Circular Thinking

When we got back from Ramona last weekend, I let Adam know that we had some interest in the land there and in Alpine.  We had some specific questions that he said he'd find answers for.  (Yay!  I hate having to call places to find out things.)

He called us Tuesday night saying that the land in Alpine had an offer out that was in negotiation and if we wanted it, we needed to put in an offer better than the other offer by the next day at the latest.  All of a sudden shit got real!  He told us about working in contingencies so that we wouldn't be stuck buying the land if we found out we couldn't build on it, etc.

So I agreed to get up at a reasonable hour and start calling financial places to see if they'd do a loan (we can't really $200K without some pain), and Chris said he'd start calling around permitting boards to see if there was even a chance we'd get our Earthship-inspired plans approved.

Turns out, the two banks I have money in don't really do this kind of loan, or at least not where we're hoping to build.  Also turns out that the city of Alpine honestly has no idea what Chris means when he talks about building with tires or thermal mass or rainwater collection (or whatever he was trying to explain about the Earthship build concepts) but they won't even guess at an approval without plans that are signed off by a local architect or a civil engineer.

In case you're trying to figure this out ever, apparently the difference between incorporated land vs unincorporated is what locality has jurisdiction on stuff like this.  So, unincorporated Alpine building plans need approval from the county, not the city.  The county permitting office basically said the same thing as the Alpine permitting office, but also gave Chris the contact for one of their architects.

Now, we'd been waiting to find land because the lay of the land will partially dictate how we build our home.  Like, if the pad isn't as wide as we "need" we'd move a room to an upper level, or make a separate building.  If it's sloped, and it doesn't make sense to flatten it, we would need to figure out how to build on the slope.  But here we're learning that we need the plans before we can even get a permit so if we buy land now, turns out we might not be able to build on it at all.  As for those helpful contingencies, it seems that it can take 6 months to a year to get permitting plans okay'd and 4-6 weeks for each revision.  No land seller is going to wait that long to sell us land!

And building plans?  Well, it's $2K to get custom plans from Earthship Biotecture.  And it would be a good idea to get them from there because they know stuff like, how Earthships work, where to put the plumbing and electrical, and whatnot.  But they still have to be signed off by someone in CA.  So... can we trust someone in CA to figure out how to Earthship and build us plans?  Or would it not cost an exorbitant amount to have Earthship Biotecture make the plans, then pay someone here to sign off?  We will have to find out.

Chris had a talk with the architect today.  He said that basically, we can't build with tires because it's not on the approved list of building materials for the county.  Unless we get research studies that show all kinds of things about building with tires like, how they hold up in an earthquake and other useful knowledge.  So... we have to see if there've been any studies done, which I doubt.  At least, I doubt they've been done for tire bales.  Building with earth rammed tires has at least been done since Michael Reynolds came up with Earthships years ago.  But we were interested in tire bales because it would be much less work and much faster, which has been being done more recently.

Chris has pointed out that if we just make the walls something approved, like concrete, we could be building much sooner.  But it makes me so sad to think that part of the point of an Earthship is to take waste out of the landfills and use it.  And tire bales use so many tires!  And tires are a huge amount of waste we make.  I can understand why the county wouldn't want our home to fall on someone else, or it makes a ton of sense that our leach field needs to be well away from wells, but it's not like we're suggesting building from marshmallow.  *sigh*