My Built Environment: Good, Bad, and Really Ugly

As seems to be the theme this year all over the place, 2009 has brought a lot of changes to mine and my families life. With the tanking of the construction and development community (largely due to the collapse of the financial industry), I have been forced to make major changes in my business and restructure it. The sad side of all this, is having to significantly downsize our staff. I know I am not alone in this, as a lot of my clients have had to do the same thing. This economic downturn has been devastating to my professional community, and it is hard to affect the livelihood of people. However, it was either them or me, and since it is all in my name, I had to make the hard choices.

Of course, in the long term, this will allow me greater flexibility and the opportunity to explore new career directions. I am not sure if I will, but at least the flexibility is there now. Of course, I do love what I do, but I don’t always enjoy the small business owner side.

The other significant change we are looking at this year is selling our home. Like a lot of other people, we wish to downsize and simplify. That we have yet to do. Change is never easy, but it can be exciting at the same time. Not to mention emotionally exhausting.

Oh well, Life goes on.

Ok, this past summer I built my daughter a beautiful Futon out of Knotty Alder. After the second major frame piece has cracked, I need to remind myself NOT to use Knotty Alder if something needs structural strength! OOPS!

Well we did it! As we discussed in some of my June posts, we have been working hard this year to conserve water, both indoors, and more importantly in the yard. On our final water bill for the year, we came in 21,000 gallons below our allotment, or almost 9% below. While this is good, what is even more remarkable is that last year we were almost 40,000 gallons over our allotment, so in total we have cut our water usage by almost 22% Not bad if I say so myself!

We have also been cutting down on our electric useage, mostly on air conditioning. We only largely ran it for one month this summer, rather than the four months that we normally run it. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but our electric bills have certainly been lower. Now to create some goals for next year!

To all my faithful readers, I hope you have a great new years eve, and lets all have a prosperous New Year!

I ran across this project awhile back in Grand Junction, and I was simply floored by it. In this day, with all the design professionals, stringent planning departments, and all, why do we continue to build such fugly housing? I understand the need to build homes that are affordable, but why on earth do we need to build multi-family housing straight as a Kansas Highway?

This particular building has 5 units in it, with the street facade dominated by garages, and hard to find front doors. Why not add on some bumpouts to break up the second floor, add a little ornamentation to the roof line, etc? There are simple things that can be done that adds dramatically to the character, without adding much cost.

What makes this even worse, is that these buildings are lined up barack style, and covered with a drab coloraed vynil siding material. Talk about going from bad to worse. I would have thought we would have learned lessons from all the 60’s housing projects that are now being torn down. I guess not.