This Damn House

Yesterday I was reminded of why I'm doing this. It sure isn't for love of the great outdoors and an inherent sense of order that I'm clearing brush and hauling beat up furniture down from the attic. It's because of my dream to live in co-housing. And yesterday I joined several members and prospective members for our monthly site walk -- my first visit to the site since they started construction.

At first I thought....ack! They've turned my beautiful meadows into acres of dust and rock! But remembering that we are going to turn this...

...into this...

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while I'm turning my house into something salable keeps me focused and positive.

By the way, we still have units available if anyone wants to join us!

Our house! Our new house! It is no longer just a dream...as of last week, it is a hole in the ground lined with concrete!

Even covered with snow, it gives me warm fuzzies.

I get even warmer and fuzzier fuzzies looking at this artist's rendition of what it will look like next spring:

(That's actually a rendering of Camelot Cohousing neighborhood, rather than my future neighborhood Mosaic Commons, but both neighborhoods are part of Sawyer Hill EcoVillage, so close enough.)

I'm just unbearably excited. It's been a long long long road to get this far. (Mosaic just celebrated it's 8th Anniversary this weekend!) After all the work and struggle and disappointments and despair, now it's going up before our very eyes. In fact, it looks like we'll be moving in early next fall. (The Quicker Fixer Upper project better get Really Quick!)

If you like construction photos, you can see all the details here.

Oh, hey, won't you be my neighbor? We still have homes to sell in both neighborhoods! drop us a line.

This morning I was interviewed by Al Vuona's The Public Eye program on WICN, a public jazz and folk radio station. I spoke as a representative of Sawyer Hill EcoVillage (my own life isn't interesting enough to draw 35,000 listeners for a half hour, for sure. :-)

Mark your calendars: the show will air on Sunday night, March 16. If you don't live in the Boston area, you can listen on WICN's website.

Or...you, my faithful readers, can get an exclusive preview here.

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).

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 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...)