• Things People Don’t Consider When Choosing a Town to Live In

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    Looking for a home or apartment is more complicated than it may appear. For someone who has never done it before, it may seem as though you simply look for places you like within a price range you can afford. In actuality, however, there’s a lot more to it. Similar to selecting a destination to travel to, you want a location that encompasses everything that accommodates your needs and interests. You look at more than just the hotel or vacation rental, but the local culture, activities, attractions, and more. 

    Though on a larger scale than choosing a vacation destination (you’ll be living in your home or apartment a lot longer than you’ll be on vacation), it is important to be thorough in your research about the property, the neighborhood, and other factors to ensure it is in fact a town where your immediate and long-term needs and interests are met. 

    With that being said, beyond finding the perfect home or apartment in the right price range, here are some other things to consider before deciding which town to make your new home: 

    Local Government

    You don’t have to be a political person, but you should know about the local government wherever you plan on moving to. These are the people that make decisions for the city you choose to reside in. They are responsible for the parks and recreation, housing services, emergency medical services, public works, public transportation, the police and fire departments, building codes, and much more. Though no local municipality is perfect, moving into an area that doesn’t line up with what you believe or a government that does not provide adequate services and treatment for their residents can make living there a lot more challenging.

    Cost of Living

    Sure, you can afford the home or apartment you’re interested in moving into, but can you reasonably afford to live in the town you’ve chosen? The cost of living in a particular area is the ballpark amount required to cover basic necessities like housing, taxes, healthcare, food, etc. If you can afford a place to stay but can’t afford to keep up with the taxes, buy groceries, or obtain adequate health coverage, chances are moving to this town will put a financial strain on you.

    Public Transportation and/or Walkability

    Whether you drive a car or not, when deciding which town is best to move to, you should find out about the area’s public transportation or walkability rating. You never know when your vehicle could breakdown causing you to have to use other means of transportation to get around. So, you want to know that there is public transportation that would get you to and from places like your job, your house, a school, or a shopping center for groceries and other necessities.

    If public transportation isn’t highly accessible, then at the very least, things should be easy to walk or ride a bike to (walkability rate). If you wanted to live in Cypress, California, for example, can you easily walk to work, walk the kids to school, or ride your bike to shopping centers or gyms in Cypress? Or, would you have to carpool or use ridesharing services to get to those places?

    Employment Opportunities

    Unless you’re planning on keeping the job you currently have, you’ll need a new one once you move. Before putting a down payment or deposit on a place, find out if you’ll be able to secure a job in the area you’re interested in moving to. There would be nothing worse than getting a place and then going into foreclosure or getting evicted because you couldn’t find a job to keep up with the expenses. Do research to not only see if there are opportunities available, but that these opportunities are aligned with your skills, education, and professional area of expertise.

    School Systems

    If you’re relocating with children, doing a thorough investigation into the school systems is also recommended. It is not enough that a city or town has schools, but how effective are these schools in providing an education to their students? What resources do they have? What’s the teacher to student ratio? Where do they rank in the local and national standardized testing each year? How large are their graduating classes? What type of curriculum do they use? These are all necessary questions to have answers to before deciding to move into a town where your children will essentially grow up.

    Your next home purchase or apartment rental is more than just about what you like about the property and what you can afford. It is essentially choosing a place for you and potentially your family to reside for years to come. In order to ensure that your immediate and long-term needs and desires are met, it is imperative that you go beyond the purchase or rental price and look at factors like the local government, transportation, school systems, cost of living, and employment opportunities such as described above.

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  • EcoTop: a truly green countertop material that you can afford

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    Regular readers know that I’m not a fan of modern architecture, but that I love modern materials – especially those that aren’t visibly avant-garde and can work in old homes just as well as new. That is, green materials – not just greenwashed products, but truly enviro-neutral or -friendly materials. One of my pet peeves is building materials that are recycled or recyclable – one or the other – but not both; many of these materials are lauded in the popular press for being "ecological," but aren’t really.

