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Book Review – Gaia’s Garden

Gaia’s Garden, by Toby Hemenway

This book is a sort of gateway book into the world of permaculture. With a brief description of the core principles of permaculture, you can get an idea of how to begin thinking the way a permaculturist would in the design of your garden/food forest. Hemenway lays out the basic ideas of permaculture without going into great detail… enough information to be useful, but not so much that you become bogged down in minutiae. Once he lays out the general ideas of the underlying theory, he proceeds to give real-life examples of how the […]

The Owner-Builder

The workshop is taking shape…

There’s no doubt a lot of money to be saved by doing some or all of your home construction yourself. There are some simple ways of deciding how to sort that out. In some cases the requirements are governed by law. You may encounter the need for specific equipment, and finally there may be levels of expertise or physical abilities that make it impractical for doing the work yourself.

Building a house is a series of linked projects. Assuming you already own your land the project begins with research , learning all there is […]

Discount Kitchen Cabinets

During the design phase of the houseplans, the kitchen is always my domain. I pull out my grid paper, mechanical pencils, and, using standard cabinet sizes, draw out my plan. This takes many iterations and, even now, is subject to change.

I’m very flexible about particular cabinet sizes, depending on what I can buy for a very good price. As many people will do when beginning a project like this, I took my initial kitchen dimensions and started with booklets picked up for free from Home Depot. I think people have the idea that buying cabinets from Home Depot […]

How to Get a Building Permit

On-line Data

The first place to begin is the web. Most every locale has an official government web site which should contain most of the information you need to start your planning. For this article, I selected a town in Arizona, far away from where we are building to use as an example. I selected Yuma, Arizona. I simply entered the following search and started to explore; “Residential building permit Yuma, AZ”. The first hit took me directly to the government site which answered the basic questions for obtaining a residential building permit. I focused my search on information on […]