credits - Anthony Falbo - Falboarts.com
The plateau at first glance seems to be entirely free of wildlife. There are miles of nothing but sagebrush and native grasses no taller than your waist. You can scan from horizon to horizon and see little but a few hawks, crows and mountain bluebirds that thrive in the New Mexican desert. But the birds presence tells the true story. Where there are crows, and especially hawks, you know that wildlife thrives below.
I’ve lived in many different houses in my life but they all share one thing in common - they were built by somebody else. I’ve adapted myself and my lifestyle to the somewhat limited vision of architects, designers and builders who were more interested in selling a house and making a profit than building a home.
I took a brief hiatus from posting to focus on some other projects, but hopefully I can now get back to regular posting. I see from the lack of responses that my property tax idea didn’t go over so well. I was hoping to stimulate some dialog on the issue but perhaps everyone gets enough debate on issues like the economy and the government spending elsewhere. With that behind us, today I want to talk about something more pertinent to the subject matter - choosing a construction technique.
I’m taking another departure from the process of housebuilding to throw out an idea that came to me the other night. While lying in bed pondering various things on my “To Do” list my thoughts wandered into the area of property taxes.
Up to this point our labor has mostly been of the manual variety. With the exception of the tiller, our work has been done with shovels, rakes, wheelbarrow and hand. We haven’t missed the fact that we are completely without power. More noticeable is the absence of ready water, but that’s another post.
Up until this point we’ve been using an old bladed driveway that the previous owner cut to his building site. Since the little road led us directly to the shed, we kept on using it as a starting point for all of our activities. Now that our focus has shifted to the new house site we came to the point where we needed to put in a real driveway.
The plateau has a remarkably diverse set of landscapes from the heavily forested ridge-lines to quasi-desert mesa. The mesa is considered desert by some because of its lack of vegetation (read trees)but its anything but deserted. The land holds many types of shrubs and grasses, and even in this fairly dry place (less than 15″ rain per year) there are still the occasional oak and pine trees in low lying areas.
One of the things we noticed as we were digging in the soil was the quantity of heavy, black, pock-marked stones in each shovel full. They range in size from peas to boulders, some of them well over 50 kilograms. We began collecting them for later use and stacked them in several piles around the building site. The small to medium stones will make excellent filler for a rubble trench.
With the boundaries of our house and garden set, we commenced with the task of clearing the cordoned area of it’s sage brush and grasses. Traditional house-building would say that this is the point where we hire a bulldozer or grader to come in and prepare the site. In fact, one of our neighbors strongly suggested that we hire someone with a tractor to come in and clear the entire 20 acres.
Once the location for the house became clear to us we set about measuring a rough area that would include the “fenced in” area encompassing the house, outdoor spaces and gardens. With some gardening stakes in hand we marked off the rough plan for the house(s) and garden.