Building the Hogan

If you read our previous post about the Search for Land you know that we spent some time creating a list of requirements for our new homestead.  With those criteria, and guided by the desire to be in a place we both love and where we could become more or less self-sufficient, we began our land search.

Having recently taken a month-long trip across most of the western US many of our favorite locations were still fresh in our mind.  We considered the Pacific Northwest, mainly in the Puget Sound area, where green building and sustainability have long been part of the culture.  There’s a growing number of Tiny House suppliers popping up in the region.  We love Seattle, but both the high cost of land and the low amount of sunshine relegated it to a “maybe”. 

Southwestern Oregon has become the center of the Cob building movement and its scenic beauty and temperate climate make it a wonderful place to live.   An Oregon cob house was appealing, even though the cool, wet, nearly windless coastal climate was not ideal from an energy generation standpoint. 

Northern California was also a remote possibility; the warmth and the sunshine is certainly there, but the land prices are as stunning as the views.  To get the kind of land we wanted in California we would have broken the budget for our entire project.  The overall cost of living in California is high, too.  With high personal, property and sales taxes and some of the highest fuel prices in the nation, we were loathe to support a public policy that is leading that state toward bankruptcy. 

Southwestern Colorado is home to some of the most spectacular land in the country.  The people who live there are proud of it and it shows.  The farmland throughout the region is meticulously maintained and the scattered towns are equally charming.  Kaki Hunter and Doni Kiffmeyer of Earthbag Building fame live not far from here in South Central Colorado. We were captivated by the area and resolved to investigate it further.  Did I mention that we visited in August?  When we visited again in January, skating across icy, snow-packed roads in our little car we came to the conclusion that we weren’t up for the long, harsh winters. 

One of the side benefits of our exploration of Southern Colorado was that it gave us a chance to look around Northern New Mexico.  We drove through Farmington and Chama, Tierra Amarilla and Questa, down through Taos, Espanola and Santa Fe.  We found the Northern New Mexico landscape to be unequaled in scenic beauty and compared to some of our other choices still mostly uninhabited, unless you count the elk and prairie dogs.

Taos, a town of roughly 10,000 full time and probably double that part-time residents is a quirky mixture of left-over sixties hippies, new-agers, artists, cowboys, Native Americans, green builders and otherwise fringe dwellers.  We fell in love with the place immediately.  On a particularly warm fall day we stopped in the Taos plaza to hear some free live music and dined on the best three dollar Frito Pie I’ve ever had, courtesy of a local fund raiser.  The plaza was full of people, yet everyone seemed to know each other.  There’s a strong sense of community in Taos and even as visitors this day we could feel it. 

Much more on Taos in later posts.

We went to work on Realtor.com, searching the area from just south of Taos all the way up to the Colorado border.  Our goal was to find something between five and ten acres.  this, we reasoned, would give us ample room for a house, outbuildings, garden and whatever projects we deemed necesary.  It would also afford us a measure of privacy from our neighbors.  Unless you want to live up in the mountains there aren’t many trees this part of New Mexico, so having acreage is the only thing that seperates you from the neighbors.

In addition to the lot size, we wanted to find a place that would be friendly, if not outright supportive of an off-grid lifestyle.  Once we started looking at the neighborhoods around Taos we realized this requirement would not be a problem.