Putting in the floor and loft

House is coming along nicely, though not as quickly as I had hoped.  Fortunately though I'm not in a hurry, and I'm enjoying the beauty of my surroundings as much as anything.  Here's the latest:

The house as it stands right now.  Just added the door recently to upgrade it to "livable" status.  Ahh, the lap of luxury......

Even gorgeous at night.  Without any moon, the stars and clouds out here are pretty remarkable.  I can see the lights of Alamosa to the east, but in the west there's only blackness.

Pretty basic frame for my loft, trying to use some scrap and unused lumber I've got laying about.  It's a small loft (only 8'x16') but it'll free up a lot of floor space to sleep there instead of on the main level.

Did some math, and 2x4s were nearly as cheap as it could be (technically there were some cheaper ways like plywood, but the reinforcement would have actually made them a bit more expensive and time consuming in the end).

Adding some thermal insulation under the floor.  This is essentially Mylar covered bubble wrap, and although it's avaliable in many different forms from many different sources, from what I can tell, the cheapest way is to get it from a shipping supply company, specifically Uline.  Really useful stuff, and fortunately not too expensive.

The 1x10" pine that I bought for the actual floor.  Doing some rough math, the floor costs me ~ $3.50 per square foot, including insulation.  Not bad at all, considering the other alternatives I found were at least double that (most run $10 or more a sq. foot).

About half way done.  A little wavy (the house and ground it sits on aren't completely level) but otherwise looking good.

A close-up of what the insulation looks like underneath the wood.  Already the floor is slightly warmer than it was before.

The completed floor.  Needs a bit of stain and sealant, but otherwise awesome!

 Since it's just a big plywood box right now and I've not got any real roof but do have a real floor, a bit of water sealing is in order.  In this case, in the form of Marine Shrinkwrap, which actually turned out to be waaaaay more of a pain in the ass than I had expected.  Should do the job, but trying to do this in the wind was a mistake.

What it looks like after a bit of shrinking.  Definitely glad I bought the shrinkwrap tape, with the wind the heating was inconsistent and burned a good number of holes in the wrap.

After buying an expensive professional shrink gun off eBay, I found that this cheaper Harbor Freight weed burner was MUCH better and more efficient, not to mention easier to use.

And finally have some AWESOME lighting inside!  These are a couple of warm tone LED lights I got off eBay, and they rock!  They give off a staggering 1600 lumens for only 20w each, and even after a while of running, they're still cool to the touch.  I'm not always the biggest fan of technology, but these are amazing.

Bricks from sand and plastic

For all the wonder and splendor of the internet, it's fairly remarkable the sorts of things that CAN'T be found. It would be nice if there were some way of filtering the useful from the rubbish without close examination, but it seems the technological gurus at the top are currently content to grant access and have not yet figured out to eliminate noise.

A lovely example of a papercrete structure from
Green Home Building (great site with lots of resources)

This is a case in point. There are a good number of building techniques out there that rely on partially or entirely recycled materials (papercrete, using bottles as bricks, old tires and salvaged wood to name a few), but one of the materials that is conspicuously absent is by far and away the most troublesome trash of all: plastic. Some builders do incorporate plastic into their buildings (the plastic bottle building is a good example), but for most the use of plastic is limited in both scale and scope.

However, this should not, and does not need to be the case. Plastics are one of the most frequent inhabitants of our dumps both here and in the 3rd world, and have shown remarkable tenacity in showing up in places as far away as the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. But these very traits (the inability to break down under natural conditions and long term structural stability) are exactly what could make these a useful and unbelievably cheap building material.

Sloplast via siloplast.com

Doing a quick search for these materials pulls up a few easy links. One, of a company in UAE making bricks of plastic and sand (creating a material they call SIOPLAST). A search of Siloplast turns up lots of company websites, but no suppliers that I can find, as well as no instructions for making your own (unsurprising since it's a private company starting this in the first place). A bit further and you discover a brilliant German making blocks out of recycled bags that he terms Recy-Blocks. A search for the same only turns up ~1000 different websites and blogs parroting the same press release, but no actual suppliers or info on how to get or make these. Another brilliant technology most will never be able to actually use.

A plastic brick wall via recycledplasticblockhouses.com

Probably the best citation I could find was this fellow, who is making blocks using a homemade press and bailing wire (it appears the idea is similar to a cardboard compactor). It shows promise, has a fantastic write-up in Mother Earth news, and even more fantastically has drawings and details on how the press is made. As far as I can tell, this is the only site online that currently gives instructions on how to make building blocks from plastic.

