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Walls aren't just for Climbing

By Steph Davis

By KAVU

May 24^th, 2022

Well, life has been pretty out-of-the-ordinary already in the last 3 years, so Ian and I decided it was time to go for one of our life dreams and build a house;-)

Just through a complete stroke of luck, the scary doublewide across the street from our house got condemned and sold at auction. Once we got a hold of it, the fun began—the previous occupants had been hoarders and some of the contents of the property included: a shed filled with 1980s style computer monitors, 2 nonworking pickup trucks filled with trash, and 5 nonworking motorized wheelchairs.

Step one: getting asbestos tests done on the trailer, demo-ing and carting the whole structure to the dump, and then clearing the lot of decades-worth of "things", most of which were strewn around outside.

It turns out that every step of building a house yourself is pretty daunting, especially when you’ve never done any of them before—starting from drawing plans, to getting a permit, to finding the sewer line when the city has no records on sewer lines..... and that’s just before you even start!

We decided to make it even more daunting by choosing to build with ICF (insulated concrete forms), which neither Ian or I knew much about, but our good friend Jake luckily has a lot of experience with.

We decided to go with concrete floors as well since we’d be pouring a slab anyway, and we had the concrete truck out multiple times through the beginning phases in order to pour stem walls, floors and finally to fill the ICF walls with concrete—which are kind of like giant Styrofoam legos.

So much concrete!

ICF is more complicated during the building phase, but the payback is big. It gives you 12” thick walls and an incredibly energy efficient and sturdy house. In Moab we have pretty extreme temperatures, and of course we are always trying to figure out how to keep our carbon footprint down, so to us ICF seemed worth the extra headaches.

We broke ground in December and have been working away with the help of our friends Jake and Lance ever since. With only a few little breaks here and there for some of our more normal style of adventures, building a house has been both extremely hard, and extremely exciting.

Ian has gotten to learn how to operate heavy machinery on the fly, and I’ve learned how to source and schedule all sorts of building materials that are suddenly scarce because of supply chain issues—for some reason, PVC gang boxes, cabinets and garage doors are hard to come by nowadays, and deciding when to purchase lumber and metal is basically like playing the stock market.

One of our biggest goals with this house aside from energy efficiency, is zero maintenance.

In that light, we put on a metal roof and corrugated metal siding, and the fence is going to be rusted metal.

The rest of the house is basically made out of concrete. I fully intend to do NOTHING house related after this, for a super long time—that being said, I’m truly enjoying every part of this wild adventure we dove into!

Right now we’re heading into what I call "Phase 2" of the project (covering surfaces), so there’s a very good chance we’ll be moving in before the end of the year…

It’s a huge undertaking and there’s definitely been a lot of stress and stumbling blocks along the way, but it’s been so much fun to work through all of the challenges as they come up, and a truly great feeling to bring something that started as a simple drawing on paper to life.

Steph Davis

Ian Mitchard

Steph KAVU

Footnotes

Steph is one of the best climbers and wing suit flyers of an entire generation. Follow her adventures with Ian and their KAVU coPilot, Cajun worldwide!

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FootNotes

Steph is one of the best climbers and wing suit flyers of an entire generation. Follow her adventures with Ian and their KAVU coPilot, Cajun worldwide!

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