Build It Where You Are

We're just recently returned from the Radical Routes gathering, and when I say recently, I mean within the last couple of hours. As usual it was busy and tiring and intense, but also incredibly inspiring. Being around other co-op members is a great reminder of why we're doing what we're doing, and more importantly, that we ought to be doing more.

Sven and I had a great blather, both at the gathering and on the way home, concerning the lack of co-ops in south Wales and what we could do about it. It's not that there aren't co-ops, but in an area with a significant need for affordable housing and relatively low property prices, it's genuinely surprising that there aren't more. We'd like to be surrounded by co-op people more of the time, and so it's up to us to build it where we are.*

So this is our** plan, which I am recording here in order to help it happen, and also to start garnering interest from you lovely lot. Just to point out that Sven and I are in no way experts, but we are keen learners with lots of contacts, and most importantly, we have done this recently.

We're going to plan a detailed set of modular workshops covering the whole housing co-op set-up process and related topics (such as consensus decision making), and then offer to run them for small groups in South Wales who are interested. You can tell us where you are in your process (anywhere from random, interested people who are wondering what a co-op is, to registered co-ops who are looking for funding inspiration) and we'll come and run relevant workshops in your garden/living room/community space.

So, are you interested? Could you get together a group of 3+ people who are also interested? Let us know and when we are ready to roll, we'll get in touch. And if we don't get around to it, please feel free to tell us off.

- Hannah

* A concept that is often talked about, summed up nicely in a phrase from Sven.
** Other members of Golem might be interested too, but I was too excited about the idea to run it past them all before posting this.

Keeping the Pace Up (more work weekends)

This is sort of a post letting you know a thing, and sort of a post reminding me about a thing, and sort of a post to remind all of us Golems to do said thing.

I'll explain.

I've been feeling like we have big surges and slumps in our energy when it comes to doing work on the house. We all pulled together and got loads of work done on the kitchen, and then all had a rest and settled in a bit. And then we got all dedicated to the garden and then we had another rest and some of us went on holiday. That's a simplification, but you can hopefully see what I mean. We need to keep the momentum up and the motivation going.

So in the noble pursuit of getting off of our arses more often, we're going to start having a monthly work weekend. It will be on the fourth weekend of each month, which means the first one is on the 25th-26th of August. The next one will then be on the 22nd-23rd of September. We'll try to post in advance to let people know what we'll be doing, so that if you want to join in, you can.

I've volunteered to co-ordinate the first one, so if you are interested, please get in touch. These are the jobs I'm hoping we'll attempt:

- finish the kitchen, which involves some tiling, the building of some shelves from some reclaimed wood, and re-fitting a pane of glass to a window.
- bashing out the flowerbed in the front courtyard and lift the paving slabs, perhaps clearing the drain along the way.
- if we have time, another job, which might be bricking up the smaller window in the downstairs bathroom.

You'll probably get food, potentially biscuits and certainly a lot of appreciation and tea. Let us know if you fancy it.

- Hannah

Mystery Object Revealed!

Do you remember the mystery object buried in the garden? To recap, here it is, in it's mysterious glory.

 

Well, I have good news! It's a mystery no more. Joe spent his time digging around it while we've been away, and good grief, there's no way any of you could have guessed what it was.

It could have been a lovely garden trellisy thing.

 

(image nicked from the intertubes)

It could have been the metal remnants of a barrel...

(likewise)

... or some kind of iron cart wheel.

(I'm basically a massive tea-leaf)

But no. In the true spirit of extraordinary weirdness that pervades our house and garden, it is...

a fire escape.

It's hard to photograph, but so far about 8 feet of it is visible. Yikes!

You know, one of those ones with the ladder and the metal cage thing to stop you falling off. All of one, or at least it looks like it. It's been there for a while, as the small wall which runs across the garden is built right over it in a most nonchalant fashion.

I think it's safe to say that none of us were expecting a huge thing like this, and we haven't even started to contemplate what to do with it, but I thought I'd at least relieve you of your suspense about what on earth it was.

- Hannah

We're (nearly) all going on a summer holiday...

In the week since the wondrous work weekend, we have not been idle. A few of us are heading off on holiday for two weeks, so the blog may or may not be quiet in my absence, and so I thought I'd give you a little roundup of events Chez Golem before I go.