I think that this ignores many of the inherent advantages of the plastic to begin with though. The process of bundling requires the transport of lots of plastic, and uses wire to bond. In short, this is a step forward (and I'm not trying to deflate the efforts of this work, what they're doing is great), but I see room for improvement and less waste. For example, using their brick size of 8"x8"x16" (weighing 6-10lbs each), building the outer wall of a 16'x20'x8' house like mine would require between 5-10 TONS of plastic overall (not accounting for doors and windows, no internal partitions), and ~ 24,000 feet of baling wire. It also utilizes types of plastic that would also ordinarily be recycled. That's quite a bit of transport and expense, and also a bit of extra work required to tie off each bale of plastic.

Which brings me back to Siloplast, and similar materials. The advantages here seem inherent to me, low transport costs (in Siloplast, the blocks consist of 70% sand, so local materials can be used), block consistency, and lower costs. It's just too bad there's nothing written on the net about the practicality of how to do this.

Except there IS.

The process of turning plastic and sand into bricks via ARRPET

Buried deep within the bowels of google results is this: a brief but informative account about this process being used in Egypt to produce "tiles, hexagon interlock, manhole covers and bricks." Unfortunately, this article only outlines the basic process, and not specific instructions on how to execute it. I'll need to further look into the process, although there are a couple of other mentions of it on the web, there's very little practical application information that I can find.

But a couple of very important points to make here:

These blocks are made out of ONLY sand, plastic and heat - With the exception of sorting and the preparation of the original plastic, the entire process is remarkably simple. From the description:

"The process of recycling the plastic rejects starts by the preparation of one cubic meter of sifted sand and adding it to one ton of mixed crushed plastic rejects. The second step is to mix the components together and heat them in a specialized furnace. Thirdly, the mixture is pressed using a hydraulic press to produce tiles, hexagon interlock, manhole covers and bricks. The whole process makes use of three pieces of equipment: the agglomerating machine, the furnace and the hydraulic press."

The process uses the REJECT plastics, plastics that would have ordinarily been sent to the dump! Again, from the description:

"Although plastic recycling contributes to a significant reduction of the waste in need of final disposal, it results in the utilization of only about 80 percent of the total quantity of plastics. We refer to the remaining 20 percent as the rejects of the rejects. Those 20% accounts for 13,200 ton/year of non-recyclable mixed plastic waste in Cairo (El Haggar et al, 2001) and they have traditionally been dumped in open dumpsites in the deserts, often burning up and producing noxious fumes........ In 2000, A.P.E. started a project to utilize the plastic rejects together with a sand mixture in the production of construction materials."

To put this in perspective, this was written in 2007, and the project started in '00, over a decade ago, in Egypt. American green builders love to crow about the techniques and developments made here in the US, and our "sustainable building methods," but the developments coming out of the "developing" and 3rd world have been largely ignored.

2 mil plastic bottles (amount used in USA every day)
via Savvy Housekeeping

But the potential here is vast. For people like me (ie, cheap and lazy), this seems to be a very interesting method of building using materials that no one wants, to create building materials that would be both useful and simple to make. And examining the techniques overall (particularly the heating and the hydraulic pressing), it appears this could be ideally suited for off-grid production, even potentially without electricity (a solar furnace wouldn't be terribly difficult to design once the specifics are known).

If anyone has any further info on how any of this works, I'd be delighted to hear from you. Otherwise, this is high on the list of projects to do once I return to the desert.

Starting the house

Starting out, the pictures tell the story better than most of what I can write.  Lots of lumber, lots of sawing, and lots of assembly.  But in the end..... something that's starting to look like a house.

The mess of supplies and other stuff, aka "Base Camp."  Lovely Harbor Freight solar panels (not the best, but they work).  Used a set of three car batteries for temporary power, which is a bad idea (and I should have realized it had I thought about it) since they only fully discharge a couple of times they have a real hard time holding power.  Golf cart batteries are the way to go if you can't afford the real thing.

The pile of all my building materials.  This took 3 days of back and forth to town to accumulate.  My poor truck, but it made it.  I've got a bunch of 2x4s, 6x6 weather treated lumber, pavers and cinderblocks, as well as the laser level in the case on top.  The laser level is again from Harbor Freight, all I have to say to anyone considering getting one there is don't, it was pretty useless.

A nice rig to make fairly precise cuts on long 2x4s without the proper equipment.  Everything held in place by 500lb toggle clamps from Harbor Freight which actually worked really well, wish I had discovered them years ago, it would have saved so much time.

The beginnings of the foundation.  Leveling all this was a bitch, even if everything is relatively flat.  Fortunately I'm not expecting perfection, and there won't be drywall or plaster to crack.  I've talked to two people who built house foundations like this out here so I'm confident this will work fine.

