House Viewings: Hippy Haven/Mould Mansion Revisited

We had two house viewings today, topping off a busy week of co-op activity. What with three house viewings, a meeting, our usual co-op meals, a referendum and Bi-Fest Wales tomorrow, it's a wonder we've managed to keep so on top of the blog. Go us.

So, first up was Hippy Haven, a new house to us, and one which we already had a good idea wasn't suitable from dissecting the particulars. It was, however, considerably under our budget, and so we went to see it with a view to assessing the potential for extension.

This house is vendor-occupied, so I didn't take pictures, but we did get to meet the fabulous lady who lives there currently. Essentially she's Mattie in 35 years time, which means she's awesome:-D The occupant prior to her was an Italian called Monty, who sounds like a future version of Sven, having planted in the garden, amongst other things, some grapevines, a brick pizza oven and a still.

You can tell the vendor was amazing because we know all this.

Anyway, the long, short and medium-length of it is, the house is too small for us and an extension would be possible but logistically a nightmare. I was sad that we couldn't offer to love this house, if only because the owner is so sweet and so enthusiastic about co-ops. It will be a fantastic home for someone's family, but sadly not mine.

Somewhat later in the day a small party of us revisited Mould Mansion. Sven and Lloyd had not been able to attend the first time, but the enthusiasm shown by the rest of us made a return visit inescapable. Me and Finn went along for the walk, and to have a proper nosey in the garden, and because, essentially, I couldn't resist.

Can you tell I like it?

The strange thing is that the mould downstairs was not as bad as I remembered, though I stand by my replaster-the-whole-kitchen-or-I'll-never-eat-a-thing-cooked-in-it stance. Lloyd made it clear that he approved, in his quiet way. Sven took lots of notes, in his building geeky way, and pronounced it to be not as bad as I'd made out. Some blocked gutters may be causing some of the problems, and a lot of things that need to be done could feasibly be done by us, apparently. To get a second opinion on this, we have a third visit booked on monday and are taking a builder friend along.

Can you tell we like it?

We fit into this house, and it feels like this house fits us, and we are fit to make it fit for us (!). All of which wordplay leads us to believe that we might be drumming up loanstock pledges again some time soon. Watch this space!

Hannah

Fun voting times (by Lotte)

Today I did some social change by posting a random-act-of-kindness to a woman who runs a kids' knitting group, which was satisfying. I also VOTED. And if you're in Wales, you should too. Polls close at 10pm, and even if you don't have your polling card your name will still be on the list.

Here's my satisfyingly gloominous and gothic polling station entrance for your perusal.

The haps are, and I thieve shamelessly from the BBC:

At present the assembly can pass legislation in 20 devolved policy areas, including health and education.

A Yes vote would mean it no longer needs to apply to parliament for law-making powers on a case-by-case basis.

Voting is until 2200 GMT. The count starts on Friday morning, with a final result likely in the afternoon.

A No vote would keep the existing system, while a Yes would mean the assembly can pass laws without first seeking consent in Westminster.

However, if there was a Yes the assembly would not gain powers over new areas.

House Viewing: Mould Mansion

As promised, here is a post house-viewing post. I thought I'd start putting pictures into posts, so you get a glimpse into the diversity of properties we're looking at, and also to break up my long-winded rambling and many-comma'd sentences:-) All photos are courtesy of Lotte on this occasion..

And so, I shall call this property Mould Mansion, for the straightforward reason that I have never seen such levels of mould and damp in my life. It was extraordinary! The interesting thing was that this property - a three floor Victorian terrace split into 3 flats - was really a trip through the extremes of the property market. The top floor flat was really rather well-appointed, with nice floors/wallpaper/giant picture frames with armchairs in (ok, that last bit was unusual). You'd never know what lay below. There are 4 rentable private spaces up there, a bathroom and a door to the fire escape/garden. Lovely sea views too. One of the rentable spaces is 2 ajoining rooms, which could well come in handy for some of us.

The next floor down is about the same standard as a lot of rented accomodation round here. A bit mouldy, in need of decoration, with some strange choices of carpet - all par for the course, really. This floor has a bathroom and 3 rentable spaces. Again, 2 of them are ajoining spaces, which means the space sizes end up being pretty ok all round. The joyous thing about this house is that we fit, which makes us very, very excited.

