Sherry Scott and John Kosich had vacationed in the Sierra Nevada near California’s Donner Summit for years when they decided to buy their own property in the region. The couple, both architects, took their time looking, and in 2010, they found a site in Truckee with a perfect view of the mountains.

Over the next eight years, they built a 1,900-square-foot house of concrete, wood, and stone, working around the area’s tremendous snowfalls to handle the interior’s finishing touches themselves. After settling in to their part-time home, Sherry and John discuss below the challenges posed by its construction and environment.

Sherry: We didn’t start building until almost the fall of 2012, right?

John: Right, yeah. We wanted to start in the spring, but...

Sherry: We got behind.

John: We had a construction loan and it took longer to close that out. Long story short, we didn’t get started until fall, which isn’t the best time of year to begin a construction project in the mountains.

Sherry: The very first thing we had to do was site grading. Since it’s all granite, that means dynamite. It’s actually easier to blast out a solid piece of granite than it is to blast out fractured rock, because if there are already fissures in the rock, the blast just escapes out of the existing cracks—it doesn’t create new ones where you want them. Even so, the blasting ended up taking a lot longer and using a lot more charges than we had budgeted for.

John: Our contractor was really great, but we found out later he had never done a project with dynamite. He had budgeted something like $12,000 for the explosive, and that number quickly went up to $40,000. That was the very first thing that happened, and we were on a tight budget. That was very stressful.

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Sherry: It’s still hard to explain the amount of snow we get up here to people who haven’t experienced it. In winter, they spray paint the name of the street on the snowbank because all the signage is buried.

John: Snowplows don’t work.

Sherry: The roof’s SIPs [structural insulated panels] are foil-faced on both sides. The insulation value of this is really great. Snow just stays on the roof, which is true of traditional chalets. They use the snow for extra insulation. That seems to be working out really well, so we’re happy with the panels on the roof.

John: We also have a four-foot-high concrete foundation all around the house. The nice thing is that even with a lot of snow, none of it touches the wood siding. It’s pretty much piled up against the concrete.

Sherry: You see houses in the area where the snow sits against the house for five months of the year, and the siding is destroyed. We knew we needed to get up out of the ground a bit with the concrete.

John: When you have a season with thirty feet of snow, you’re constantly shoveling, and wood doesn’t last. That’s why we wanted all the terraces to be made of concrete and stone.

Sherry: The south terrace is basically this big concrete form that’s filled with gravel and drainage rock. As the snow lands on that terrace, it melts and drains right through. We have very little shoveling to do, which works out great. It’s kind of what we envisioned, but it’s nice to actually see it happen.

John: It’s very comfortable. We have easy access to town and we’re pretty active outdoors people, so it’s great that we’re only three or four miles from Sugar Bowl, a fairly major ski resort. We’re six miles from one of the biggest cross-country resorts in the country and half a mile from Donner Lake. We do a lot of bike riding. There’s everything in the world that you want right here.

Making It Theirs:

Below, the pair of architect-owners dig into the details of some of their favorite home features.

Project Credits:

Architect: SLS Architect

Builder: Norwegian Wood Construction

Engineer: Alpen Engineering & King Engineering

Cabinetry Maker: Marshall’s Cabinets

Other: Bavarian Timberworks

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