I picked up Dan DeVaul tonight and took him out to dinner. Dan's the kind of character that someone could write a book from the stories he's got to tell. I will say this much so far, he is very receptive to this concept. After dinner he brought me back to Sunny Acres and showed me some of the small buildings he engineered and his people built. Man, what a character Dan is. He had a great little smirk on his face when he slapped his palm up against one of the buildings and asked me "what do you think of the stain work done on this plywood?". I looked at it, it looked normal to me. I didn't know what he fishing for from me, so I said "you made the stain?" and he said "No, it's used motor oil". Hahahah.. I had a chuckle out of that. Anyhow I got the whole tour of the place and I must say the building the county condemned sure looks like a solid building to me, and I have over 10 years experience as a Real Estate Appraiser, so I know hands on from inspections what kinds of construction quality there are. Well, I'm starting to venture a wee bit off course.. let me steer back to papercrete.
Dan's got a lot of connections. All over the southwest actually. But one contact locally here in San Luis Obispo is a gentleman who made some pre-stressed concrete invention that he owns a patent on. This fellow used to be a teacher or professor, if I remember the conversation correctly, at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (which by the way is the #1 rated graduate university in the nation - speaking of which what does that say about Harvard, Yale, etc?). Dan's already called this gentleman before I picked him up for dinner tonight. He told me that he's going to speak with him about the possibility of providing some kind of engineering on papercrete as a structural material. That little tidbit was something that really perked my ears up because my Coop idea would be incomplete without someone like that...
Dan's got a property in Quartzsite right off the interstate, not even a mile off the interstate, where he says is a great location to have truckers dump their crates and cardboard and whatnot. Dan ran a business in the past where the truckers would drop off a bunch of things on his property and leave their "waste". They paid him for storage and they hauled his "waste" which his guys would sort through and bale up, basically cardboard, and the truckers had empties and heading to Fresno, and they would haul his cardboard to the recycling facility where Dan would get $'s for tonnage. It worked out to a big money maker, but that was the first thing the county shut him down doing on his site. Now he plans to do it again but in Quartzsite. He mentioned something about the possibility to use that as a collection facility for large quantities of paper.
Dan's also got a 5 yard mixer that he says would be a likely piece of equipment to be modified to make papercrete. It's got some neat features about it that reduce the back breaking labor associated to lifting cement, aggregate etc.. and it also has an ejection mechanism to it.
Lastly, I told Dan that my end of this.. what I wanted out of the deal was just simply to have my hand involved in some way to make this world a better place. That I wasn't necessarily looking at making a ton of money, but I did stress that honest to goodness real capitalism solves all of the worlds problems and that there may be a way to kill two birds with one stone. I told Dan about my idea of acquiring cheep land, and that if I couldn't get some kind of general project going or be a part of that in some way that for sure I was planning to do this papercrete thing myself as far as building my own home. And I mentioned California Valley as my likely target since the land is relatively cheep around these parts in California where everything seems to be priced like gold. I told him I almost bought a property there but decided against it because I suspected water would be a problem there. At that point Dan mentioned that he had two lots there in California Valley. Later when we were saying goodbye for now, Dan mentioned that he had no plans for the California Valley properties, and he could let one of them be used for a papercrete project. Did you hear that part Evelyn? How'd you like to spend weekends making a papercrete home?
Well, at this point we are letting things gel. Dan's an older man. He's not internet savvy and really for that matter he's not much for computers. I don't think we'll be able to get him to come into this forum, but I would say he's really interested. I saw a spark of excitement in him tonight. I'll provide an ongoing report. I believe there's going to be some kind of a commercial endeavor attempted if it can be done. I think Dan's going to press his concrete friend for some guidance. That's how I read the situation earlier tonight. Meanwhile I've given him enough information to get started with. And I've sent some links to your videos Judith, and Mikey Sklar's and some others to Dan's girlfriend who IS internet friendly.
Evelyn, I invited Dan to the September gettogether. He said it sounded very interesting and he would like to attend but he can't get away from the ranch that long because his people need him. Totally understandable. He's got I think abotu 50 people in his program right now and crops in the field and construction of "sheds" ;) sheds with bunkbeds in them since the county has a bug up their butt about them living in a very decent structure...
Well that's all for now...
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 1:58 PM, Perry Way
<perryway@gmail.com> wrote:
Sunny Acres Update Addendum:
Evelyn and fellow lurkers,
I just met with Dan DeVaul, owner of DeVaul Ranch and Sunny Acres (I had the spelling wrong earlier) briefly after lunch and gave him the quick 2 minute spiel about papercrete since he pressed me for some kind of details. I have invited him to dinner tomorrow night where we can discuss this Co-op idea I have that will benefit him, the community and future papercrete builders here in San Luis Obispo. I don't know if you knew this already but recently Forbes did one of those ratings for the best place to live in the country and the city of San Luis Obispo came up as the #1 ranking. That blew me away! Little San Luis Obispo, city caught midway between the history and the future. Perhaps this is apropos, a Co-op in San Luis Obispo and we can take a leading role in getting papercrete approved as a building material.
I will let y'all know what happens over time, as well as the details to the Co-op idea I have. But for the moment I'm stealing some time from work to write this email so I've got to go.
Perry
On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 11:54 AM, Perry Way
<perryway@gmail.com> wrote:
For the lurkers, Sunny Acres is an 80 acre site on the outskirts of San Luis Obispo. It is the remnants of an old old ranch (DuVaul Ranch), the man who owns it is a recovered alcoholic and he runs a non-governmental controlled sort of halfway house for people who needed to get back on track in life. Homeless people, recovering alcoholics, battered women, ex con's etc. His method of working with people was a special method, one filled with love. It was highly successful from the standpoint of helping those who went through his special program. It was always a money pit of some kind, it never turned a profit even though they busied themselves operating a roadside vending stand selling things they grew on the ranch as well as seasonal things like Christmas Trees and Pumpkins. The recovery and assistance program was so successful that the County would sometimes send people to Sunny Acres for improvement when the County facilities weren't able to help them. Some time ago, in more recent times, some developer took hillside property nearby and subdivided and built some expensive homes that overlook Sunny Acres. There is a nasty woman on the City Council who bought one of those homes. She's an import from Los Angeles and brings along with her all her big city methods for shutting down honest people like DuVaul (who owns Sunny Acres) because it was an eyesore to her. She pursued relentlessly for years to get Sunny Acres to raze some old barns they had on the property that were in a state of disrepair. And she was successful at forcing them to take down their roadside vending operation because it was being run from a "non-permitted" chicken coup like structure and operating with a business license. DuVaul had to pay out some outrageous fees for attorneys and permits and whatnot.. and because he was operating his ranch as a full blown charity, he had no money to fight the "evil witch". Not being able to even conduct any sales from their vending structure and having to tear it apart, they lacked funds to continue. From what Evelyn is saying, they finally got to DuVaul and now have broken him to the point that he can't keep Sunny Acres running as a charity halfway house any longer. So sad...
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