Cassian and Joe brought joy to the entire house by getting the shower to be up on the wall on one of those poley things. I cannot put into words how exciting it is to be able to have a quick shower instead of the sort of bath I have with (at the very least) Radio 4 and a cup of tea. Queues for the bathroom are now greatly diminished.

We had a budget workshop where we worked out a way to plan for our spending over the year, based on things like projected income and expenditure. It involved a glorious addition to our accounts spreadsheet made by me and Lloyd, and our explaining of it terrified the few Golems who didn't know we both love spreadsheets that much.  Talking through the spreadsheet by displaying it on Sven's projector helped enormously, and I think it's one of the most helpful gadgets for a co-op to have (but maybe that's because I love gadgets). We now have a lot of our money for the year ring-fenced into different budgets, but which are flexible enough to be changed during the course of a meeting if needs be. Everyone seems to feel like we have a better handle on our finances, so it's win all round.

I've continued my researching of the history of the house (which I'm saving up for another blogpost). As part of it I ended meeting some opposite-neighbours and having the most magnificent conversation about the area, private landlords and Victoriana. I'm really hoping we get to meet more of our neighbours in the future, as we're planning to be here in the long term.

A drunken night with two archaeologists (one resident and one non-resident) led to us identifying the manufacturer of the lovely blue and white tiles we found in the garden. They were made by Craven Dunnil & Co and are very likely to be some of the tiles put in when the house was first built. The non-resident archaeologist thinks they are from a bathroom set, rather than a fireplace as I thought. Sadly the company don't keep pattern catalogues so we'll never know for sure when they were made, but I think it's a reasonably safe guess. The blue and white tiles in the kitchen are much later, probably 1960's. I really hope we find more of these little snippets of the house's history along the way.

I've also finally started doing some of the floor tiling in the kitchen, re-covering the bit which was in the hallway we ripped out.  It's taken me an absurdly long time to get started, and five tiles in, I've run out of tile adhesive! That said, the area already looks better, and once it's done there's only one more bit of tiling to do before it's finished and we can think about painting the kitchen. Hooray!

Joe cleared out the downstairs hallway so it's much, much roomier and less full of junk, though there is a little bit left to go. Small things like this make an enormous difference to how good a house feels, so we were all hugely grateful.

We're still getting quotes before deciding how to go about rebuilding the retaining wall of the garden. Another one came in this week and it was slightly less terrifying than the first, but only slightly. We're now waiting for a third and will discuss a plan of action when the travelling Golems get back. Once the dodgy wall is down and a new, spectacularly sturdy one is put up, it will be a weight off of everyone's minds, and mean that we can crack on with the other huge job of our Year One work: fixing all of the roofs. Joy!

Joe has been busy in the garden cutting up even more of the buddleia mountain and packing it into council garden waste bags for collection. Him and Lloyd had a good crack at digging up some of the bigger stumps today, and in doing so found a wall we didn't know was there. It looks to be only a small one, acting as a step down across the garden, but it's still amazing we can be finding things like this which we had no idea were there. Joe is planning to excavate more of the Iron Thing while we're away, and we're taking bets on what it is for anyone with an idea. See picture below.

It's about two feet wide, seems to be circular and goes a long way down. Any ideas?

I'm also including a little slideshow of the garden progress so you can revel in our hard work. The next phase will include digging out tonnes and tonnes of this soil/rubble, probably with a mini-digger. I can't wait!

- Hannah

The Golem Garden - June-July 2012

What would Lady Gaga do?

"Pretend I'm a shower curtain!"

"Oh God, it's all gone tits up."

"Lady Gaga would totally wear this."

Ta-dah!

Today me and Steve took 3 bags and 1 box of garden waste to the tip, along with lots of electrical rubbish. Then we went into the plumbing shop and bought one of those shower pole thingies and a shower curtain.

Upon my return, I attempted to fit it all with Joe, but accidentally a nap.

Then I woke up, and me and Joe blasted the bathroom wall with our amazingness until the shower pole thingy and the shower curtain were fitted, both professionally and with style.

I had a shower in my own home for the first time in well over a month and it was so good I cannot even. You guys, me and Joe and Steve are amaze.

Housing Co-ops and Housing Benefits

I applied for housing benefit upon taking up residence in your friendly neighbourhood Swansea housing co-op. The process was a little bit long and convoluted, so I thought I'd tell you about it in the hope that it might save you some time.

