This Damn House

Okay, I admit it, I kind of lost my momentum on the blog when our focus shifted from prepping the house to showing the house. There's just not much interesting to say about the 643rd frantic pre-showing cleaning in order to get the house into the same coiffed and manicured state every time.

I have several long pent-up rants about selling a house but right now I'm just sitting perfectly still, barely breathing, with all my extremities tightly crossed, praying that our buyer comes through as promised.

Well, okay, I lied. I'm not sitting perfectly still. I'm cleaning and packing and organizing and preparing myself and my family to move on to the next stage of our lives.

I'd love to blog that process but 1) I fear I'll be much to busy actually living life to assemble wry observations about it, and 2) this blog title isn't at all apt.

So what should I call my new blog?

This Co House?
This New House?
This Super-insulated Low-Toxicity Community-oriented EcoHouse?
(that really doesn't scan so much...)

I got a chance to go on my cohousing site today and take a bunch of pics for marketing purposes. I can't believe we're just a few short weeks/months away from move in. I love being on site, so I will inflict the love on you, too:

The driveway into the community goes up and around the outside of the clustered houses.  (The parking is all on the outside, too). This preserves the area between the houses as safe walking/running/playing/biking/etc. space.  There's a paved path up the middle of the community but it is for emergency vehicle access only.
The homes in phase 1 are nearly done!  Hardwood floors are done (and protected by cardboard as shown here in the model unit), cabinets are mostly installed, tile floors laid in bathrooms and kitchen, paint and trim nearly complete.  It nearly looks like a house!  **SQUEE**
The EcoVillage consists of two neighborhoods, Mosaic Commons and Camelot Cohousing .  Each neighborhood has a "common house" -- sort of a clubhouse, with a big dining room for community meals a few times a week, play room for the kids, exercise room, music room, TV room, etc.   This one is Camelot's...nearly done because they are in Phase 1.
This is a phase 3 unit so not as far along.  But check out the kitchen cabinets.  Those are locally grown, milled and build unfinished white pine from Young Furniture.  These are nice, study cabinets that also happen to be local, environmentally friendly and low-toxicity.  Plus since they are unfinished,  we can each choose a finish color to our own tastes.
This is the Mosaic Commons common house. Not so far long...eventually those beams will be an actual ceiling. I love how bright and homey it is, though. This is the dining room, which looks out over the courtyard, play area and green. (the "green" is currently Standard Construction Site Brown, of course)
This is the unit I'm jonesing for. We chose a 3BR unit because that's what our family budget allows but I'd love this 4BR home...plus walkout basement! OMG lust!
The community is in Berlin, MA. You've never even heard of Berlin, MA, right? (BTW, that's pronounced BURR-lin, to rhyme with Merlin, not like the city in Germany) It's a classic tiny New England town of about 2500 that still has agriculture as a substantial part of its economy. What I love is that I get to live in a rural area but still be 45 minutes from Boston and 20 minutes for Worcester. This is Sawyerhill Rd, after which our community is named.

Okay, I admit it, I'm one of those lazy, half-assed environmentalists...the type who totally absolutely agrees that global warming is a Very Bad Thing, who buys organic veggies as long as the price isn't too much higher than conventional, who turns on her A/C when the guilt overwhelms (and turns it back on when the heat overwhelms).

So although in theory I cheered, inside I balked when my cohousing group chose to spend extra money to make our homes super-insulated and have a perfectly tight envelope. I mean, did we really need triple pane windows? 2x6 construction and 2 inches of rigid insulation? Isn't that just a little over the top?

Well, that was back when gas was less than $3 a gallon. Now that it keeps nudging over $4, those choices are seeming more like frugal than profligate.

people are often surprised to hear that rather than a fancy heating system (we did consider heat pumps and solar) we have regular old electric baseboard heat. "Electric? Your super-eco-green community heats with electric?!" Well, yes. Because you actually get better bang for the buck improving the envelope than improving the system that heats the air inside it.

With any luck, just the heat-generation of daily life (running the fridge, using computers and TVs, people breathing and moving) will keep the house comfortable warm except on the very coldest of days...at which point we'll turn on our cheap baseboard electric heat.

(If that turns out not to be the case, we are also set to buy an air-source heat pump.)

I admit it. I thought if I fixed up the house enough it would sell like hotcakes.

All those months of hard work, all those late nights spent painting and early mornings spent laying sod and weekends spent caulking would pay off. In my un-admitted-to fantasies, I was sure a glorious bidding war would erupt the minute my shiny-floored freshly-stained house went on the market.

And maybe it would have if, just about the time the "for sale" sign went up, oil hadn't climbed over $100 a barrel and the sub-prime mortgage crisis hadn't spread to all walks of life and and and.

So, we languish. Us and the other 5 homes on our block for sale. (No, really!)

Which would all be much more depressing if I wasn't unbelievably excited about our new house! Construction on Sawyer Hill Ecovillage has been cranking right along. We've watched our house magically grow from a hole in the ground to...well...a house!

Completion of the project is happening in phases and my home is in the third phase, so we'll get the keys sometime in November. The first units will be available in just a few weeks. After having been working on this for so long (over 6 years) it's hard to wrap my head around it actually being real. But...it is!

Since I'm not doing anymore work on This Damn House, I may shift the blog to posting about This New (Co)House, which actually has some really neat things -- like super-insulation and natural low-emissions flooring.

I also can't resist a plug:

For those who live in Massachusetts (or who would like to), we still have a few homes left to sell, both market rate and affordable (for those who qualify).

This evening I painted the hallway.

Normally I find painting a very satisfying task: once the job is done, it makes everything look so good!

But this is the second time I've painted this hallway in 4 months. The first time I turned 10 years of horror grey-once-was-white into pristine sunny yellow. This time I turned 4 months of horror brown-once-was-sunny-yellow into...pristine sunny yellow.

Actually it was still pristine sunny yellow except for a strip from 2 to 4 feet high the length of the hallway on both sides, which was filled with hand and finger prints the color of mud, grape jelly and Cheetos.

This painting task was decidedly less satisfying than the last time.

I had been hoping that this task on the to-do list would never rise to top priority but today my realtor, reporting on the open house, said "Comments were about 95% positive, which is great. Several people did comment on the hallway paint, though."

So much for escaping that one, eh?

The realtors open house went swimmingly this morning, we hear.

To celebrate, here are some last-year v. today shots...

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We've come a long, long way, baby.

Get set...
GO!

The front stoop, before and after:

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Now to be honest, this pretty stoop was not our original plan. In the interest of both time and money, we had asked our neighbor/contractor to put in a simple cement block, perhaps topped with flagstone or pavers or tiles or something, for a cost of $600-800 or so. We wanted a second opinion though, so we found this guy who had a great rep and said he did concrete. So he came to take a look -- turns out he's more a mason than a concrete guy. His proposal -- complete with cut bluestone -- was definitely the more expensive option, by a factor of two. But it sounded great, and the end result looks great...and in the end I think when selling a house that the front yard and stoop make a lasting first impression, so I think it's worth it.

Some of you wanted to see how the staging consultant turned our kids' room into a family-room-and-oh-by-the-way-the-kids-sleep-here-too room.

Kids' room:

Family-room-and-oh-by-the-way-the-kids-sleep-here-too room:
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9 months ago:

2 days ago:

This afternoon:

I fall down go boom now.