The cinder block pylons to hold everything up.  Even a landscape that appears to be totally flat has a slope.  And digging is a pain, doing the greenhouse is going to require a better technique than just a pick and a shovel.  Good thing I at least have a wheelbarrow.

Putting down my 6x6 beams for the base of the house.  I held these all together with rebar as was recommended by a few people and it's as steady as a rock.

Starting to put up the walls.  For a first time putting up walls, I have to say that this is actually easier than I thought it would be.  Even in wind.  But definitely leveling is the hardest part, especially for one person.

A different angle, showing the impending rain storm.

Roof truss time.  Actually built these out here with a friend before I even laid the foundation, and they've been sitting under this tarp since.  Should have taken photos of them being built, but there was so much sawdust that I didn't want to bother.  But they came out great, and I think they look lovely.

If there were someone else out here, there might have been an intermediary series of photos of my falling off the ladder or dropping roof trusses, thankfully there were no witnesses.  After I finally figured out a method that worked, these all took me an afternoon to put up.

Another angle.  The trusses are scissor type, and I really like the look.  The center rail underneath the base of all the trusses will be gone in the end, it's only there to make sure that I can align and bolt down the roof beams.

Starting to put on the plywood outside at sunset.  The ends of the house will be mostly windows when this is finished, so I'm looking forward to this view when it's complete.  The plywood will help it last through winter, but I don't expect it to be completely weatherproof.

More roofing at sunset.  Fantastic view from the top of the ladder, even if I'm afraid the wind might blow me to my death.

The empty inside, with all the reinforced  rails for putting up the roof removed.  Pretty wide open with the high roof, should be fun to furnish the space.

And that's the basic structure of my house!  From start to finish ~ 4 weeks, with a fair number of lazy days, and an even larger number of days trying to figure out what I was doing.  But very exciting, and easier than I though, particularly for someone without much carpentry knowledge.  Now that it's May, I'm back and the real fun can begin!  More photos to come soon!

About the San Luis Valley

Wild horses grazing in the San Luis Valley (C) Pieceofnowhere 2012

The San Luis Valley is truly a spectacular vista, and mostly one of the few remaining places in the USA that remains both pristine and sparely populated. But it also has a harsh climate at times, and some other disadvantages as you'll find below. In my opinion, it's a fantastic place to live both because of the beauty and seclusion, but many others will likely find otherwise. If everyone were as crazy as I, there would be a lot more people there.

For those unfamiliar with southern Colorado (particularly the San Luis Valley), I should provide some background. You can get a lot of the basic details by reading the Wikipedia page and a nice little summary written by National Geographic, so I'll only give a list of what I think are the pertinent highlights here.

The San Luis Valley, courtesy of Google Maps

The San Luis Valley is in far south central Colorado and extends partially into New Mexico. It's vast (~8,000 square miles), high (~7-8,000 feet) and fairly dry, although where you're at in the valley determines some of how much moisture you get (more about this later). The only "major" city is Alamosa, and even it's facilities are modest in some regards. The Valley is among the poorest places in the US, and it is approximately half private land, half BLM land. It's also home to the Great Sand Dunes, which rise up to 750 feet from the valley floor.

But here's some of the pertinent information about living off grid there:

Climate - The San Luis Valley is not for the faint of heart. The spectacular vistas belie the often harsh and unforgiving weather for most of the year. Wind is pretty much constant, can be very fierce (I measured gusts up to 40 mph fairly often) and (as far as I can tell) does not come from any particular direction. Tornadoes are very rare, and there's little history of any tornado damage. The summers are mild (generally don't get above the low 90's) but short, and the winters are VERY cold (primarily during the night, during the day, the sun generally warms things at least a bit). Despite the short summer growing seasons, there are a remarkable number of sunny days, Alamosa has 350 on average.

Aquifer image via Wikipedia

Water - The Valley has one of the largest and deepest aquifers in the world (technically two different aquifers, confined and unconfined), but has been the subject of legal fights and overuse in recent years. While wells for home use can still be drilled (as far I as I know, this may have changed with the legal battles ongoing), some towards the edges of the Valley are increasingly deep (200-300+ feet) and as the aquifers shrink, wells on the outer edges of the Valley may go dry without re-drilling. The Valley gets an average of less than 10" of rain a year, and while the Rio Grande runs through the center of the Valley, few have the rights to the water that runs through it. Many small households get water trucked in rather than drilling a well.

