Building the Hogan

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.

I say “houses” because we had originally planned to build something fairly small, in the area of 850 square feet, but our community covenants say that we need to build at least 1200 square feet.  It seems odd somehow that a neighborhood dedicated to sustainability would require a house of this size when the county itself holds no such requirement.  In all likelihood the provision was created to avoid the gypsy type development that has taken place in nearby neighborhoods.

The reasons for setting our structure size at 850 square feet can be attributed to our desire to minimize our usage of materials, conserve energy and only build what was required for our needs.  The other factor determining size was a structural one: an Earthbag house (much more on this later) can only be 33ft (10 meters) in diameter before buttressing is required.  We didn’t want to break up the circle with buttresses, so we accepted the 850 square feet created by this circle.

In order to accommodate the covenants, we decided that rather than changing the style, or buttressing, we would attach a second complimentary two story structure of approximately 400 square feet.

I should also mention that we were laying out the site plan according to a scale drawing that Cecilia had transferred to a very large piece of graph paper.  Using a 1/60 scale (1 grid square equals 1 foot) we diagrammed the entire space with room for the house, gardens, outdoor spaces, solar, wind and water systems.

One more thing.  Because our house is designed to be passively solar, and we wanted to orient the entire plan along the solar south/north line, we first calculated the position of solar south.  A good starting point for determining solar south for your location can be found on Innovative News.  Once we had located solar south, we could set the stakes.

Guided by the drawing, we measured out the external dimensions and drove in garden stakes every 15 feet.  It was exciting to see the physical representation of our plan come to life between the sage bushes.  Included inside the garden walls were several clusters of prairie dog holes, which we would soon have to start addressing.  We staked out the house in a similar fashion, and then the  first garden areas for the fruit trees.  Even though we had no plans for starting the garden this year, the trees were already on order, so getting this started now was important.

Typically when you choose a house site, you want to place it on the highest spot on the property so that you can avoid as much machine work as possible.  We would have preferred this also, but the gentle slope of our land and the absence of high spots meant that the gardens would actually be slightly above the house site.  This we plan to correct in two ways.  First we’ll remove a small amount of the earth from the garden bed locations and transfer that to the house site.  Secondly, we’ll pull more dirt from other areas of the property to raise the house level even more.  This will be important both from a hydrophobic point of view and also for the purpose of transferring greywater to the garden areas.

When all of the stakes had been placed we tied them together with twine to create the basic outline of the site.   The total area came to a little over 11,000 square feet, or roughly a quarter of an acre.  Standing at one end and looking toward the other, it looked much bigger and we realized how much was ahead of us.  Still, the satisfaction of seeing the plans become physical was immensely satisfying and gave us the desire to begin clearing the space immediately.