Very early in the design of our house, I wanted to create a feeling of connectedness with the outside. The landscape is so beautiful – why would we waste that view by boxing it up? Now that the house is generally finished, we are starting on the outside spaces and landscape.

So, the last time I was down in Mexico, we started working on the landscape design. I know there is landscape design software out there, and I did look around for a quick option, but in the end decided to sketch instead. Switch printed the basic floorplan of the house and I traced it into one of my drawing books.

Unlike the house, we are building most of the outdoor spaces ourselves. You get a freedom to try, fail and adjust with DIY work, but it also means this phase will go much slower. A few weeks back, I did some more financial modeling and discovered that it actually made more sense for Switch to quit his job and work full-time on house projects. We have a bit more finishing inside the house and had basically not touched the outside spaces except a few palms, a lemon tree and a banana near the bedroom window for privacy. So he quit and is now free to dig into new and exciting projects like aircrete.

Yes, who needs clunky old concrete, when you can magically infuse concrete with bubbles, intentionally? Normally, bubbles in concrete is a no-no, but with the right technique, aircrete can produce strong and light structures with far less material than traditional concrete. You can find information online about exactly how to do it, but in essence it uses dish soap and a compressor to create bubbles in the mixed concrete when it is still wet. This produces a much lighter, but still strong, product that can be used for a bunch of different purposes.

The first couple experiments were iffy – even mixing is very important so a flat bottomed container needed to be acquired – but Switch is getting the hang of it. We’re trying this on non-structural elements to get practice then we’ll set our sights higher. Check out this “board” that we’ll use for landscape paths, inspired by some concrete railroad ties we saw in Chiang Mai on our last trip to Thailand.

As we get better with the technique, we can try more structural things like planters and eventually, a “planter wall” to shield the house from the road and create more architectural spaces for plants.