Excited... but daunted. Because on the ground floor is the most fascinating mould-based civilisation, spanning the kitchen, bathroom and part of the dining room. Oh my word, it is immense. Truly, fascinatingly immense. I shan't show you photos, you'd re-visit your dinner.On the plus side there are some great-sized communal rooms, and everywhere you look you can see the potential for this to be a fantastic home.

Much to my delight there are decent gardens to the front and back. Mattie is rather beautifully modelling the back garden in the photo to the left:-)

Even more pleasingly, we'd be making sure this rather posh, yet neglected, house would be available at affordable rent for years to come. To further highlight the wondrousness of this possibility, another woman was viewing the house at the same time as us. Mattie and I asked her what she was looking for, and she said "A bargain that I can make some money on". I felt a sneaky sense of pride that we would be creating a longer lasting, and more community-minded, legacy if we were the ones to buy the house.

We've a meeting tonight where I suspect we'll decide to do a second viewing, hopefully with a builder friend in tow. The house is up for auction (a whole other level of complexity when applied to co-op finances) so there's no knowing the price, but I think we will be following this one very closely whatever we decide to do as a group. I just hope that whoever buys it gives it the TLC that it deserves.

Hannah

'Ouses, 'Ouses, 'Ouses*

I thought I'd write a post about house viewings, since that's a huge part of what we're doing right now. Finding houses that fit our criteria exactly (or even closely) is pretty tricky. This isn't because we're hideously demanding and want a hot tub in every house (although there was one in the last one!), but because there are a lot of us and we can't afford very much. Necessity being the mother of invention, this means we are usually looking at houses that would need a lot of jiggling and poking to fit the bill.

The last house we looked at (mentioned in my last blog post) was one of a pair of 1930's semis just round the corner from where most of the golems live now. Unfortunately one of them had sold the night before we were meant to go and look, but we carried on with the other viewing so we could establish whether two neighbouring houses might fit the communal bill. In truth, I wasn't expecting it to be suitable, but was presently surprised to see that we could probably, maybe, make it work. One delightful thing that became clear from looking at the two house scenario was that some of us felt that even being neighbours wouldn't be close enough, and that without bashing holes in the wall to connect the two houses we would feel split in twain. How twee are we? Very, is the answer - but then I suppose we wouldn't be buying a house together if we didn't want the chance to see each other on the way to the bathroom in the morning.

Anyway, we had a meeting informal-chat-over-dinner this week to re-establish what we wanted from our future housing, what had changed after lots of house viewings, and how we felt about the process. Sadly Mattie couldn't make it as she was at work, but the general consensus between the other 5 of us was that things were going well and that we are prepared to be patient waiting for the right house to come along. Phew! Room size is still an important issue for most of us, and I think will be the thing that settles us on one house over another when it comes down to it, but there was agreement that we were all prepared to view houses and assess each one individually rather than writing them off because the particulars don't sound promising.

With this reassurance reagrding our aims, there will hopefully be a slew of house viewings. We have one on monday (subject to a minimum of 3 golems being able to attend, as per our consensus agreement on the matter) for a large house, currently split into 3 flats. We like properties like this, as they have extraneous kitchens and bathrooms which can be brought back into use as bedroom spaces for individual people, rather neatly pointing out why it's more energy/resource/space efficient to live in larger groups than smaller ones. Huzzah!

This particular house is up for auction with a ridiculously low start price, so there's no knowing whether it's in budget or not, but with the very friendly auction lady to lend us a hand, we feel confident enough to go and have a look.

Intriguingly she also informed us that the house that we nearly went for never did sell as the vendor wasn't happy with the price he got at auction. This made me think more about the whole house-as-asset thing, and how glad I am that we will be removing a house from the market. If it is ever sold then at least the profits (if there are any) will be retained within the co-op movement, so there's less incentive for us to waste a lot of people's time and energy selling a house and then changing our minds because it doesn't personally make us enough cash.

