We met Adam today, who may become our builder. He is the only guy in the Verde Valley who builds with adobe. For us, building with the earth-based materials (adobe, rammed earth, and the like) is what makes the most sense in this environment (where average temperatures are pretty comfortable – it’s 75 today in mid-November and has been comfortable since sometime in September). We think if we build our house with double-thick adobe walls (two 10” walls with a 2” space between them) and get the right shading from the roof, we will eliminate the need for air conditioning! That’s a big deal since we want to get all our power from solar. And it’s not something I expected to be able to do in this environment when we started thinking about a house. Even on the guest house and Denise’s office, a single adobe wall with insulation and plaster on the outside will stay nice and cool in summer (we won’t have many guests in the heat of summer anyway – you’re not visiting then, are you?) and will require minimal heat in winter.
So we are sending Adam our sketches and our vision for the place and he’ll give us a proposal in a couple of weeks. What I’m most interested in at this stage is having an architect take our raw sketches and shape and polish them to an elegant design. Then I’ll be ready to get the building going.In the meantime, we have ¾ of the kitchen cabinets installed at the Phoenix house – just the bank of cabinets that contains the sink is left to do. We will probably knock that out this month. The electricians are getting near completion of all they can do for the time being – until we get a plumber in to add a small master bath and a laundry set-up. We want to insulate the attic before the end of the year to take advantage of the tax break on this year’s return. After the kitchen is done, we’ll move out of our bedroom and remodel it.
In most of the rooms we are adding 1” of insulation board and new drywall to the inside face of the exterior walls. This gives us a little cushion against the heat and allows space for new wiring (which means we can take the conduits off the outside wall). The most fun now that it’s cooled off has been getting the yard in shape. We’ve been repairing the irrigation system and planting trees (both for shade and just for aesthetics) and cactus. Mostly we’ve been cutting back plants that have grown too big and/or taken over large portions of the yard. Prickly pear cactus in particular was left to its own devices and claimed too much real estate. So we’ve hacked away and dug up big chunks of it for the trash pile. And we’ve been doing it very carefully – only a few glochids so far to deal with. The city will haul away a big truckload of our thinning just before Thanksgiving. In December, we’ll get the fence re-installed on our west side – it was lying on the ground when we bought the house. By spring planting season, the landscaping will have taken its general shape and will be left to fill out.Note from Denise: The photos show the Phoenix kitchen in progress. The white cabinets are the ones that came with the house. We are putting in maple cabinets and will be putting in Corian counter tops. The previous owners had put in black granite tiles and white laminate cabinets and BRIGHT yellow walls! We are going to mellow out the color of the kitchen and putting in more natural colors. The pink color is the new insulation to help hold down the heat. Drywall will be added over it and painted. The white cabinets will become nice storage for the garage. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment