La Casa del Sol

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A self-styled freelance futurist, Sister Paula Gonzalez, has brought together 35 friends to accomplish the improbable:

April 29, 1985

Gentlepersons,

In late August 1982, the first meeting of volunteers for this "Saturday project" came together to hear my plan for converting an old frame farm building into a future-sustainable home. In the course of three years, some 35 people have been involved in one way or another, for longer or shorter stints. (Jerry Ropp, our de facto foreman, hasn't missed a single Saturday since that first meeting.)

All materials for the house you see in the pictures were either [1] recycled, [2] purchased using money made from recycling—especially yard and clothing sales but also some metal salvage—or [3] donated. I don't have detailed cost figures at this point (since I'm not only the bookkeeper but also the orderer, general contractor, soup maker, and apprentice plumber, tiler, carpenter, drywall finisher, etc.), but I do know that we've raised about $12,000 or $13,000 and still have $500 in the bank. That means that in anyone's dollars, the 1,500-square-foot, superinsulated, passive-solar house that Sister Mary Bookser and I now live in—I call it La Casa del Sol, "the house of the sun"—cost less than $10 per square foot to build. What's more, our all—electric residence used less than 500 kwh of power (and a few construction scraps in the woodstove) in February of this year.

Peace!

Sister Paula Gonzalez Sisters of Charity 5820 Bender Rd. Mount St. Joseph, OH 45061

These are just a few choice excerpts from a letter we received from Sister Paula Gonzalez in response to the announcement of our LowCost HomeBuilding Contest (see page 90). We were impressed by what Sister Paula described, but the entry also posed a problem. How would we equate the costs of a completely recycled house built entirely with volunteer labor to those of others constucted by even remotely conventional means? It would be a classic case of trying to compare apples to oranges.

For this and other reasons-just for starters, we wondered what a sister-Ph.D. cell biologistprofessor was doing building a passive solar house-we decided that La Casa del Sol ought to have a feature article unto itself. The more we heard and saw, the more fascinating the tale became.

FROM FUTURIST
TO FOUNDATION DIGGER

Sisters of Charity at Mount St. Joseph, near Cincinnati, was founded by St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, who aptly described the spirit of La Casa del Sol when she said, "Live simply, that others may simply live." La Casa's founder, Sister Paula, believes that much of the current world strife can be attributed to the attempts by some to maintain (or achieve) a lifestyle that our planet can't (and doesn't) support—at least not for all 4.7 billion onus. She asks, "What might happen if, instead of fighting (all the way up to nuclear war) to extend the `good old days' of the petroleum era, we began to tap our boundless creativity and imagination to design the `better new days'?" La Casa is where the words stop and action takes over.

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