled, and the 2 foot elevation created for the house, with lots of extra dirt to be spread

Having lived in adobes that were built directly on the ground (one without a foundation), I'm a little skeptical of this approach, but we need a permit to build this house. . .

Of course the "we" in this case is not really us. The man in charge of all this is an 80 year old with a front loader accompanied by several dump trucks and a water truck.

Amazing to think what was accomplished with this front-loader in a few days. 

This is Michael trying to demonstrate just how much dirt got moved around

Some of the neighbors didn't seem to be disturbed

3 dimensions

I've been hearing about a lack of updates to the blog.

We're in waiting mode now, as structural drawings are completed for the house. Then bids, then contracts, then permits, then we can start posting photos more regularly when building starts.

Meanwhile, here are some 3 D projections to amuse us.  The view just below, on the left, shows the house from the northeast. On the right, from the northwest. The two bottom views feature the southern trombe wall.

And a floor

When we mentioned a polished concrete floor for the downstairs of the house, several people asked about that detail. Here's a photo of a house in Santa Fe that Mark built with that type of floor. The color is mixed into the concrete before the pour.

A Stove

Strangely enough, we ended up buying the gas fired stove for the house last week. This is absurd, of course, as we don't even have final house plans.

The stove will be our back up heat source in the main part of the house. We had already opted out of a wood stove or fireplace. The official reason is that gas stoves are much less polluting. In reality, the thought of never cleaning out ashes or splitting firewood won over the inherent beauty of a wood fire.

Why buy the stove so soon? A new law in the United States compels the manufactures of glass-fronted gas stoves (but not wood stoves) to put screens over the glass so it can't be touched. The best stoves are manufactured in Europe. European manufacturers, so far, have reacted to this 2015 regulation by ignoring it and just not exporting stoves to the US. No one is sure which models will ever reach these shores again. Given that, when we found a stove we liked (the last one of its kind in New Mexico), we bought it. It will sit in the retailer's warehouse for many months, until there is a place for it to be installed.

We went for a modern stove design, to go with the whole design of the house. It's made in Germany and is quite a bit more impressive than the photo. About 4 feet tall. It will sit against the eastern wall between the kitchen/dining area and the living room. The shape of the glass allows the flame to be seen from both rooms.

One very small step

Last week, all of the very weedy elms and ailanthus (tree of heaven) were removed, leaving 4 four healthy trees and a view of the really spectacular cottonwoods on the ditch. 

We've been working away on the house design and it's very exciting to all of us, but there isn't much to show you, really.

The roof line has moved down, then back up (with much complex 3 dimensional visualization) as we navigated the Bernalillo County roof height limits.

The room sizes have shifted a bit.

We've discussed sliding glass doors versus french doors versus glass patio doors at length. Awning versus casement windows. All exciting stuff for us, but not so much for anyone else, especially without striking visuals.

So here it is - the next big step.  There is a stake in the ground. It marks the likely location of the SE corner of the living room, based on Mark, Michael and I wandering all over the land, looking at all possible views.

There are more stakes, of course, roughly outlining the entire house, but this one is the first : )

The Design

Mark Feldman is an architect/builder who has designed solar houses in New Mexico for over 30 years - we've known each other for most of that time. I've always thought how wonderful it would be to ask Mark to build a house for us.

What an interesting process this is - we met with Mark a couple of times, told him what we liked and didn't like, sent some emails and photos back and forth and voila! the drawings appeared. They were a perfect depiction of what we had been vaguely describing.

This page shows the second generation sketches. We started out with 1500 sq feet, then started adding a foot here and there, another closet and - look what happened! 1700 sq feet.

The house will be heated most of the time only with passive solar techniques. In addition, there will be photovoltaics, batteries and a generator back up so that we will not even connect to PNM. That's excellent, as the costs of a new power pole and transformer from PNM were about equal to the price of the solar system.

Michael and I are Californian and New Mexican. Both design influences show in this house. Michael is a big fan of Eichler homes, reflective of mid-century Californian architecture. My childhood was spent in a similar type of home in California, before moving into an adobe in New Mexico. Key features of those California homes were window walls bringing the exterior inside, open design with post and beam construction, the use of mixed materials and horizontal lines referencing Frank Lloyd Wright. From New Mexico, we bring the mass of the trombe walls, the exterior and interior woods and stucco, the galvanized metal roof. And the extraordinary sun, of course, that makes this all possible.

The key to design of this house is in the East Elevation:

The walls of windows and glass doors in this view all face to the East (the walking ditch and the mountains). The slanted roof up to the left is over the living room, and brings in a ton of southern heat and light. The slanted roof in the other direction is over the upstairs master bedroom. That roof is covered with the photovoltaic panels. In the lower right of this drawing, you can see the slanted garage roof line, but that changed completely this week : )

I've learned that's what you can do in architecture; move entire floors by several feet at a time, or just erase rooms. 

The key to the energy efficiency of this house is in the South Elevation:

Hard to read at first. The very tall windows on the right are the southern wall of the living room. The bottom two thirds of those tall windows are trombe walls (glass over a solid mass such as adobe or concrete). The top third are glass to allow sun to enter during the winter months (and for light and views of the sky). The top squares on the slanted upstairs roof are the photovoltaic panels.  That roof slides all the way down until it creates an overhang in the middle of the wall for an entry way porch. The left hand trombe and glass windows are the downstairs master bedroom suite/office. 

Here's the downstairs floor plan:

You can see the entry porch I mentioned, as well as the other rooms. The dotted line in the interior great room/dining area is a wooden cross beam.  The dramatic slanted roof over the great room would be at the tallest at the base of this drawing, over the trombe wall. The triangle in the lower right corner is a gas fireplace, efficient, to add back up heat when needed. The staircase is completely open to the great room. The dotted lines outside the building are possible overhangs on some of the roof lines. Mark is working on both the climate efficiencies and the "look" with those overhangs. See the Western and Northern elevations below for a sense of that. 

Here's the upstairs master bedroom suite with a deck to the East. This is the room we expect to pick up really beautiful mountain and sky views. 

The look and feel of the interior will be a mix of California and New Mexico also. The downstairs floor will be poured dark brown highly polished concrete, with a variegated color. That material has become very popular here and is quite beautiful when done well. The stairs and support beams will be wood. The walls and ceilings will be sheetrock, paint colors unknown (Michael says white :). The trombe wall will be thick of course, because of the mass it requires, but all the other walls will have some sense of mass, also, as they will be built of 2 x 8's. Mark insulates to R-30 on walls, R-50 on the roof, to assist with the energy conservation. 

In the garage, in the downstairs floor plan, you can see storage for the batteries which will allow us to store our daytime solar harvest. The generator, back behind the garage, is for back up during high usage or emergency. All of this has gotten a little more possible, with the advent of good LED bulbs and energy efficient appliances. I drive a plug-in Prius, so that challenged us a bit more. The Prius sucks up a good 3 kilowatt hours every night. However, driving it will be even more fun after this, since it will be charging off the photovoltaics. 

The Land

Here it is, on a tiny private lane with 4 houses on it, branching from southern Guadalupe Trail. For those outside of New Mexico, this is old valley farming land, rapidly disappearing. There is a 5 acre horse field just north of the property. The land is circled to the east and north by a small walking ditch used by the neighborhood. Three immense and ancient cottonwood trees grow on that ditch. The first time we visited, a Cooper's Hawk flew out from a cottonwood. The next time, the migrating sand hill cranes flew overhead.  
                                                                                                                          

 

Michael and Kaylee got right to work

 

The ditch bank to the east of the land

The farmland north of us