We found this little guy (can you see him?) on our second day working on the lot, last Sierra trip. My sisters were raking out the earth around an oak tree, getting ready to put down a load of compost, when they spotted him.
He is the only wildlife to be a confirmed sighting on the lot this time, except for the quail that I saw twice but could not photograph because they are speedy and uncooperative.
Which is probably as close as I will ever get to Nevada Falls, because the hike up to Vernal has defeated me twice and that's not even halfway. But it looks awfully nice from the trail!
This shot was taken with my Canon Powershot SX510HS, as are all of my photos, in this case using "live" automatic settings with the miniature effect on. No editing.
So, a while back I wrote a bit about our future building plans. Being in the midst of a southern California "winter," this is probably a good time to talk about climate control!
Permitting agencies will let you build a house without air conditioning, but not a house without heat.
The human can survive a lot of heat - you may feel like you want to die, but unless you are health-impaired and the conditions are truly hellish, most people will cope via applications of cold water, and/or chilled beer, and/or nudity.
Lack of heat, though is something that will actually kill you fairly predictably, especially if you are old. Improper sources of heat can also kill you.
One of the heat sources I've specced for the Sierra House is a wood-burning stove. The pros: the fuel is abundant and relatively inexpensive, and the truly cold season in our area is short. The cons: unless the firebox is perfectly installed and the house is very well vented, you can smother yourself with carbon monoxide. Also, hauling wood is tiring and can be dangerous, you can't store cut wood directly adjacent to your house unless you really want to issue an invitation to termites, and there is considerable associated mess.
So while this is a sentimentally attractive option and we may yet get one, if the budget allows, despite its potential drawbacks, it is only an option and not a Must Have. For ambiance, we may well go with a wall-mounted ventless gel-fuel fireplace instead: no wall/ceiling perforations and no special flooring required.
The more likely heat solution is also a cooling solution, and that is what's known as the ductless mini-split. This is a device that mounts on your wall and provides either heat or cooling via a compressor and heat pump located directly outside. These are cheaper than whole-house furnace/air handler/duct installations, more energy-efficient, and easier to maintain. Getting one of the smaller units for each floor of the house would provide almost complete comfort.
I say almost because again, we will be old. So there are additional heat options, focusing on the bathrooms.
There is a high likelihood that an old person is going to want to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and for a solid portion of the year - much longer than the period when daytime heat might be desirable - the nighttime loo is going to get chilly. Chilly old people shiver and increase their risk of falling.
I have specced two heat sources for the bathrooms. One is a ceiling-mounted light + vent fan + heating element fixture; one is a hydronic box heater that can slide into the kickspace under a vanity. There is a good chance I will go with both of the then-available equivalents when we build. The hydronic heater can be set to a thermostat to keep the bathroom at, say, sixty degrees; and the ceiling fixture can be controlled via switch.
Of course, any power-consuming climate control devices have to be accounted for in the electrical wiring plan. Those two bathroom fixtures would each require a separate circuit. Knowing in advance how big of a circuit board to specify will help clarify the budget and will certainly reduce time spent on-site doing change orders and waiting for supplies.
Advance planning: the one-time home-builder's friend.
This tree is part of the thickety maze that stands between our proposed building site and the creek. The thicket is laid out in irregular bands, not a single impenetrable mass; three of the bands bracket a small meadow that looks to me like prime deer-nesting area. On the northeast of that is this, a mature willow. Obviously it is scruffy as hell, and also festooned with the malicious blackberry vines that run rampant, but I know that birds love trees like this, so we will probably leave it alone. It will look lovely in the spring/summer.
Here's another topic glossed over by the glossy shelter magazines, that like to focus on slate floors and redwood walls and granite countertops:
Poo.
And everything else that can be classified as a bodily product of humans.
It's another thing that is easy to overlook when you are being romanced by photos of lovely country cabins, or straw-bale farmhouses, or rammed-earth showplaces: if you are outside of a town with a public sewer system, you are on the hook for dealing with your own effluents.
This is like trash removal: not a luxury, but an essential component of civilization. The first public works ever were roads, water-delivery and waste-removal. Even now, when we think of "first world" versus "everywhere else," the line is drawn under waste removal.
Everybody has a smart phone? Irrelevant. No poop in the streets? Civilization!
All residential building permits, in any county anywhere there is no public sewer, will require that the prospective home-builder install a sewage collection system, usually called a septic system. What is that, exactly? It's a pipe and pump combination that moves effluent from your indoor toilets, sinks, showers, etc into a sealed, and usually buried, collection tank. Where it sits and ferments until, at some point in time, determined by the size of the tank and the number of pooping people in the house, you call a septic service to come and pump it out and dump it ... somewhere else, probably best not thought of, where chemicals and filtration and added water and time will reduce it to something that can be used to irrigate highway landscaping.
Some enlightened counties will let you install composting toilets, which, in combination with a greywater-disposal system, can greatly reduce your water consumption as well as eliminate (HA!) the need for a septic system. Calaveras County has a rule that if a lot zoned for a residence does not already have a septic tank installed, the home builder can install composting toilets. If it *does* already have a septic tank, you're supposed to use that.
Now, this makes very little sense to me, and when we commence the structural-engineer and building-permit part of our process, if the regulation has not been changed, I intend to apply for a variance. There is no acceptable justification for using potable water to flush toilets when a simple, well-proven alternative is available.
Currently, the cost of two high-quality composting toilets is roughly equivalent to the pipe & pump combination we would need in order to employ the septic tank on our property. The maintenance required by composting toilets is laughably simple and requires no plumbers, no electricians, and no pump-out services. This is one of the reasons I want to go that way: it is a lower-operating-cost solution.
Old people on fixed incomes really do not want too many systems they cannot maintain themselves, for which the cost of hiring services is uncontrollable.
And obviously, if your septic tank floods or your pump fails, you are officially in deep shit and have to get help on an emergency basis, which means you will pay the maximum.
Now, there is another non-obvious component of forgoing a septic system, and that is: you can't use a garbage disposal in your kitchen. Food waste is a non-acceptable additive to a greywater system. So the kitchen is also a source of compost, or, if you have certain types of livestock, critter food.
And what exactly is a greywater system?
It's another simple, low-maintenance, low-cost solution to a problem that in cities is solved by public sewers. (Some cities will let you install a limited greywater system, in which drainage from your shower and washing machine can be run straight out of the house into your landscape, with minimal filtration components.)
In our country-house scheme, a greywater system is planned to handle all waste water from the house. It will be routed through a surge barrel and a series of gravel-and-plant-filled tanks, where it will be naturally filtered before being discharged into the landscape. I've already checked; this is perfectly legal, it adds ecological value to the yard (instant wetland!), and will cost about the same as a manual well pump - around a thousand dollars.
There are not many caveats to a greywater system; you have to use a specific class of detergents and soaps, but most ecologically-minded people already do. Since the landscape we propose to move into is a dry one, this is, oddly enough, our best bet to have a year-round water feature. If we do it right, we may even get us some Calaveras jumping frogs.
These are the image files for each of my published works of fiction.
The L.A. Stories (currently eighteen separate novellas) are available singly for Kindle and Kindle apps from Amazon.com.
My short novel MILLION DOLLAR DEATH features characters found in some of the L.A. Stories, and my play WHAT WENT DOWN is actually used in the novel.
The four full-length novels are available for both Kindle and paperback formats.