Fearless Mountain Newsletter
Fall 2002 Articles
From The Monastery Go Forth, Young Man Tradition Welcome to the Homeless Clan Building Committee From Blessing to Commitment Sanghapala Foundation A Day in the Life Calendar View Archive
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After two seasons of building cabins (kutis) and two different approaches to construction, we want to share this experience with our supporters in order to communicate where we've been and look at how we might approach building cabins in the near future.It has been our intention to produce solid, quality structures that conform to the Uniform Building Code (UBC) at reasonable prices. This provides the community with safe, low-maintenance dwellings that will last for many years and satisfy the requirements of the county building department. We are very happy with the cabins, but the price was rather expensive for such small and simple dwellings. Therefore, further efforts must be made to bring down the costs of future cabins.The building committee has been trying to find a means to construct cabins with the hope of keeping the costs between $10-15,000. The contractors that we have consulted or asked for quotes from keep coming in at the $25,000+ range, and these are considered "reasonable" and "moderate" quotes by many in the building trades. Several conditions have contributed to the dwellings' surprising costs: 1) current labor rates of professional carpenters and contractors; 2) building remote cabins on the steep terrain that Abhayagiri's land affords; 3) building small, individual cabins rather than multi-roomed dwellings; and 4) building in compliance with Uniform Building Codes, especially the stringent engineering requirements for the foundations on steep terrain in less than optimal soil. Given the above experiences, all of us on the building committee feel strongly that a significant change in our approach to building must be tried for the next cabins. We have reconsidered building simpler structures under the county's less stringent Class K Builder/Owner Code. In that category, the requirements are not as great and costs can thus be held down more easily. The first five cabins regularized after we received our change of use permit were permitted under this Class K designation, but in our dealings with the county we encountered pressure to move away from building more of this type and instead build UBC-conforming cabins.
Now that we have a few dwellings meeting UBC Page 2 of 3
standards, and given the desire to experiment with ways to build lower-cost structures, our immediate plans are thus to build the next cabins with Class K permits. Moreover, it is our plan to do the construction with more monastic and volunteer labor, perhaps guided by a skilled or professional carpenter. With this process we believe we can lower the unit costs while still having relatively well-built, durable structures that are more than adequate for the needs of our monastics.
The monastic and lay communities have had varying levels of involvement in the building projects of the last couple of years. The labor that we have provided is significant and varies from heavily involved, as in the construction of the straw-bale kuti, where many community members worked extensively on every phase from start to finish, to minimal, as in the wooden yurts constructed last year for which the community provided support only in planning, site selection and preparation; digging foundations; hauling in materials to the site; and minor finishing work. Nevertheless, we are finding it exceedingly difficult to construct suitable dwellings for prices that we feel comfortable with, while balancing the resident community's workload, leaving ample time for monastic training and meditation. Our goal is to build a monastery where people can train and practice in Buddha Dhamma, rather than the carpentry and construction trades. Up to this point we seem to have been both working too much and at the same time paying far more than we would like for the necessary dwellings.
This year the community has decided not to undertake any significant construction projects for a variety of reasons. The building committee will be using this time to thoroughly plan and prepare for further construction in the spring of 2003, when we will need to construct more cabins. There are three levels of skills that the larger lay community can offer which would help support the construction of more economical dwellings: 1) one or two skilled and experienced carpenters who can oversee or manage the cabin-building project; 2) a moderate-sized group of semi-skilled workers who can saw Page 3 of 3
boards or pound nails; and 3) a fair-sized group of, in effect, unskilled workers who can carry in materials, paint, help clean up the building sites or facilitate the community project in other equally helpful ways. The significant and largest cost in constructing the cabins has been labor. It is our intention to form work days or work parties that would help bring the larger community together to aid in the construction of less-expensive dwellings.
In sum, given the learning curve for all new enterprises, we believe the building committee and the monastery has done as well as possible given the circumstances and challenges to building appropriate dwellings. Although we have spent more money than we had hoped on the existing cabins, we are more than satisfied with the quality of the structures. They will provide proper shelter for the community for a long time into the future. We intend to begin our new owner-builder construction experiment within the next year. We will keep you posted as to our process and intentions. Please let us know if you would like to offer any assistance on future construction projects.
