Living In Las Cruces- Spring/Summer 2008

WHERE TO LIVE

By Jeff Becker
Photography by Russell Bamert

The story of Sonya Cooper and Jean Fulton's house starts like many others. The couple found a piece of land. They fell in love with it. They decided they wanted to put a home on it. It was the perfect place for a nice new home. At this point, however, their tale strays from the typical. Cooper, you see, is a professor and department head of Engineering Technology and Surveying Engineering. Fulton is a Preservation Programs Coordinator of Cornerstones Community Partnerships. In essence, Cooper, an engineer, builds. Fulton, a preservation specialist, preserves. And so the real story begins.

One Saturday afternoon, Fulton recalls, over a couple of cold beers and a green chile cheeseburger at Dick's Cafe, they sat down and decided to build a new home using traditional materials. The initial plan for the house was drawn on a napkin. Both Fulton and Cooper, as part of the Cornerstones program, had spent time in Mexico where they had seen historic missions that were still in fantastic shape after 200 to 300 years. Sitting directly on the ground (as opposed to an elevated foundation) these buildings were built and maintained without the use of any contemporary materials, they have dealt with all the rainwater and all other elements from 200 years of storms and are still upright and ready. As the couple set out to build their house, they wanted to use the traditional methods that built these missions as a guide -- an inspiration, maybe.

WHAT THEY DID

What is unique about this house is how it was built and, specifically, what it was built with. The initial plan they drew on a napkin turned into real blueprints, once an architect friend from Mexico came to town, took their ideas, and stayed up until two in the morning designing. Then they had it -- a plan. What they needed next was a whole heck of a lot of adobe bricks.

So the couple took the sandy soil from one end of their property and mixed it with clay from the other end of the property to make 7,000 adobe bricks. With the help of Javier Rodriguez, they made bricks the traditional way, by mixing the soil in a front-end loader, dumping it to make a heaping volcano of the soil with an indentation in the top that they filled with water. Much in the way that a grandmother makes biscuits without the use of a mixing bowl (or pasta if you are lucky and your grandmother happens to be Italian), the couple mixed their adobe under the hot Las Cruces sun. It took them all summer long. When they were done, the rows of bricks stretched up and down through the rows of pecan trees. Build, they said.

This do-it-yourself attitude was applied to much of the building process. Cooper fashioned a post-tension concrete slab to accommodate for the house's proximity to the river and the sandy soils beneath it. When they started building, they got some help, but did a lot of it themselves using what is called the rajuela method, where little volcanic rocks are inserted between the adobe bricks to hold the plaster when it is thrown onto the wall. The adobe walls were plastered with lime, the traditional way, and the couple did this themselves, too. Unlike many of the cement-stuccos people put on adobe homes today, lime allows water to escape should it ever find its way into the walls, and keeps the bricks from deteriorating. "Neither Sonya nor I understand when people craft the walls out of adobe and then conceal it with cement stucco," Fulton says. "It makes so much more sense to use compatible materials: dirt, rocks for anchoring, mud and lime plasters. They expand and contract very similarly, and therefore they all tend to move together with minimal cracking." In addition, the couple just thought the lime plasters looked more appealing. "With lime," says Fulton, "especially when you are a non-expert lime plasterer as I am, you can see the undulations or the irregularities in the walls. The light tends to play off it. There is just something about it that is hard to describe, but I think it has a lot to do with its effortless longevity, and the imperfections."

Apart from the adobes, many of the other construction materials come from nearby and the couple had a direct hand in creating them. The adobes, of course, came from their backyard. Some of the latillas are made with aspen poles the couple cut and peeled themselves from the Lincoln National Forest, while others are river grasses they collected from the Rio nearby. The latillas are saguaro cactus spines that are exported from Mexico to a distrubutor in Tucson.

When it came to the roof, however, Cooper's engineering expertise encouraged them to stray a bit from the traditional mud-on-latillas style. "Sonya's eyes kind of glazed over when I suggested we do a traditional roof," Fulton says. "Kind of tough for a structural engineer to go with dirt in that situation, I guess." In a traditional adobe, the dirt went on top of the latillas, but Cooper added an element of modern technology, using a truss system by putting two-by-fours on top of the vigas, then OSB board and then the roofing. They used Duro-Last as the roof covering for lots of good reasons, including zero maintenance and the added insulation of the contemporary
roof adds to the efficiency of the house.

Like most people that build their own homes, the house is never complete. There are always plans for a solar panel and, of course, more lime plaster. "There's definitely a certain amount of insanity in embarking on something that is so labor intensive," says Fulton. "There is nothing quick about adobe or lime plastering or collecting and peeling aspens! But there is a deep sense of satisfaction. And I like the way that it fits close to the orchard," she adds.

HOW THE HOUSE IS GREEN

"When you talk about green building," says Cooper, "you are talking about the energy that went into making the products. And this is probably on the lowest end of the scale. This is very labor intensive." It is, she admits, not for everyone. Green design is one of those terms that apply to many different aspects of building and living, but with their separate backgrounds in different aspects of building, plus past experience as framing carpenters, the project was a good fit for the two.

The house is passive solar, with two trommel walls, and 16-inch thick walls. The windows are high quality Kolbe & Kolbe, adding to the insulation. Their bills are only about $75 a month, for a three bedroom, 2,100 square-foot house. They built the house, though, so that it can be augmented in later. The idea is you keep an inside temperature constant all the time. The hot weather doesn't penetrate all the way in and neither does the cold. The house is heated by fireplace only, which in today's world may seem crazy to
some. Or cold, at least. Truth be told, in a place where the sun shines almost everyday, it does not take much more than a little planning to keep the house warm and cozy all through the winter months, and cool through the hot summers. "You can design a house with passive solar at no more cost," says Cooper, yet using the benefits of the sun's heat in the winter, and shade in the summer, reduces energy bills.

Many of the features of the interior of the house exhibit the same hardy yet aesthetic principles applied to the outside. In the same vein, most of it was built and installed by Fulton and Cooper. They plastered the walls in different pigmented lime washes, lending them a unique color and texture. The floor of the house is concrete stained with muriatic acid, which leaves behind swirls and bubbles of gold in the dark mixture. In addition, the house has hydronic tubing in the floors, which pumps hot water from the water heater through these tubes, and thus warms the entire house.

In the bathrooms and kitchen, the countertops are made of concrete stained with black pigment. They are poured in frames and then set on the studs of the counters, making them nice and tall to reduce back strain. The concrete will not deteriorate nor will it need to be replaced, however, they are "unforgiving" on wine glasses, says Cooper.

In all of this, not only are the couple not using much energy to build the house --in terms of all the energy that is used to place that wood, to make that insulation, the wood paneling and the sheathing, plus transporting it here -- the end product, the house itself, is durable, efficient and saves on living costs, as well.

The moral to their story is to build a house that is efficient, that is "green," one need not to install a bunch of space-age products. The proof, one might say, is in the past, when people had to be efficient and use what they had on hand because they had no other options.

The irony maybe of making a home like this is that Cooper and Fulton returned to the old way of doing things. While there are many trinkets that can be attached to a home now -- timers for your light bulbs and showers, low flush toilets, and other items that help reduce -- this house is simply more efficient because it incorporates the way of doing things from a time when people didn't have central heating or any of the other creature comforts of today, and thus had to be smart and get the most from their designs. In terms of this being a "green" house, well, according to Cooper, the preservationists chuckle at that word because traditional buildings are the original "green."

Cooper believes it is only a matter of time before more people start implementing good design into their homes. "It's just one of those awareness things," she says. "We have got to educate people more and show them how it will affect them personally…people have to look at building in a whole different way."