Part 10: Angry declarations and plan changes.

"Winter of 25" (c) J.B. Sommerset 2025

Welcome back, and bring on the fall weather! There's a chill in the air today, and it feels great! Especially up here in the mountains where the air is a little cleaner.

As promised, here is part 10. 

To catch up, here's Part 9: The land lord pilgrimage, and 30 second showers. 

And if you need more than that, here's the start of all this, Part 1: "How I wound up on this mountain..." 

If you are current, below is Part 10, the part where the advice starts dropping, good advice, on how to build in remote locations. 

I'll be up front about the moral of this part of the story, it's a simple one, check the codes in you county before you sell your house to build. Especially what kinds of houses can be built, permitted, financed, and insured. Also, where they can be built and what kinds of zoning is required. This is the first step, be honest with yourself and answer the question: "What kind of house do I want?" Then, check with the county to see if its allowed, if it's permittable, able to be financed, and if it can be insured. In some cases check with the financier if you are going that route to see if it can be insured before you look for financing. The point is, do the research! Ask the questions and get the answers before you contact any builders.

We had just settled in for the short haul, our year stay, before leaving for the country side. We were moved in with some of our most needed possessions, and the rest were in storage. Cleverly packed away with Tetris level skill in a tin box up north. All of our knick-knacks would stay there for almost three years. We got one of the medium sized storage units and stacked it from floor to ceiling. Then we went online and got the cheapest replacement furniture we could find- you know that stuff that's made out of particle board and falls apart if you spill your coffee on it... once. The kind of tables and shelves that make you feel like you bought from Temu or Wayfair... oh wait, that's where most of it came from. I have too many god damn hex wrenches laying around here because of  those bastards and their inbred franken-furniture. 

On the upside, this is why I started working with wood. I hated those crappy, wobbly tables and shelves so much that I decided I could do a better job, we will eventually get there, but not today, I have digressed enough. Time to get back on track. 

It wasn't even a week before we were sick of short showers and the second bathroom flooding. We quickly learned that poop swimming around on the bathroom floor in raw sewage water was a problem. Long story short, the second shower was never used again. Nonetheless, we were thankful to have a place to stay.

We upped our game and started moving forward with the build. At this point we had a lot of great ideas and nothing official. Let me run through the early ones, the ones we would have loved to build but were either impractical, illegal, or just stupid. 

First, and this is one I would still like to do, was the "earth ship" or "earthbag" home. For those of you who don't know, this home is built into a hillside, or with stacked sandbags filled with native soil. Then a layer of concrete or adobe is used to cover up the structure and the inside can be framed or covered. There is a lot more to them, but that's the basics.

The hippies back in the sixties like to claim they came up with this idea, but they didn't. These kinds of homes go back several hundreds if not thousands of years. Hippies just made them modern. The great thing about them is that they have thermal mass. Heating and cooling are easy. That and for the most part, dirt doesn't burn. The down side to them is that no one wants to build them, permitting is almost impossible where I live, and people think your an idiot if you even mention them. Like we didn't live in caves for the first hundred thousand years of our evolution. After coming across so many legal issues and finance issues, we decided against the "hippie hive". The biggest issue was that they are not insurable. So, moving on.

The next idea we had was to use a Quonset hut. We encountered the same issues with the Quonset that we did with the earthbag. Putting one up was easy and didn't require permits. Insulating it, Drywalling it, and putting a house in it was another. As long as it was a shop or an airplane hangar, no one gave a shit, but the second a person tried to move in and call it home, there was going to be trouble. And again, they cannot be insured. Also, with the extreme curve, no one wants to insulate or dry wall them. I can fault anyone for that. 

Back to the drawing board. 

We knew we didn't want a traditional "stick-built" house, (which is an odd thing to call a house, by the way) but we started leaning that way around this time. So, we thought we might try a "shop to home" or a barn dominium next. 

We started feeling like we were being herded into the very choice we wanted to escape. A traditional house, the vanilla house, one that you might marry, or kill, but never fuck. For the uninitiated, "stick built house" is a modern concept. Before it, there was the "timber frame". It's now known as "the pole barn (loosely)". It's a simple concept. I will sum up- Sink posts, put walls and doors between the posts, then poor a slab of concrete inside and slap a roof on it. And a barn-dominium is where you convert a barn into a house. We didn't have a barn. 

We even thought about, and even inquired about the modular and manufactured houses. They were a no-go right off the bat due to the location, they couldn't be moved up the mountain road.  

The county we live in, however, does allows the Shop to home / barn-dominium. Great! We went and got plans drawn up and then we tried to find someone who does that kind of work. We put a lot of thought into those plans and really drew upon our years of living in houses that were build by idiots. Houses like the "split entry" and the "I have been remodeling since I bought this house" or the ever popular "It'll be fine" home. You know, the one where the short cuts are hidden so well the inspector doesn't find them- but you do, a year later when the basement floods. Those kinds of homes.

We designed a simple open concept, With a door wide enough to get a couch through. On the inside was a small foyer, with one hall straight to the living / dining/ kitchen area. Bathrooms, utilities and bedrooms branched off of that main hall, which, by the way, was five feet wide. I was never going to have to try and shoe-horn a couch into a split entry and up a half flight of stair again. Never going to strain my back while I followed poor instructions and invented new swear words. 

Our design was 2400 sq feet and had everything we wanted. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a large open living area- oh yeah, and a garage with a separate entrance through the mud / utility room, right into the main hallway. Best of all it was one level, it would be easier when we were older. I still like that design, and if I had the money I'd build it and have it as my primary- these knees aren't what they used to be. 

Since we could build it, we found a contractor and got the ball rolling on a 40 x 60 pole barn. It was going good. Things were moving.

But crap! There was a catch. A big catch. 

Up next, Part 11: Son of a bitch! Radiant floor heating and argon filled super windows. 

Cheers!