Building the Hogan

A renewal of self-reliance, simplification and harmonic living

Archive for June, 2009

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.

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Posted by Terry in Philosophy

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.

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Posted by Terry in Energy, Solar Power

June 11, 2009

Creating a driveway

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.

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Posted by Terry in Land, Landscaping

June 4, 2009

Planting Trees

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.

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Posted by Terry in Gardening, Land, Landscaping