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Friday, July 30, 2010 |
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Bottle house turns heads in Kingsbury
Published January 5, 2010
Imagine what life would be like without having to go to the grocery store for eggs or produce because you have — and grow — your own.
That would help the old bank balance, right?
It sure would. But not like building your own home without a mortgage would. By now, those of us hooked up to our alarm clocks, our time clocks, our employers and our bankers and running the rat race necessary to make sure we pay this month’s food bill and next month’s rent might be wondering if Sunny Gonzalez and his wife Connie are on to something.
“If you’re not giving all your money to ‘the man’ for a mortgage and you’re doing all of your work yourself, it will surprise you to learn how little money you need,” Sunny said. “I’ve learned I can build things out of trash that people would pay a lot of money to live or work in.”
Artists and musicians, the Gonzalez’s have now raised their seven children — all also artisans or musicians — and have downsized their lives and gotten closer to nature in a lifestyle that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a 1969 California commune, and doesn’t need to be completely foreign to thrifty rural Texans.
“When we were raising our children, we wanted to be in the city for the school system and the cultural amenities,” Connie said. “When the kids left, we said, give us the country back.”
They went back in a big way, living in a home shaded by ancient oak trees off a back street just two blocks off what used to be the main east-west route across the country’s southern edge in a small town the railroad and the interstate passed by.
They keep their own chickens, and they do their own gardening, so they have fresh vegetables every day.
But walk down the path to their home in the trees in Kingsbury, past the sign that says, “Hippies use back door,” and it’s the home they’re building that really sets Sunny and Connie apart from the rest of us.
And that’s because of the materials they’re using to refurbish and expand a former one-room school.
Don’t look for kiln-dried wood, space-age vapor barriers or radiation-blocking mylar or ceramic coatings. Think of three-foot thick walls made the old-school way, of straw, stone, cement, old downed trees and recycled lumber and even old straw bales that otherwise would have been composted long ago — and thousands upon thousands of beer bottles cemented into walls that curve and soar and form the rooms and even an atrium that are all being produced, essentially, out of trash.
But it doesn’t act like trash.
National building codes call for six-inch walls insulated to a degree — called R-19 — that designates how well they resist the radiation of temperature differences. Sunny estimates his three-foot walls, which include an interior facing, a 20-inch thick layer of straw bales and then the cemented beer bottles, have an R-value of about 150.
Local bar owners happy to avoid the costs of transporting
“Think thermal mass,” he explained. “Inside, it does the opposite of whatever’s happening outside. It’s cool in the summer when outside, everybody else is really, really hot.”
And in the winter, it takes little to heat. A small boxwood stove handles it very adequately.
It doesn’t look like trash, either. The Gonzalez place looks more like art — maybe like a cross between a gingerbread house and an old-timey home in a book of fables or fairy tales. The walls along their walk look like stone or concrete set between tree trunks — but they’re really recycled tires and drywall compound buckets covered with metal mesh and plastered with a homemade cement that is then carved and formed while still damp enough to work with hand tools. The effect looks like an old European stucco-clad wall set between tree trunks along a forest path.
It looks like the kind of masonry a customer would pay thousands of dollars for.
“He’s the architect and I’m the designer,” Connie said.
“We want zero environmental impact,” said Sunny, a musician who makes the little cash he needs playing as part of a local band called The Rail Jumpers.
Between gigs, he and his wife work on their house bit by bit, five, six and even seven days a week, and they’re expanding it a room at a time — building the rooms around a center courtyard or atrium required because they don’t want to cut an ancient oak tree that was growing behind the original schoolhouse.
“If this is green building, there’s no question the tree needs to stay,” Sunny said.
Some materials, the Gonzalez’s have to buy — like modern, plastic-clad electrical wire — but most, they manage to scrounge or create. They make their own concrete using fly ash to offset most of the Portland cement in the mix, and they recycle whatever they can — such as a their laundry room sink that is an avocado color not seen anywhere else since 1974.
“Everything is just junk. We started with this old school built in 1912,” Sunny said. “This is designed to last hundreds of years. Our thinking here is our descendants will be able to live here, and it’ll already be paid for — they’ll have to do less paying of the man to live here.”
And because Sunny and Connie can accept living in the middle of their construction job and they can pay for the little they can’t scrounge or create on their own, they’re already living there with few expenses.
“It’s a lot of work, but we make progress every week, and we’re saving money on the fitness club membership,” Connie said.
Sunny agreed.
“We enjoy living here, and we don’t feel like we’re ‘roughing it’ in any way,” he said. “It’s been a real pleasure here, in all of these beautiful oak trees. We have more time than anyone else we know because we don’t have to go out and make the money to do all these things. You don’t realize how little money you need when you do the work yourself — and how much more time you can have with a beautiful woman you’ve loved for 30 years,” Sunny said. “It’s a 30-year honeymoon.”
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