Lotte and I have been plotting what sort of things should go on the blog, and we're hoping that every time we have a viewing we'll put up a little post or a huge one, like this) about how it went and what we got from it. I'm hoping that some of the people reading this blog are thinking about setting up co-ops and want to know what's involved, and that we can provide a little window into how a group of individuals with very little prior knowledge find a way to sustainably house themselves.If you are thinking about it, please get in touch with us for a natter. It's n secret that I dream of running little workshops in the living room of our house, sharing our experiences and inspiring others to do the same, so that there can be lots of pockets of people living in tenant-owned housing in our local area. Happy times:-)

Hannah

* This is a reference to a rather brilliant song on the first album by The Imagined Village, and I would heartily recommend it to anyone.

Rarrrrr!

Or rather: RR! We are now proper members of Radical Routes!

Things may have been seeming quiet here at Golem HQ, but we've actually been busy, and not just with pulling faces at the baby to make him smile (although that is currently at the top of the daily agenda for most of us). Work has been ongoing with making us more Official (with a capital O), and we now have shares in the co-op, and will soon have share certificates, or Cher certificates, if Mattie has her way. (I must say, I like the idea of the latter - although "Do you believe in life after landlord-owned rented accomodation?" is a less catchy lyric by anyone's standards).

Some of us also attended the Spring Radical Routes gathering in Brighton. The 'some' in question comprised Lotte, Mattie, Sven, Finn and me, all squeezed into a small hire car for the journey, and then all kindly housed at Out Of Town housing co-op for the weekend. This was my first gathering and I really enjoyed it, but it did bring home to me how tricky things like long meetings are with a very small person to look after. I only managed one workshop attendance, and that was down to the fabulous baby-wrangling skills of Lotte and Finn having a fortuitous nap. The rest of the weekend involved me and Lotte eating cake in great proportions thanks to the Cowley Club, and squeezing in fabulous conversations with fabulous people. Oh, and pulling faces at the baby, of course:-) Mattie and Sven volunteered for everything ever, and Lotte and I wrangled our way into the Children's Working Group. Yay!

In other news, we've had a few house viewings. Well, one recently and one today. The recent one was a fabulous wreck, complete with tonnes of ridiculously lovely original features and fascinatingly studwall-divided rooms (including one which had been divided diagonally), but it was over our budget and quite, quite delapidated. The house we're viewing today is one of a pair we were hoping to look at, but sadly one has sold. Sad times. We're still looking at t'other one though, so if similar houses come up we will know whether they could be the right place for us.

So, apologies for the rambling post, probably full of typos as I'm breastfeeding at the same time, but I thought you'd appreciate a hello:-)

Hannah

Our agendar, let me show you it.

Hello!

Since we're having a meeting tonight, I thought I'd keep it fresh in my mind by telling you about how we structure our meetings. We find it really helpful to keep us all on the same page, and to make sure we regularly talk about the things that need talking about.

We can keep it pretty simple because our co-op doesn't have a house yet. Once we've bought somewhere and moved in, we'll probably need to have sections for maintenance, accounts and loanstock, bills, all that jazz. But for now, here's how it goes for a simple start-up co-op.

1. Treasurer's report. Every month we all put a bit of money into the pot to cover expenses, such as stationary, travel costs and (hopefully) future Radical Routes payments. In this bit, the treasurer just squares the accounts book and tells us how the finances are looking. The exact figure goes into the minutes.
2. Social change. Even though we're not in Radical Routes, we like the social change dedication aspect so we've adopted it already. We're all trying to get in our 16 hours a week, and here we share what we've been up to and any ideas or events that others might like to participate in. It's in the form of a go-around, to give everyone a chance to say everything they want to say.
3. ALL THE STUFF. Things from the last meeting that we planned to come back to, and things that occurred to us in between times that we told the secretary about with enough time for them to add it to the agenda. This might include potential houses to view together, travel plans for Radical Routes National Gatherings, bank account stuff, loanstock information or anything else that needs bringing up.
4. Any Other Business. The words of dread. Stuff that randomly occurred to us during the meeting, or just before. Fortunately, these often tend to fly by, as they're simple things mostly.
5. Homework overview. Some of us will have volunteered to complete tasks for the co-op before the next meeting; this is just to make sure that everyone's clear on who's doing what.
6. The next meeting. Choosing the chair and the date/time. If we don't arrange it now, we'll keep faffing and putting it off. When we're all sat around a table together, that's the best time to find out when everyone's free.
7. Queue for bathroom, followed by cups of tea.