    Joel Klippert, a young man living just outside of Seattle, has really turned this specific market around. With a little help from some very talented research chemists and materials scientists, he’s created the very  first recycled, renewable and fully-recyclable countertop material. EcoTop, a successor to his extremely successful PaperStone product, is 50% pulped bamboo paper fiber and 50% recycled wood – sometimes called "urban timber," the structural wood salvaged from demolished buildings. He’s worked for years to find a non-petroleum resin that was UV resistant, so that he could avoid using only dark colors (the resin used in earlier materials had to be dark to avoid the yellowish cast that would develop over years of sun exposure). Now that he’s found that and reliable sources for his two structural ingredients, EcoTop can hit the market – in a range of colors ranging from white to black, with an enormous range of shades of green, tan, red, brown and gray in between. In fact, Joel says he can match any PMS (Pantone Matching System) shade that a client can specify, if the order is large enough.

    EcoTop is not only a beautiful, extremely durable and truly green material – right at home in any kitchen or bath, new or old – it’s also really affordable and easy to install, competitive with natural stone and significantly less expensive than concrete installations. If anything, I think that materials like this are even more apropos in an Arts & Crafts home than stone or tile: their makers take their responsibility to the outside environment just as seriously as their responsibility to the inside of your home, something that is much more in line with the tenets of the movement than nonrecyclable materials which, no matter how green their production process, end up filling a landfill when you (or, in the case of something like EcoTop, which will last generations, when some far off future owners of your home) are done with them.

    Note that this material is also available as an exterior cladding for large residential and commercial / industrial applications.

  • historic window workshop in Sacramento, CA

    Sacramento’s Sierra Curtis Neighborhood Association and the Sacramento Bungalow Heritage Association are fighting a winning battle against cheap, unsightly and – in the long run – inefficient and environmentally damaging vinyl, aluminum and composite windows. Their solution? Fix your old wooden windows before switching over to something that seems like a good deal – but actually isn’t.

    This coming October 6 and 7, they’re offering two workshops on the basic repair, maintenance, weatherization and repair of historic wood windows.

    Volunteer instructors from the community will demonstrate how they worked on their own windows, preserved the character of their historic homes, and saved their pocketbooks!  Historic windows were made to be taken apart and repaired, and with basic guidance, anyone can make their windows work as they originally did – with ease of operation and weather tight – and beautiful!

    We ran a short piece about these workshops and the woman behind them two years ago; again, much thanks to Janice Calpo not only for the heads-up, but more importantly for making Sacramentans aware of the benefits of our old homes’ original windows!

  • Arts & Crafts gems shine in Berkeley’s velvet hills

    I was going through SFGate.com’s home section archive and found this great piece by R.W. Apple, Jr. (the New York Times‘ architecture critic), originally published in that paper in 2003:

    "Westward the course of empire takes its way," wrote the 18th century
    Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, so the 19th century founders of a
    little city directly across the bay from San Francisco, almost at the western
    extremity of the American empire, chose to name it after him.

    Many famous men and women have walked its streets — Ernest O. Lawrence,
    the remarkable physicist who invented the cyclotron; Clark Kerr, who helped
    develop the nation’s best statewide system of higher education; Mario Savio,
    the leader of the radical Free Speech Movement during the turbulent 1960s; and
    in our own day Alice Waters, arguably the nation’s greatest restaurateur.

    Another — too little known, at least beyond Northern California — is the
    architect Bernard Maybeck, a precursor of the modern movement like Otto Wagner
    in Vienna, Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, Victor Horta in Brussels and
    the brothers Charles and Henry Greene in Pasadena.

    Much that he saw and so brilliantly succeeded in grasping still stands
    today in Berkeley, on and near the campus of UC Berkeley and in the hills
    above it, in the north side neighborhood where Maybeck lived for most of his
    life (1862-1957). More than anyone else, he made Berkeley one of the nation’s
    architectural treasure-troves.

    read the whole thing

  • Small Houses and the Question of Need

    Carol Lloyd has a good article at SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle‘s site) on extremely tiny homes:

    Down a rambling residential road on the outskirts of Sebastopol, the dream house sits like a testament to discriminating taste.

