(This is the fifth in a 10-part series. The previous post is here, or you can start at the beginning.)
When everyone moves to Taos, they want to buy an old adobe home on an acre of irrigated land. I was no different. I searched for a house for three years. Some homes were perfect, but just out of my price range, some transactions fell through, and the perfect three-acre piece of land needed a 1/4 mile long driveway through a swamp.
I stumbled across my current home in the newspaper in December 1998. It was nothing what I was looking for – 1800 sq ft of frame ranch on .87 acres of sagebrush – but it had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a studio space and incredible mountain views. The biggest selling points, though, were the two covered porches (north and south) and the established flower gardens, strawberry patch and apple tree. It was in my price range, and the transaction did not fall through, so it was mine in January of 1999.
Do you remember my advice from last week? Don’t move in until the work is done! I hadn’t forgotten, so I shelled out one more months’ rent and upgraded my new home from afar.
I painted the walls with BioShield natural paint. I bought five gallon buckets of white and tinted them. The price was comparable to five gallons of toxic paint, so money could not keep me from creating a healthy home. I replaced the dark brown, cat-smelly carpet in the living room and bedroom with an oak Upofloor brand floating floor with a non-toxic finish.
While the contractors and I beautified my new digs, I watched the winter sun.
My observations showed that the winter sun drenched windowless walls. I was so in love with the porches, gardens and views that I hadn’t noticed! Common to Taos, picture windows face north and northeast to the mountain views. Very beautiful, but very cold! I knew then that my next project would be installing windows on the sunny side.
The house was oriented SE to SW, with the sunny side facing southwest. In a perfect solar world, a home should have an east-west orientation with the long wall facing south. This collects the most sun for maximum heat collection. You can have a variation of 15 degrees from true south, but up to 45 is acceptable. My orientation was ‘acceptable.’
That summer, I found a local warehouse of hundreds of wood windows recycled from a company that had gone out of business. I had measured my interior walls for available space and chose windows as close to the maximum size as possible.
In early October, just in time for winter, my new southwest facing windows were installed! While we had the walls open, we beefed up the insulation where it was thinning and sagging.
Over the following winter, I continued to watch the sun bathe the house inside and out.
The room my daughters shared was once a two-car garage. The sunny wall had tiny little windows at the top. I hired a builder friend to put in a glass door, and a large window on one side and a trombe wall on the other side.
A trombe wall is a window installed over a wall of thermal mass (concrete, adobe, water). Vents into the house are placed at top and bottom. As the sun heats the wall, warm air moves into the house through the top vent, and cooler air replaces it to be heated and moved back inside via convection currents. It is an effective way to use solar energy without having the sun directly in the house, if you don’t want to place a window to unwanted views, or if you want privacy.
The large window materialized, and the trombe wall did not (long, irrelevant story), but the solar energy I did harvest warmed the room during the day. It also hit the concrete slab and radiated a bit at night. This was not high-tech, but it served its purpose to cut the daytime heating down for that dark room.
Meanwhile, I continued to watch the sun for several years. Plans for a major remodel percolated slowly and deliciously like fine coffee, and my restless, latent architect went to work with pencil, eraser and graph paper.
(Originally published at www.greenbuyguide.com.)
