September 7th, 2009

So, we’re going to build a house. It’s our hope that providing you a perch on our shoulders will help us think things through and move the process along. You’ll be our audience, not just following our progress but making us hone our skills and do a better job, whether we hear from you or not. Feedback is welcome but certainly not obligatory – just the regular reporting out to our family and friends will help our thinking. And it will be a nice record of the process. We hope you enjoy reading about it.

This week we close escrow on an acre of land in Rimrock, Arizona – a place we tried to buy a year ago (for significantly more money than we’re spending now!) but were foiled by the start of the housing meltdown. How we got here is perhaps worthy of a few lines of context. Denise and I both arrived in Arizona in the 1980’s and we’ve been married since 1992. Although we’ve been in the state a long time, we’ve lived in lots of different places – no one place longer than about 5 years – which kept us from forming deep-seated roots in any one community. When we started thinking of places to retire to, it wasn’t immediately obvious. We thought at one time that the desert of the Baja Peninsula might be an option but it feels too risky now. We bought a piece of land in spectacular and remote Boulder, Utah, with the thought of retiring there but our year in New Mexico made clear that our home had become the Arizona desert and that’s where we needed to stay.

The acre we bought is at about 3500’ elevation, which is critical information in Arizona. The state varies from just over 100’ at Yuma to Flagstaff at 7000’, and smaller communities higher than that. The Sonoran Desert icon Saguaro Cactus grows as high as about 4000’ on warm hillsides but prefers about 2500’ and doesn’t grow naturally as far north as we are – on the northern tip of a finger of Sonoran Desert. We’re in the Verde Valley, where the Verde River flows south/southeast toward its confluence with the Salt, near Phoenix. A few creeks in our area flow all year – Sycamore Creek, Oak Creek, and Beaver Creek – into the Verde, creating ribbons of leafy trees through the dry desert. The place we bought is on a hillside sloping down toward the north. US Forest Service land (Coconino National Forest) continues up the hill behind us. Our view is across several miles of the valley to the red rocks of Sedona and the Oak Creek drainage. The San Francisco Peaks (over 12,000’) just north of Flagstaff are visible between the red rocks on clear days (the same San Francisco Peaks we studied up close from the first house we built just a few miles to their north). Our hillside is a good place to grow Crucifixion Thorn – a shaggy shrub/desert tree with long green thorns. It grows there more thickly than we’ve seen anywhere else. There are a few Utah Juniper, some barberry, and yucca. At 3500’, we can expect summer temperatures over 100 regularly but not 110. Winter lows might get to 15 on occasion and it will snow a little once in awhile (not more than once a winter, probably). Winter days will almost always get above 50. We get about 10” of rain per year – at least that’s our estimate.

Our vision for this house is to be a net-zero house – meaning we generate as much energy as we use, having a net zero effect on the energy supply. Further, we plan to use only the water that falls on our property, leaving aquifers, creeks, and rivers undiminished by our demands. (Technically, the water we collect is water that would have gone into aquifers, creeks, and/or rivers but if we all used only what fell on us for residential needs, our collective water use would plunge.) The climate here encourages outdoor living much of the year so we plan to have places to take advantage of good weather, good views, and our love of desert landscaping. We envision landscaped courtyards, walkways, gardens, and grounds. We won’t be able to grow the full complement of Sonoran Desert plants that we might grow in Phoenix because of the winter freezes but there are still lots of plants to choose from. The cactus blooms that Denise posts come from plants that will grow at 3500' so we'll have lots of them!

Now that we own the property, our first order of business is to get a topographic map made so we can complete the design and start the permitting process. We’ve made sketches of what we think we want but we can’t put it all together with utilities, driveways, and grounds until we put the buildings into the landscape. The topo map will let us do that. We will also talk with the power company and get an estimate of cost to bring power to our property. This will be a key question – Denise and I have differing opinions on whether grid power is important to have. We’ll need this figure for our ongoing discussion. Lastly, we look forward to talking with a local company that makes and builds with adobe bricks. Double adobe walls are very effective at keeping heat and cold out, modulating temperatures. And adobe is obviously very Southwestern.

I’ll get deeper into all the aspects of this project in future posts. I hope this is a good overview. Look for more in a few weeks.