Our Spring Radical Rumours Article

For those of you who may not get to read Radical Routes' rather excellent Radical Rumours newsletter, here's the entry we've sent in for the Spring edition, written by Sven and Mattie.

___________________________________________

This is a bit of a sneaky entry as as of yet we aren’t Radical Routes members. Maybe if we’re really stealthy, you won’t notice...

This past year has been a pretty busy for us out West. It’s a year this January that the Golem Housing co-op grew from an idea into a group of people, and then into an FSA registered entity. So far we have held regular meetings, sometimes very long, but mostly productive. We still look forwards to them, which can only be positive. The food co-op between members is still running, where each member cooks for the group once a week and is fed for the rest of the week. Communal eating has become an important part of how we work as a group. Our first co-op Christmas was wonderful,  especially for those of us who were experiencing our first away from home. Plenty of handmade gifts, a festive Aloe Vera decorated by Mattie at some ungodly hour, and a group showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show were some of the experiences that marked a good season well spent. Last October we came within a gnats crochet of buying a house, only to be thwarted at the last minute by the owner filling it with sitting tenants. While disappointing at the time this has come to be viewed as a minor setback, and an education. A fair chunk of the secondary rules have been written (although we learned the hard way that rules involving money are not, in fact, easy to write.) Our new co-op’s visit was brilliant, and re enforced our collective belief that Radical Routes is what we want to be involved in as an organisation and as individuals. We have had guests from around the Radical Routes network, and in turn some of us have been guests ourselves. The feeling of community that we have encountered has been incredible.

Individually plenty has been going on in camp Golem. Hannah has been expanding her already prolific creation skills, including dying her own wool with a microwave and food colouring, recording with Lloyd (more on that later) and making the mini Golem Finn appear last November. Her knowledge of environmentally responsible baby wrangling is ever expanding, and so far both mother and baby are doing very well. He is very cute, but then we would say that.

Finn has been tirelessly taking part in pro-breast feeding direct action since November.

Joe, our Treasurer, is still Chairman of Bi Swansea. He’s currently helping to organise Bi Fest Wales in Cardiff this March, an event offering networking opportunities and workshops on Bisexual issues for people across Wales and the rest of the UK. He has taken training in LGBT activism in the past year, and has been knee deep in a dissertation on mental health within the LGBT community. As the most central owner of a table in the co-op he has also spent the past year graciously hosting many a lengthy co-op meeting. Thanks Joe.

Lloyd is often ensconced in recording. Left to Bees, the band that consists of Lloyd, Hannah and a plethora of instruments, brought out a home made E.P last year called Bones. He has also been pursuing his own projects under the name Vesperite. One of the more recent creations was a version of White Rabbit as Lotte’s Christmas present. Ingenious use of violins abound.

Lotte was the main thrust behind the Swansea UKUncut protest this December, which was held outside our local Vodafone store. Information was dispersed to busy Swansea shoppers, chants were chanted. The store closed within minutes, and remained closed until we left a good while later.  Lotte also started a polyamory based web comic called Poly in Pictures late last year which has gained itself a tidy following.

Sven is in his last year of a building conservation degree, and therefore a dissertation looms. This has lead to him expanding his understanding of post oil economies and the imminent threat of peak oil. As a result, the rest of the co-op (and indeed our social circle) has had their understanding on the subject expanded. Plans for a potential workers’ co-operative are forming, perhaps there will be more news by the next Rumours. He has also been putting some hours into helping FHA with their HMO legislation work. His main activity of late, however, has been fatherhood, and quite right too.

Mattie has moved house 3 times in the past year, and this has reinforced her belief in co-operatives as the most practical way of living, ideology aside. She is slowly but surely educating herself in the way the world around her works, and isn’t best pleased. Perhaps an activist will be made of her yet. For now secretarial work for the co-op, cooking for the food co-op and general information gathering, combined with working in a bookshop take up her time nicely.

A happy Rumours to you all, and we look forwards to seeing you all at Gatherings to come.

Golem Housing Co-op