About Affordable Adobe

Affordable Adobe is a fully licensed, insured and bonded construction and excavation company in Taos, New Mexico. The proprieter Andy Romero and his two sons Jose and Andres (pictured right), are full time builders in the company.

What's Adobe? (Short answer: sun-dried mud). Adobe is a traditional building material used for millennia in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as New Mexico and other parts of the Southwest, where the pueblo people used it to construct their homes well before the Spanish came. Taos Pueblo, which is built entirely out of adobe, is the oldest, continuously inhabited dwelling place in North America. Adobe is usually made out of earth, sand, straw, and water, which is mixed into "mud," formed into bricks, and baked in the sun. Bricks come in all sizes, but we prefer the 4x10x14 size. We make our own bricks and vigas.

Affordable? Traditional adobe building is very labor intensive: it involves digging the dirt, hauling the water, mixing the mud, forming the bricks, and then of course building the house. Nowadays, unless a family is willing to do all the labor of harvesting and gathering themselves, and some still do, they have to buy the materials, and pay people to do the labor. Adobe has become a more expensive building medium than frame and stucco homes or manufactured homes. Adobe homes have been priced out of the range of local working families, acquiring the status of  'luxury' homes.

We are reversing this trend by making adobe homes affordable to local working folks, with competitive pricing, in order to realize both our dream - to sustain traditional, ecological, building - and yours, to own an adobe home. We care about the long-term consequences of how a community lives and works. This means living by a sustainable business ethic.

Affordable Adobe will build you a basic, "4 corner" adobe home or studio to your floor plan. Included in this basic custom home are:
 

- Walls: Adobe Exterior-Frame Interior

- Interior and Exterior Plaster

- Visions 2000 Thermopane Windows

- Radiant Floor Heating

- Basic Electricity and Plumbing

- Brai Roof

- Tongue and Groove Pine or Viga Ceilings
 

*Extras subject to additional cost