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Home, Home on the Range
Homebuilding 1 |
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We officially started the house building project in July by meeting with architect Gary Olp (GGOArchitects). We talked about a project he was working on with builder Don Ferrier (Ferrier Custom Homes) called Heather's House. These guys are active and competitive in the sustainable housing arena. Although we liked many of the ideas, that home turned out to be more sizable than we needed. But for the previous year and a half this place in the country idea had been percolating in the Martin-Smith household, resulting in files of house plans ranging from rude cabins through round elevated houses through concrete domes through 3500 sq ft machines for living. So, by this time I knew what we wanted and what we were willing forgo in orders of importance. So, I sat down and modified a modest floor plan which Amy and I together refined and took to Gary. We told him this layout would work well for us, for the way we live. He studied it for a moment before exclaiming he could do something cool with this. And he did. For the next month we found holes in our initial logic and suggested fixes while Gary and his crew refined the design even more. He made a simple little box into a hip, comfortable, very energy efficient home that could be built within our budget. We signed off on it. Next: get a soil test. Don Ferrier came out to Osage Moon and we staked out the house outline on the flat stretch of ground just south of the barn, overlooking our pond. But right on the northeast corner of our property. (There would have been a covered walk to the Cedar Lounge, the canopy and barn served for parking, and water scavenging off the house and barn would have been accomplished with a single system.) The drillers came out and drilled two holes about 40' apart. They hit pier-worthy rock at 12', but the soil above was highly expansive black dirt with some clay inclusions. About that time a disco started up in the woods about 250 yards away. It went on almost every weekend for two months and was louder than any neighbor either of us had ever had in any city, town or burg. A very depressing time. Even considered selling. Blew our stacks once. Yow. What a mess. An alternative site was in order. We speculated about several spots on the other side of McClung Creek: overlooking Memory Meadow, high in the South Meadow or nestled in the Back 40 woods. Then we started figuring what it would take ($) to get a road -- including an extensive multi-culvert bridge across McClung -- electricity and water back there. Whoops! Soooo, we found a nice site in the lateral middle of the property about 100 yards from the county road. In the photo to the right, Dotty and Mabel are returning from inspecting the stakes Amy and I had just put out. There was quite a bit of negotiating the site's relationship with our bank-jumping, bridge-killing creek. Then the construction bid came in way, way high with the site prep due to begin next spring -- mandating two more summers and a winter in the RV. We were disappointed but not totally surprised. Popular dude that Don, and rightfully so. (Considering our goals, I couldn't help thinking that, apparently, saving money doesn't come cheap). We went immediately to Peterson Construction, specialists in PolySteel -- a highly insulating and strong housing material that we had been interested in from the first (more on that in the next section). And they came recommended. They also came in with a realistic estimate for us, they were local, and they were ready to start throwing dirt rather than begin building next year. So we said yes. Very familiar with the local soils, they set to prepping the site, seen in the photo at right. They dug a pit in the highly expansive black dirt which they filled with Sulfur River sand (chosen over the more plentiful Red River sand for its stability). That was immediately followed by bringing in water from our well (711 feet away) and building a short road. In the picture below you see the trench from the well house heading west between two small apricot trees. The last photo is of the intended-to-be-secondary Poplar Place gate that will now be our front gate. Signage will have to change, but this gate is more suited to an automated gate opener -- it takes unlocking and locking your gate in very few winter rainstorms before you see the wisdom in that particular technology.
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