Alt. Build Blog

After having built and lived in quite a few passive solar sun rooms over the last 40 years  I have come up with a good way to set t...

To conclude this series on Building A Well House I want to show how we built the door,  some final landscaping, and finally a photo ...

We have now had our rain water collection system for a year and a half  and it is time to give an update on how we are using it. Th...

This is the 3rd post in a row on the work of mason Porfirio Bustillo. Please refer to the 2 previous posts to more easil...

My previous post was on the work of Porfirio Bustillo. You may want to read that before this post: Porfirio Bustillo, Mast...

I had the pleasure to meet Senior Porfirio Bustillo,   a mason in Alamo, Sonora who specializes in fireplaces. These next ...

I would like to expand a bit the definition  of alternative building to include murals. (I want to continue looking back...

It is interesting how we present ourselves to the world. The mask above is found on a home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (...

As the weather turns colder  it is nice to look back at some of my older posts from Mexico  and this one comes from December 16...

Last fall I ventured by the virtually abandoned ghost town  of  Lake Valley, New Mexico , where I got some photos of the...

A couple of years ago as we traveled through the Mexican state of Michoacan  we were advised by fellow travelers to visit the  Pa...

It was a thrill to finally get to the point in this project  that I had been most looking forward to  and that was building the  ...

Last week we looked at wiring the well house for applying stucco to, now let's look at the stucco process itself. The who...

Once we got the plumbing and electrical hooked up in the well house  we were ready to finish up the outside  and the first step w...

Once we had the roof done on the well house we wanted to go ahead and make the switch over from the old well system to the new befo...

This is the 5th post on our well house project  and we will take a look at the corrugated galvanized metal roof. To get up to s...

This is the 4th post in a series on building a well house, and I hope you will look at the previous posts  to get up to speed on ...

This is the third post in our series on building a well house. Please refer to the previous posts to see how we got to this point...

This is the second post on our well house project and in the first post, Building A Well House #1: Rubble Fill Foundation , we lo...

This post is the first in a series  for a 80" x 128", dry stack cement block, solar heated, well house we are building  ...