Thursday, July 06, 2006

Living Green at the NBM


On my birthday we celebrated by going to the National Building Museum to hear the symposia on pre-fab. The editor of fabprefab spoke on the history of prefab housing and why the sudden revival of interest in architecture and design circles, and Michelle Kaufmann and Joe Tanney both spoke about their firms and their designs. We've been talking with Res4 a bit by email about their projects and hope to meet with Joe in NYC next week to talk some nuts and bolts. Their "single bar" design - the foundational component of their custom prefab homes - seems about perfect for us at this point. Modest size and price, relatively quick turnaround time, and a great looking house. We'll post more after our meeting.

Moving along...

We made an offer on a piece of land in Lost River, WV last week and we think we've got a deal. Thirty acres, already subdivided into three 10 acre lots, $142K. Also an option on ten adjoining acres for about the same $/acre. Unrestricted land, no homeowners association, no infrastructure in place. We're going to have to put some money into getting a suitable road to the desirable home sites, but we now have the option to build more than one home sometime in the future.

After meeting with two contractors and an excavator before making our offer (all of whom said getting a road to the homesites would be no problem), I met with another excavator today who was skeptical. So a little a bit of anxiety about that. We put a very small deposit down so I suppose we'll get some more opinions before we close, but I'm optimistic.