Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: pre-built or owner- built

[Muriel Kranowski (murielk]

I'd like to add to what I wrote before that while we owners each built our 
own homes, we had to adhere to a Pattern Book (town requirement) in terms 
of style, and we also consensed on a limited color palette for siding and 
roofs. Our architect ended up creating 5 standard designs, one of which was 
used for most of the homes including the duplexes because it was such a 
good flexible basic design.

So in fact our community has a fairly uniform look and feel, which might be 
good or bad, even though the homes were built over a period of almost 4 
years for the individual lot buyers.

I should say too that we hired Chris ScottHansen as a consultant early on. 
I can still remember him standing in front of our group and telling us two 
things. One was that we should totally standardize the houses both outside 
and inside to keep costs as low as possible and for the reasons Maraiah 
gave.  The second thing was, he knew we wouldn't do it.

He said he told every cohousing group to standardize to the max but people 
invariably want to customize, even though they've been warned not to.  How 
right he was.  I don't know what quirky "dream house" features people might 
have designed into their homes here that could keep them here too long or 
keep their house from selling, but we were warned!

   Muriel
   Shadowlake Village Cohousing

At 07:31 PM 6/23/2011, you wrote:

> Rod, I'd be very interested to hear more from you. Especially because 
> you've done both at EcoVillage. How many homes were owner built vs 
> contractor built? and the ones that were contractor built did they all 
> have unique designs?
>
>
> Lynn, thank you for your thoughtful response. Our community is kind of in 
> the middle financially. We could pull together the finances to build it 
> all, but it would take more effort. Your idea about standardization and 
> examples of people getting attached to their 'dream home' are very insightful.
>
>
> Deryk Wenaus
> http://nelsonland.bluemandala.com
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