Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Lake Claire move-in and breaking ground stress

[Jennifer Lynn Mccoy (poljlm]

I wanted to announce that Lake Claire Cohousing in Atlanta is now finished
and 10 of 12 families moved in last week.  We haven't been participating
much on this list, but have benefited greatly from reading it over the
last year as we've been inundated with construction details and generating
our houserules.  Now I can also respond to the breaking ground stress and
does it get better question.

WE broke ground last June and our project is now finishing about one month
overdue -- not bad.  We had perhaps an unusual amount of stress throughout
the construction period (not less as someone predicted), because we served
as our own developers, dealing directly with our builder.  This is not a
model I would recommend, but one that we had to adopt out of neceesity.
This meant that throughout the project we had to oversee the construction,
make decisions as a group sometimes on emergency bases, and deal with the
sometimes tricky issue that our paid project manager/architect was also
the founding member (and "burning soul") of our group.

We made it through and now have a beautiful little urban village with the
group very much intact.  Everyone is rather burned out with the effort of
moving and getting settled in, and we're putting off for awhile the next
set of meetings/decisions about reorganizing our committee structure and
getting organized for common meals and other aspects of communal life.
But the families who have moved in (mine is one of the two still
preparing) are ecstatic.

We'll be organizing tours eventually for people who want to come see us
(already have many people coming through informally), and the East Lake
group in Atlanta has looked at our place as they are intensively working
right now in designing their project.  So let us know if you're coming
through Atlanta and want to stop by.

Jennifer McCoy
Lake Claire Cohousing
Atlanta GA
jmccoy [at] gsu.edu