owner-builder:
building our own home in the Colorado Rocky Mountains
I had aspirations to travel the world and wanted a vagabond lifestyle, journeying wherever the wind took me. So I did -for nearly a decade. The wind blew this desert rat to the mountains, and then to an island, then a sailboat, then a big gust carried me to the bottom of the planet and all over the world and finally, this seed is sprouting some roots back in the mountains.
I was working half the year in Antarctica and traveling the other half. During this period, anytime I would be in North America -usually anywhere from one to three months a year- I didn’t have a home, which meant I spent a lot of time living in tents on national forest lands and couch-crashing. This lifestyle allowed me amazing experiences; I spent a season as a caretaker at remote hot springs tucked deep in an old growth forest of the Pacific Northwest, I spent a month camping in the outback with the wallabies under the stars, I enrolled in a silent meditation retreat in a golden temple on a jungle mountaintop. It was an exciting and expanding way to exist.
However, being a free agent can be demanding. My partner and I were starting to feel the urge to slow down a bit, though we both had hesitations about how and where. This free-bird has never been comfortable with the idea of a mortgage for a variety of reasons and my partner, he had his own dreams of building a home so once again, our goals aligned and we were off to make some magic happen.
The first step was where. It had to be somewhere we could afford, somewhere we’d appreciate the culture that also fit our lifestyles in the wilderness, and the area would need to suit our goals for the future. It took us about a year to find the right piece of land and the day after we purchased it, we flew back to Antarctic and wouldn’t see it again for another year and a half.
It was “on the ice” that we hashed out the design and layout. My partner was the designer, architect and estimator. All the while, we were working close to sixty hours a week, week after week for a year and half straight, making that cash-money to bring the dream to fruition.
After we reached the end of our contracts and flew back to the U.S., we immediately began the process of acquiring permits and engineered plans, sourcing and purchasing materials and tools, and making endless decisions. All the while, we were living in a modest trailer on raw land, learning how to navigate our county’s stringent building codes, and embarking on what would be the most challenging project we had been on together yet. If building the house was half of the difficulty, living in a trailer under the conditions we were in was the other half.
We started with building a storage shed to store as many tools as possible and then got to work digging for electrical lines and installing sub panels, which had the added benefit of bringing power to the trailer, something we had been living without our first couple of months (in winter, no less).
We strived to build a house with the least environmental impact that we could manage, which included energy-efficiency and sustainable materials. Things like;
recycled-cellulose insulation,
metal roofing (recyclable),
fire-resistant composite siding,
a high-efficiency wood stove as our primary heat where we harvest wood from our nearby national forest lands, which makes for a cheap and environmentally-friendlier way to heat our house than many other options,
radiant-floor (water-heated) as our secondary heat source,
passive solar gain (which is usually all that the house needs to be comfortable),
energy efficient windows and appliances,
and as wildfire-resilient as possible, which is a large and growing concern in Colorado’s forested communities,
with plans to install solar panels after the completion of the garage and workshop.
We’ve dubbed our home ‘Utilitarian Chic’. It fits our style; it’s functional, practical, but oozing with creature comforts (..when you have two Taurus sun-signs living under one roof..).
We originally estimated the build to take about a year or so but as life so often goes…Five years and a lot of stories later, we finally reached a finish line. Bruised, battered, and barely standing but still standing and standing together. During this time, I also earned my Master’s from Colorado State University, started teaching yoga-inspired movement courses within my community, started and failed a couple of small businesses, lost my marbles a few times and found them a few more, thankfully.
We officially completed the build and gained our Certificate of Occupancy in July of 2022. For over five years, we had been putting nearly all of our energy, time, money and soul into the project of building our house, and while we still have endless additional tasks to finish, we at least have a place to call home. We are finally reaping the benefits of a project that first began to take shape while working in Antartica back in 2015. Nearly another decade of our lives spent, this time working to build a home for ourselves, and in exchange we don’t have a mortgage. Another goal accomplished and on the next.
This period of life was an endurance, to say the least. Words fails to describe what it’s truly like to have an experience like this. Living in a trailer year-round at nearly 8000 feet in elevation in the Rocky Mountains while constructing a house with your partner day after day, year after year, really put me to the test. Memories of living off-grid without power, internet, heat, no functioning toilet or shower, no hot water, or working refrigerator for more time than I care to reminisce on, battling mice, being afraid the wind would blow us over some nights.
Would I do it again? Hell no. Was it worth it? Absolutely. The extraordinary highs and lows of a project like this are tremendous; from using a blow torch to defrost the sewage lines on the trailer, to rejoicing when 75knot winds don’t blow the roof trusses off of the house. To say it was an experience would be an understatement.
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