Chapter 23

"So how did you do it?" Rob asked.

Bryan shot him a questioning look as he took another spade full of dirt from the hole beneath them both and added it to the pile on his side.

"Do what?" Bryan queried, not quite sure what he was being asked.

"Build all this," Rob gestured around him. "The house, the barns, the walls..." he dropped for a moment. "It's like you built everything out of nothing. You said yourself there's not much money tied up in any of it."

"There's not," Bryan agreed.

"But what I'm getting at is how on earth did you take it upon yourself to do all this. Didn't you have a job or something?"

Bryan chuckled. The question was one that he had faced many times with family and close friends. "Well yes," he said. "As a matter of fact I did."

Rob said nothing, just continued scooping for a moment before looking up to see if Bryan was going to elaborate.

Bryan cleared his throat. "I worked for the phone company," he said. "I bought the land for about a thousand an acre. It was a significant chunk of change, but nothing really huge. I had it in savings at that point."

"Silver and I looked at several house designs and we wanted something both unusual enough to reflect how eccentric we are, and how we were both tight asses and didn't want to spend much money."

"I finally came upon this design for a home in a magazine. Some guy out in Oregon, I think Mike Oehler is his name, had built himself one about thirty years ago and had been refining the design since then. He had a book and a DVD set about it and I decided to get them. I checked it out and Silver was sold. She likes peace and quiet, likes the energy efficiency idea, and likes the idea that it's both not visible and storm resistant."

All told, the structure and pond lining to keep out the moisture cost me about eight thousand. A majority of the floors and built in fixtures are just local clay and straw, cob they call it, solidified with boiled linseed oil, so all that was pretty much free except for labor."

"Wow," Rob said, clearly impressed. "So it cost you about eight thousand dollars to build that house?"

"Eh," Bryan said. "It probably comes closer to ten by the time plumbing and wiring came into play. The cabinets and woodwork are almost universally reclaimed pallet lumber that I milled and constructed. The windows are all reclaim from old houses and barns around the area that were being torn down."

"I thought they were double pane windows," Rob said. "You found that many double pane windows to reclaim?"

"No," Bryan smiled. "I made my own." I set them into home-made frames in double pane configurations an if you look closely there are holes drilled in the bottom of the frame. Those holes are filled with silica gel which keeps moisture from condensing between the panes. It's not quite as efficient as commercial panes, but it's much easier to fix if one of the kids decides to hit the window with a baseball."

Rob chuckled. "There isn't anything you won't try is there?"

"Not much," Bryan admitted. "It gets me into trouble sometimes."

"I'll bet."

"Well anyway," Bryan continued. "So I had about fifteen hundred man-hours, ten thousand dollars roughly, and got a Christmas card from the local tool rental company with all the stuff I rented for bizarre jobs."

"At that point we had a dirt path and some gravel out by the road. The fences were pretty bad and when it rained we had to ford the stream at the bottom of the hill. Silver wasn't taking that all that well as you might imagine."

"So one week she was gone at a conference for work and I decided I was gonna do something about it. I made the arrangements ahead of time and two hours after she was off on her trip there was a nice new bulldozer dropped off at the road that I had rented for the week."

"Now I had already laid everything out for weeks in advance so I knew where I was working and had the vacation time planned. I had the pond put together and packed down in about a day and a half. I made the drainage diversions and shaped the driveway so that it rolled more with the lay of the land instead of just going straight up and down the hill. I also took out some of the scraggly brush that this place was covered with."

Rob nodded. "You've worked hard toward a goal of making this place work for you, that's for certain. But where did you get the ideas in the first place?"

"Have you ever heard of permaculture?"

Rob stopped digging and peered at Bryan. "That's one of those tree hugger buzzwords I thought." His brow knotted in confusion. "You don't seem to be one of those types, at least not what I stereotypically think of as a tree hugger."

"I'm not," he replied chuckling. "At least not stereotypically ... I am somewhat left leaning when it comes to some of those things, but very right leaning when it comes to others. I'm a bit of an oxymoron I guess."

"I've noticed that," Rob said, wiping sweat and dirt from his brow.

"So anyway, before I get too far off track ... Permaculture is an approach to design. Its goals are to mimic nature so to minimize upkeep and inputs and maximize the outputs without a lot of waste if any."