My Built Environment: Good, Bad, and Really Ugly

Spring has finally sprung, and with all the recent rains, everything is really green and beginning to bloom! With the dry winter, the Iris have been simply fabulous this year! Our Hawthorne tree actually bloomed this year. All the color, makes our red house really stand out! I actually built our compost bins this year, 4 bins total measuring 4 feet x 4 feet square, by 3 feet tall. One of the bins is for table scraps and I have planted red worms in that one. As the worms multiply, I will add some to the other bins to aid in the composting.

Unfortunately, the dry winters have also cost us a lot of die back, and even some lost plants. The most notable one is our green grape. This weekend I am going to try to take it out and plant a new one. All of the red grapes survived, but we will miss the green grapes. Those were great to eat! See the link below for some pictures from our yard.

Spring Garden 2008

Sorry to everyone for being out of it for awhile. We have been pretty busy lately with a lot of submittals, and I have been having to write a lot of design guidelines, zoning codes and such, so I havn’t been inspired to write in my blog too!

Tomorrow I leave for Vegas for the International Council of Shopping Centers conference. I am going primarily for one of my clients. It should be an interesting experience. I am also looking forward to getting lots of fodder for my Fugly awards, and checking out the local development scene. I know that they are really hurting right now…but they have had an excellent ride for a couple of decades now. There are some really good projects going on there though that I want to check out. I will keep you all updated.

Well, I finally did it. After thinking about it for a couple of years, I finally broke down and got a Macbook. I love it! The Mac OS is far superior to Windows, it runs faster, is easier to work with…and it all works together! Fantastic! Of course, I do have to use windows programs, such as CAD, so I have set this system up for a dual boot, with virtual machine software. In other words, I can run both the Mac and Windows at the same time, more or less seamlessly. There are some nuances I am still getting used to, but it is pretty smooth.

For the past 6 months or so, we have been hard at work developing a new concept for Habitat for Humanity here in Fort Collins. They had purchased a few adjoining multi-family lots that allowed a total of 8 units. However, with there experience at building the last multi-family building (see previous blogs), they did not wish to build any more. So working together we came up with an innovative concept that clusters 8 single family cottage homes on the 3 multi-family lots. Three of the units face a street, but the others are clustered around a central greenbelt.

In all, we developed three plans for Habitat. Plan C, the ranch plan, is designed for ADA accessibility, has a 2 car attached garage. The other two plans, A & B are story and half designs with a main floor bedroom and two bedrooms and a bath upstairs. All plans are designed for an optional basement that would could accommodate additional bedrooms if family size dictates. These two plans have a detached one-car garage that is accessed from an alley type private drive.

We are hoping that this concept will become a new model for higher density construction that provides some of the economies of scale as a town home design, but with being single family construction allows flexibility in family selection, funding, and sponsor assignment.

I found this during one of my wandering adventures the other day. Now I admit this isn’t particularly ugly, but just plain stupid. In this development I found several blocks of homes that had an alley running behind them. That is all fine and good. Trouble is, most of the homes were built with front load garages, and not alley load garages. In this particular development, this is a waste of resources since the front load homes require a fairly substantial setback. This leaves the homes with a very small backyard. The few rear load homes that were built, had shorter front setbacks, and bigger backyards. The second problem is, this was just a waste of land and resources to build the alley, that won’t get used for its intended purpose. Sometimes, I wonder what developers/builders and homebuyers are thinking.