Soil image via Wikipedia

Soil - The short of it is that the soils vary depending where you are in the Valley. There's a great report by the Dept. of Agriculture. Bureau of Soils (made in 1912!) that can give you more than enough detail on the specifics. Generally, the soil towards the center of the Valley has more loam and slightly better drainage, and much of the soil is sandy. The soil towards the edges of the Valley is very rocky in some places, and caliche is common in many places. Expect to do at least a little soil improvement, and most of the soil is slightly alkali (there are a few dry alkali lakes in the valley) but again, it varies from place to place. Most of the places that are convenient for large scale agriculture are already being cultivated, looking at google maps, you can be fairly sure that the blank spots on the map of the San Luis Valley have some reason (water, soil, drainage, etc.) that prevents them from being cultivated on a large farm. This is not to write them off as un-farmable or un-gardenable, just that it may take more effort to do so. For a really in depth view of the soil in any particular area go to the List of Soil Surveys by State by the USDA probably far more information on every county in the USA than you'll ever use or need.

Land in the San Luis Valley looking towards the Great Sand
Dunes in the east.  Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Buying land - There is plenty of cheap land in the San Luis Valley, much of it for very good prices. It's not uncommon for land to be sold on an "owner finance" arrangement (where the buyer makes the payments directly to the land owner, and ownership is transferred once payments are complete), and land is available in many places in the valley on this arrangement. Locations and prices vary wildly though, so it's a good idea to do research and shop around before settling on any particular plot. Much land does not come with full water rights (the water rights on nearly every plot in the valley is worth far more than the land itself), although most allow for a residential well. The valley encompasses 6 different counties, so building codes do vary, but most (as far as I can tell) are fairly friendly to alternative building methods. Access also varies widely, with some lots being directly off a major paved highway, while many (if not most) are down a labyrinthine series of dirt roads. The roads are usually well up-kept (some are plowed) and access usually does not require a 4-wheel-drive (the valley is primarily flat with few geographical features), but again varies. Keep in mind when looking for land that the valley is 8,000 square miles, so it's fairly easy to buy land that's a 2-3 hour journey to the nearest major city (considering Alamosa and Taos as major cities in this case).

If all this sounds like it's a bit harsh to live in the San Luis Valley, it's because it is a bit. But at the same time, very rewarding, and once set-up, very easy to maintain and enjoy. Besides, if everyone likes this sort of place, it quickly becomes a place where all the reasons to be there in the first place begin to disappear. Wild it may be, but it's fantastically wild.

An Introduction

Just your typical dreary rainy morning in the San Luis Valley, no Photoshop here, this is what it looked like. (C) Pieceofnowhere 2012

This blog is meant to be a chronicle and (hopefully) a guide to others looking for self-sufficiency, fulfillment and innovative living. The purpose of this blog is a focus on DIY, self-made structures, tools and techniques, as well as a coherent documentation of my ongoing structural, gardening and other experiments. I've scoured the web for useful information about the projects I want to pursue, and while I've found a lot of the information I've been looking for, much of it has been difficult to discover and a good deal of it is technical in nature. I want to both use and share what I've found to lower the barriers to entry for others hoping to take the same steps.

I'm the sort of fellow who's never been satisfied by sitting still. For as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated by how things are made, how they function, and how to make them better. This led to an interest in archaeology and architecture, accompanied with a myriad of other fields.

Now that I'm an adult, this interest has taken a form beyond idle contemplation. It seems to me (as it has always seemed) that there is an inherently happier, more efficient and healthier way of living than the working life that many pursue. A career never interested me very strongly, since I've always been drawn by a number of varying interests and always assumed that the point of working a job you disliked was to be able to retire and enjoy yourself. With this in mind, I decided that my primary goal was to retire, and I'd figure out what I wanted to do after that.

I'm now in my early 30's, and finally putting the finishing touches on my retirement. I have a large plot of land in the San Luis Valley of Southern Colorado, and I've been working on an off-grid house. In the end, the house and property will be completely self-sufficient, with no outside power or water, a greenhouse and a workshop.

I've done this all with very limited resources, limited by nearly any standard. Technically, my income puts me well below the poverty line, but I'm fairly judicious in how I spend my money, and have never been particularly hard up. I bought my land without any great financial strain, and my monthly payments (in the $250 range) are easily manageable in nearly any circumstance. I designed and built my basic house frame with both beauty and expense in mind, and in building it entirely by myself, I spent ~ $3500 building it so far, using all new materials (I'd love to have used salvaged materials, but I simply didn't have the time to spend on the initial structure).

Even the contemplation of true independence and off-grid living can be daunting. Most don't have any idea of where to start their journey or where it will take them. There are specifics available on the web about parts of independent living, but few sites that offer a comprehensive picture of what it requires and what it costs. This is my attempt at changing that at least a bit. My goal is to be able to show ANYONE how to do this if they want to, regardless of income, savings, education, class or beliefs. If I am capable of this, so is anyone, and perhaps this blog will give some the bravery they need to make the leap and pursue their dreams as I am doing.

So please, come read, contribute and share in my experiment and my joy.