    This dream house is the love child of artist-builder Jay Shafer,
    who lovingly hand-crafted it. The stainless-steel kitchen, gleaming
    next to the natural wood interior, is outfitted with customized storage
    and built-ins. From his bed, Shafer can gaze into the Northern
    California sky through a cathedral window. In his immaculate office
    space, a laptop sits alongside rows of architectural books and
    magazines — many featuring his house on the cover. And from the
    old-fashioned front porch, he can look out on a breathtaking setting:
    an apple orchard in full bloom.

    But in an era when bigger is taken as a synonym for better,
    calling Shafer’s home a dream house might strike some as an oxymoron.
    Why? The entire house, including sleeping loft, measures only 96 square
    feet — smaller than many people’s bathrooms. But Jay Shafer’s dream
    isn’t of a lifestyle writ large but of one carefully created and then
    writ tiny.

    Read the whole thing.

  • East Bay (California) homes for sale

  • “Shelterporn” from Houstonist: big profits in Texas

    Houstonist‘s every-Saturday Shelterporn section focused on a really pretty bungalow in last weekend’s edition:

    Longtime shelterporn readers will know that we’re most partial to two
    kinds of houses: clean, contemporary designs and traditional bungalows.
    Frankly, though, it’s the bungalow that really makes us think "home" —
    and so it’s only natural that we fell in love with this Heights beauty at first sight.

    At $599K, it’s no bargain, whatever that means, but I can’t speak to relative prices, not having much knowledge of Houston’s current real estate climate. However, based on the last selling price and the square footage price of other homes in the neighborhood, Zillow estimates the home’s value at $187,915, which certainly seems a bit more realistic.

    Adam Wells, president of Clerestory Homes, says that the upgrades and renovations were extensive:

    This project was definitely a labor of love for our company. It is
    an original 1920s bungalow that was extensively remodeled and
    renovated. We added ~1,900 sq.ft. to the original ~900 sq.ft.
    footprint.

    You can see previous sales data here; looks like a flipper or the developer bought it for $160,656 last year – so a more than 300% increase in price. It’s just too bad that people are priced out of neighborhoods they’ve lived in for years, and entire areas are ghettoized, by profiteering and personal greed. That said, the house itself is beautiful, inside and out, and apparently the buyer is very happy with her purchase.

  • for sale: restored Horseheads NY home, $199,500

    From Martha Horton’s recent article in the Star-Gazette‘s Twin Tiers Homes section:

    John
    Stevens, a Horseheads native, studied architecture at Cornell
    University, and his wife Rosemary, originally from Owego, is a Cornell
    graduate, but the two did not cross paths on campus. They met later,
    when Rosemary was employed with Corning Inc. and John, an independent
    electrician, was doing work there.

    John
    had purchased a Craftsman-style house in the Village of Horseheads in
    1993 from the Shappee estate. The original owner, who built the house
    in 1920, was James Shappee, a prominent citizen and foundry owner. His
    caricature by famed cartoonist Zim hangs in the Zim Center in
    Horseheads. James’ wife Febe was a Horseheads school principal.

    When
    Rosemary, an interior designer, first saw the house, she recognized its
    "good bones," and thought it was well worth preserving and updating. So
    the couple went to work on it, doing most of the labor themselves. "We
    worked on the house every day after work," Rosemary recalls, "and every
    weekend." They are still working on it.

    John
    did extensive rewiring and updated the heating system. Rosemary, who
    now operates her own interior design firm under the name of "Designs by
    Rody," masterminded the aesthetics. "I wanted to keep the house in
    character and bring it forward as it would have evolved through the
    years," she explains. "Houses talk to you," Rosemary adds.

    The 3+ bedroom, 4 full bath, almost 4000 square foot house is listed by Kristen Dininny, a real estate agent with Signature Properties. There’s a map here.

    Of course, where I live, a house like this would sell for well over $450,000, even with the market falling a bit in the past year. It’s almost tempting to move to New York and try to make a living doing freelance work or by beefing up this site and trying to make some money from the advertising … the $200,000 cash I’d walk away with from the sale of my own smaller home would cover expenses for several years.