From Grid-Locked in California to Off-Grid in New Mexico

We didn’t set out to get “off the grid.” We weren't, at that point, even particularly environmentally conscientious. We did want a house and lifestyle that allowed us to spend more time with our children and to have more control over our daily lives.  We wanted a more healthy, less stressful lifestyle that did not require the two of us to work out of the home to 8 to 12 hours a day to pay the mortgage.  In fact, we didn’t want a mortgage at all.  We were willing to work hard and make changes.   But, of course, we had no idea what we were in for!

After touring several Earthships in the Taos area and studying Michael Reynold’s books, Earthship Volumes I and II, we designed a three bedroom/one bath 1,800 sq. ft. home.  We modified the Earthship design, adding a row of small operable windows along the front glass wall to improve airflow during hot days.  Our interior walls were sheetrock instead of Reynold’s can and concrete construction.  We also added a store room and patio with outside planters.  The girls’ bedrooms got sleeping lofts with interesting built-ins underneath for play, study, and clothes storage.

Walls of the Earthship, as Mike Reynold’s wife named his energy efficient home design, are earth-packed used tires, layered so as to interlock, then covered with adobe.  Mark pounded almost every tire that went into that house.  My job was to shovel dirt into a wheelbarrow and roll it over to him, dump it in, go back and get three more loads......for each tire.  The tires were free.  The dirt was free.  So was our labor.

Building an Earthship is incredibly labor intensive.  Mark and I did almost all of the work ourselves, from packing 900 tires full of dirt to roofing, plastering the walls and laying the tile floor. While Mark has building skills and experience, I was a complete novice.  Most days, the tasks which were required of me were tasks I felt completely incompetent to perform.  But I learned, and I did what I needed to do.  There were days when I was so sore it hurt to laugh, and many nights I fell asleep as soon as the supper dishes were washed, or even before.

It was a real adventure: living for months with water from five gallon jugs filled at the local Texaco, showering only when we could brave the breeze with the hanging solar shower bag or when we could drive into Family Swim Night at the Taos Community Center.  We managed our vegetarian diet from an ice chest and the travel trailer propane stovetop.

Daughter Jessica, 11 years old at the time, began the school year under these circumstances, riding a bus 15 miles to the nearest public school.  She learned you can wash hair with one gallon of water heated on the stove top.  We used a lot of diaper wipes for Allie. 

For many months, both of our children were happily involved in all phases of home-building. Soon, there was more time for reading and exploring the arts and cultural events for which this area is well-known. By the time winter rolled in, five months after we started building, we had just gotten the roof, doors and front glass on, which meant we had a warm, dry shell to work in during the winter.  But the trailer was too cold to brave the snows, so we moved into a small rental in nearby Arroyo Hondo.  From there we commuted 30 miles every day to our Earthship to finish building.

Finished Earthship walls, after layers and layers of cement or mud plaster, look much like adobe or stucco but are a massive three feet thick.  Non-weightbearing walls are built of aluminum cans and concrete, then likewise covered with adobe or cement plaster.  We had never plastered before.  By the end, we were experts, volunteering to help our neighbors plaster their own homes.  Despite the unusual "ingredients", the finished cake looked pretty normal for the northern New Mexico high country. 

Use of recycled materials—used tires and aluminum cans—and dirt from the building site dramatically reduces the overall cost of the Earthship house.  Mass of the tire walls provides the strength to hold up the roof without a concrete slab, further reducing cost and time of construction.

Sides and back of the house are bermed with earth up to the roof line.  The front, south-facing side is all fixed glass and operable glass windows, allowing sun and outside air to flow throughout the house.  Walls and floor absorb heat from the sun in daytime and radiate it into the air at night.  Bermed walls share the temperature of the earth with the air inside so that the Earthship needs little heating or cooling to stay comfortable. We used less than one cord of wood per winter at 7,500 feet in northern New Mexico!

The Earthship’s passive solar design, combined with a photovoltaic electricity-producing system, allows it to stand independent of public electric companies.  Composting toilets, grey-water storage systems and rainwater collection off the roof help to make many Earthships totally self-sufficient to water needs.

After nine months of hard work, we were settled into our handmade home in northern New Mexico, living “off the grid”, independent of public utilities and insulated from changes in the economy. We did it with no mortgage.  Living expenses were low enough to allow us to support our family of four on one income.  I got to homeschool our kids and had time to write, to produce organic vegetables and herbs, to meditate, to hike. 

It was several months before we were able to make the change from public school to home-schooling.  And what a wonderful change that was!  We found that in one hour a day, Jessica was able to move through the same amount of textbook work as she did in public school in one day. The rest of the day was open for real-life learning, art projects, caring for kitties and horses.

Our home was quite a ways off the beaten path. You'd have thought we would feel isolated and that the kids would be lonely for other kids.  But our house and homestead were unique enough that there were always people driving out to look.  We met people from all over the world who came to Taos to check out the Earthships. We were viewed as solar pioneers, even. So we gave tours and told people how you could make your own electricity, catch your own water, raise organic vegetables in the dry highlands of New Mexico. More people moved into the "neighborhood" and built their own strawbale and rammed earth home. A wonderfully conscious community grew up around us.  We came to appreciate the healthy inter-dependence of community and to really love the fact that we were breathing clean air, drinking clean water, living gently on the earth.

When we first moved in, our photo-voltaic system produced 2,500 watts of electricity (per hour that the sun was shining) which supported all the gadgets we needed:  lights, computers, overhead fans, TV, stereo and miscellaneous appliances. We eliminated electric items which require ghastly amounts of electricity like hairdryers, toasters and clothes dryers. Compared to living out of an ice chest, our small propane refrigerator was just fine. Years later we added more solar panels and bought a larger but very efficient electric refrigerator.

The Lifestyle Shift

We started building the year I turned 40.  It was a demanding shift for a body that had been sitting in an office for many years.  But that transition was not the “biggie” from my point of view.  We are all creatures of much greater capabilities than we use in ordinary life.  The truly diffiult task, and one I’m proud of being able to accomplish, is the act of letting go of one lifestyle and moving into another. 

A teacher friend of mine once tried to convince me that in order to have a new life and new opportunities, you must first let go of your old life, your old situation.  For us, this involved literally selling or giving away lots of stuff.  A baby grand piano.  The sewing machine my grandmother left me.  Vehicles.  Tools.  I sold or gave away my dress-up work wardrobe.  The kids got into the spirit by selling toys and books at our pre-moving garage sales.

Letting go also involved letting go of ideas:  ideas of how a family can live, what kind of work I can or can’t do, even the idea of what a house should look like.  Once, we lived in a house we could not afford, had major and minor credit cards maxed out, three vehicles, three motor cycles, two TV’s, two VCR’s...bill-paying time was always a major stress.  Then, in California, I juggled a job of time-consuming responsibility with raising two young children, one in a public school school we were extremely unhappy with, and the other in child care.  We were always in a hurry.  I never read the book The Hurried Child, but it and others like it glared at me, accusingly, from the bookshelves in libraries and bookstores.  I could have written it—if I’d had the time.

I guess it took those years, those stresses, for us to identify just what was important, what we wanted more of, what we wanted less of.  Once we drew a clear picture of the lifestyle we wanted, the changes came very quickly.  Yes, we let go of a lot of things and ideas.  But in return, we gained our sanity and new wonderful opportunities. The feeling of accomplishment from having built your own home is tremendous.  But the real pay-off was we had more of that very precious commodity, time.  Time to appreciate our kids and the high, spiritual area we lived in.