At Home In The Woods

[dave1949]

Wow, you're really moving along. I find your story fascinating because we are on the brink of starting our house, not in the woods, but in the high desert outside Patagonia Arizona. I'm planning to take our camper and stay on-site and supervise construction. I've learned a lot from your posts and I thank you much. Keep it up you're doing us neophytes a real service.

Welcome to TBN!
Looking forward to seeing you open your thread when you are ready. We live in a direct gain passive solar house we built in 2006, so your project will be double fun to watch.
Dave.

 

[CurlyDave]

Glad to hear you are building with access in mind. It makes sense. It can make the difference between having to spend time in a nursing home type place or to be able to stay at home.

Two other things we did that are easy at the building stage and difficult later were one bathroom with the area around the toilet large enough for both a wheelchair and an attendant. And, a shower large enough for both a seat and an attendant.

We hope we will never have to use these features.

 

[dave1949]

Glad to hear you are building with access in mind. It makes sense. It can make the difference between having to spend time in a nursing home type place or to be able to stay at home.

Two other things we did that are easy at the building stage and difficult later were one bathroom with the area around the toilet large enough for both a wheelchair and an attendant. And, a shower large enough for both a seat and an attendant.

We hope we will never have to use these features.

We did the same thing. We have a free standing linen cabinet in the free space next to the toilet, but that is easy to move. I didn't go as far as installing the hand/grab rails, that would be easy to retrofit too.
Dave.

 

[Obed]

I'm planning to take our camper and stay on-site and supervise construction.

James150, your property has a beautiful view.

Being able to stay onsite has been invaluable, even during the short 2 weeks we've had our camper here. In our case, there were no other options. Since our house site is located in the woods out of view of the neighbors, if we weren't here I have no doubt the thieves would carry off everything during the building phase. Also, a couple weeks before we moved the camper onsite, we saw signs of some mischief that occurred one weekend. It wasn't very bad but some kids had been fooling around. Our construction permit had been torn off a tree and some big rocks had been placed on top of the stack of concrete slab wire. The locals have been riding 4 wheelers across the property for years and I'm sure they are not thrilled that a house is now being built.

Obed

 

[CurlyDave]

The locals have been riding 4 wheelers across the property for years and I'm sure they are not thrilled that a house is now being built.

We had exactly that same issue when we started building.

Mostly it was kids, and I would always wave to them and when they stopped I would tell them that it was OK to ride, but please stick to the established trails. The trails followed an old set of logging roads which had been laid out with access to the property in mind, and soon one became part of my driveway, and another one was in just the right location to dump the excavated dirt from the basement.

It took about a year, but the trails just got to be less and less fun, and I haven't had any riders in 18 months. I didn't have any theft and vandalism either. I like to think that is because I didn't chase anyone off, but slowly made it less and less attractive so they went somewhere else.

 

[James150]

Welcome to TBN!
Looking forward to seeing you open your thread when you are ready. We live in a direct gain passive solar house we built in 2006, so your project will be double fun to watch.
Dave.

I've found the information and people here invaluable in the planning of our home. This thread is especially timely and the posts about foundations and concrete really interesting to me. Our project will be somewhat more complicated due to the redundant plumbing (grey water system) and rainwater collection.

The foundation/concrete issues Obed has dealt with will be important to me and I am looking forward to seeing what else comes up in his project. Luckily we don't have any trees to fall on the camper so I won't have to deal with that!

I'd love to see a picture of your home if you have one handy.

Regards,

Jim

I've also found 3RRL's project very informatiove, he has dealt with some of the specialized issues we will have to also. Things like photovoltaic panels and rainwater tanks and graywater systems.

 

[dave1949]

James150

Here is a view of the house and the garage 50' behind it on a snowy day. My wife, who is a Tech. Coordinatoor for a school system, keeps a blog site. She needs playgrounds to scope out services and software and gets a kick out of the process.
BettsBerm
This site has lots of pics of various things to do with the house and our life in general. It is not well ordered for construction purposes. You will have to poke around in various galleries.
Dave.

 

[James150]

James150

Here is a view of the house and the garage 50' behind it on a snowy day. My wife, who is a Tech. Coordinatoor for a school system, keeps a blog site. She needs playgrounds to scope out services and software and gets a kick out of the process.
BettsBerm
This site has lots of pics of various things to do with the house and our life in general. It is not well ordered for construction purposes. You will have to poke around in various galleries.
Dave.

Wow, cool! We are moving in part to spend the winters there and get away from the snow in SW Wisconsin. Our house should be able to heat and cool itself (and power itself too!) in the Patagonia climate. Thanks for the site link.

Jim

 

[dave1949]

Wow, cool! We are moving in part to spend the winters there and get away from the snow in SW Wisconsin. Our house should be able to heat and cool itself (and power itself too!) in the Patagonia climate. Thanks for the site link.

Jim

I just googled Patagonia, AZ since I had no clue where in AZ it is. The weather looks pretty ideal for solar. We don't worry much about cooling here in the 21 days of summer .

I have 4 whole house fans spread along the length of our house, never uncovered them last summer. They will pull in considerable air flow through the casement windows during the night and cool the house if we would get a hot spell. They exhaust into the attic space, so that gets cooled at the same time. Probably a different approach is used in a desert climate. I have seen those interior wind chimney things. Mud brick and adobe are all about thermal mass too.

I'm sure your house will heat and cool itself with the right building techniques for that climate. A passive solar home will certainly breeze through overnight lows in the 25*-30* range without breaking a sweat. You probably have sunshine to burn there.

Good luck with your project.
Dave.

 

[Obed]

BettsBerm
This site has lots of pics of various things to do with the house and our life in general.

Dave, I'm impressed with your house. My wife researched passive solar building techniques when she was designing our house plans. While our house can't be categorized as passive solar, we did make use of some of the passive solar features. We made sure that our house faces south. The wife also sized the overhang of the roof eaves so that the eaves would shade the south facing wall in the summer but would not shade the wall in the winter. For our latitude and house design, the overhang needed to be 2 feet.

Obed