I assumed that it was alright for the council to know who else was living here, and so I happily put the names of other residents on my form. Some weeks later, I emailed the housing benefit department to ask why my application was taking so long, since it was just logging a change of address. I had a reply by email saying they'd sent me a letter 16 days earlier (still not received) and this:

The tenancy agreement you supplied appears to have not been signed by your landlord.  It appears to be signed by another tenant at the property.  Please provide proof of your rent liability by providing your original Tenancy Agreement which has been signed by your actual landlord or a signed letter from your landlord to confirm [rent details].

Amusingly snarky, with casual fraud accusational overtones. I emailed back the same day to explain that we were a housing co-op (as outlined on the change of address form), and as such, members are tenants and tenants are members. Members are authorised to sign such documents when agreed at a general meeting, which is what happened. So yes, a fellow tenant did sign my tenancy agreement, and that's all totally legal and alright.

They replied again, and asked the following questions:

1. Who owns [the house]?
2. Who do you pay your rent to?
3. Do you share ownership of the above address with your fellow co-operative members?
4. Please confirm in writing if you hold more than a nominal equity share in the property.

I answered by email, and a week later when I asked I was told that my housing benefit claim had been set up and was all okay. (Still no letter, mind.)

The whole process took over a month, partly because their first letter to me got lost in the post.

Someone else in the co-op also had to switch housing benefit to our new house, and had no problems, probably due to leaving off the names of other tenants when filling in the form since that information is totally irrelevant.

The reason I'm telling you all this is because it might help you if you have to do the same thing. First of all, don't bother telling them the names of the other tenants, since it's not really relevant anyway. Second, perhaps answering those four questions on the application/change of address form might speed things up a little bit.

So there we are. Extelligence. Love it.

Work Weekend Update

Well, what a weekend. It rained, it poured, it cleared up a bit and then it rained again. Thank goodness we weren't planning to spend the weekend wading through mud-encrusted rubbish.

No wait! That's totally what we were planning! And despite all the water the heavens could pour at us, that's exactly what we did. Here is a brief summary of what we managed to get done:

- formed a sedimentary layer of tiles approximately a foot thick in the bottom of our magnificent skip.
- put all the already-sorted-out rubbish on top of it, leaving a sort of chute arrangement in one corner for adding the bazillion more broken tiles we knew we'd find.

Hasselback Hotel :)

- dug through layers and layers of soil* fishing out even more rubbish and tiles to add to the skip.
- burnt through all the buddleia branches too big to go in the council garden waste.
- chopped up nearly all of the rest so it will fit in the garden waste bags.
- restacked the - by now, enormous - rubble pile into a slightly less scary shape.
- ate all the biscuits.**

Along the way, we received magnificent assistance from Lis, Mary-Eve, Sammie and Beth, for which we are enormously grateful. The skip guy was rather lovely, too.

Mmm, soil. Sort of.

Other fascinating occurrences include a guy stopping in the alley to chat to us. He did some work on the house under it's previous owner and said it was nice to see people tidying the place up. He also said, "that downstairs bathroom is pretty terrible", which is bizarre considering he apparently worked on it. I promise to write that blog post about the bathroom soon - I know you all love a good horror story ;)

We then saw him doing work on a property down the road, overseen by none other than the previous owner of our place, who waved and said hello. I saw him later, and he said "you're working hard, eh?" with a big grin on his face. I honestly couldn't tell what level of cheekiness he was aiming at,  but I think he must have known about the garden's hidden horrors. Again, bizarre.

NB: this is not what gardens are for, people!

We've also uncovered the top of a large metal object, but haven't had a chance to dig it out yet. I'll add a picture of it below later, in case anyone wants to try guessing what it is.

We still have loads of buddleia to get rid of, so if anyone randomly has the urge to take a bag to the dump, do let us know. There is still lots of rubbish and tiles left in the soil, but we've got rid of the bulk of it, and everything is clear enough now to do the garden wall (when we manage to work out how the hell we're going to do it). This evening we've got a finance workshop to get to grips with our work budget for the year, so hopefully the mystery of how to fix the wall will be solved.

- Hannah

* soil is a bit of a strong word for it. It's more like something you'd find on the banks of the Ankh.
** actually, that's a lie. We ate all the vegan biscuity things, but there's a foot long roll of uncooked non-vegan biscuit dough in the freezer, ready for anyone else who pops around to help.***
*** unless we eat it first.