We bought another house!

It's been an exciting first couple of months to the year. In January we welcomed our newest member, Ian - and in February we finally got our new house so that he could actually move in!

The view from the new house (more pics here)

The first few weeks of being a two-house co-op have been a blur of ceiling destruction, key cutting, mould removal, painting things white, blagging free furniture, ceiling reconstruction, packing and unpacking - among many other things. Plus numerous trips back and forward between the two houses, which mercifully are only about 100m apart - although this includes a flight of about 50 steps.

 Ceiling destruction

We're still sharing evening meals between the two houses, so half the week we get to go out (to the other house) for dinner. Sometimes there are even enough chairs for everyone!

There's still loads to do, including finding the garden under the brambles, converting the garage into a gym and installing a sauna - but we'll get there. There is also a housewarming party in the pipeline - watch this space!

Ethical investment opportunity: help us buy our new house!

For years we have talked about how one day we would expand the co-op so we can provide more people with secure affordable housing - but until recently it had remained a pipe dream. Then a few weeks ago we discovered that a friend of a friend who has a house across the road from ours was selling up, and on investigation discovered that it would be the perfect place for us to expand to! 

So now we are buying it - and need to raise some money! 

What do we need the money for?

In a nutshell, to buy the house. We have applied to an ethical building society for a mortgage to cover 80% of the purchase price, but need to raise the other 20% (plus money to pay the solicitors, land transaction tax, survey etc) ourselves. As many of our members are on low incomes, we are looking for investors to lend us this money as loanstock - money lent to the organisation by individuals or other co-ops (usually) for a fixed term.

Why should you invest in Golem housing co-op?

You’ll be helping to provide good quality secure and affordable housing in Swansea - now and in future. We are also able to offer interest on the money you lend, so this is an ethical investment opportunity.

How does it work?

We would welcome any investment of £1,000 or over. The investment is for a fixed term between 5 and 20 years, although we can sometimes consider early repayment on request. If you can lend us money at 0% interest, this helps to keep our costs down - but we are also prepared to offer interest paid at any rate up to 2%. We are in the process of buying our new house so we are looking for offers of investment over the coming month (up until Friday 6 December). When we receive your investment, we will provide you with a loanstock certificate as evidence of your investment and its repayment terms. 

Please note that loanstock is an unsecured investment and you may decide to get independent financial advice before making any investment. However, housing co-ops very rarely go bust, and in the event that they do, any money recouped by the sale of the property can be used to pay back the loanstock investors once the mortgage was paid back.

How can I invest?

Drop us an email at golem.coop@gmail.com with details of how much you would be interested in investing and for how long, and we can send you our full terms of investment. We are also happy to answer any further questions you may have.


You may also be wondering:

What is Golem housing co-operative?
We are a housing co-op based in Mount Pleasant in Swansea. We were
formed in 2010 by a group of friends who were sick of renting poor quality
and insecure housing from (often) exploitative landlords and wanted to
work together to create a better alternative to house ourselves. In 2012 we
bought an eight-bedroom house which we have prevented from falling
down (literally) and made into a lovely and affordable home for seven
adults and a small person. Now we are expanding so we can house more
people and are very excited to have had an offer accepted on a second
house just across the road.

What is a housing co-op?
A housing co-op is registered not-for-profit organisation that exists to house
its members. All its residents are members (and so have a say in running
of the co-op) and all its members must be residents. The organisation is
run according to co-operative principles which give all members an equal
say (and equal responsibility) in managing their housing. If it should ever
cease to exist, its assets (such as any property it owns) must stay within
the co-operative movement - so members cannot profit from them.

All the updates on the last three years!

Lots has happened in the last three years and there have been many exciting changes* which has resulted in us being able to expand to buy a new house! More on this soon...

*including two new members, a new roof, a dog, a cat and a piano.

All The Updates On The Past Year

Since it's been over a year since our last blogpost I thought I'd drop in and give an update on what's happening at Golem. In this instance no news is most definitely good news - we've had a fantastically uneventful year in terms of the co-op and everything is ticking along nicely.

Developments in the House

Every living room should have a hammock :)

Our fabulous living room of fabulousness is still going strong - and in what is now a fine Golem tradition, still isn't quite finished. We've now had two summers where we could fling the doors open to the garden. We've had many dinners with friends and family where everyone could get up from the table without having to get a whole row of people to move out of the way. The stairs may not be carpeted yet, but we do have a hammock which makes all the kids who come visiting (both big and small) delighted. It's amazeballs.

Half installed!

The lovely wooden floor has had some teething problems though, rising into a big hump in the centre in warm weather. The damp air of of our basement living room seems to be to blame, so we're working on various remedial strategies at the moment. Firstly we're routinely running a dehumidifier overnight to try to keep the damp down. Secondly we're fitting a cooker hood in the kitchen so that when cooking we're not adding too much extra moisture to the air. Thirdly we're looking at adding more ventilation to the two sealed up chimney stacks in the room. It's difficult working out how to help an old house, so we're trying multiple strategies.

In other parts of the house not much has changed, except that we're currently in the process of re-roofing the oriel window on the ground floor front bedroom. We had planned to do this when all the other roofs (eventually) get sorted but it developed a hefty leak and had to be dealt with sooner. Ironically finishing the roof is being held up by the rain this week, but soon it will be done. Almost every timber had to be replaced which is giving us a more realistic idea of just how expensive doing the other six roofs may end up being.

The garden has gained a pond (to the top right of the patio in this picture) and fully completed paving and has generally levelled up in fabulousness this year. Only the building of the green roofed shelter remains to be implemented from the permaculture design and the garden is serving it's various purposes well. It's certainly produced a lot of pumpkins this year, and there are two pears on one of the cordons for the first time :) We may redesign the lawn area after the shelter is built as it's not getting as much use as hoped, but generally the design has been a success.

Other News

Our members haven't changed at all in the last few years which is a great testament to the living situation here. Previously our plans for expansion included buying more houses locally, but Sven is spearheading a much more bold plan for an intentional ecovillage run on co-op lines. If you'd like more information or to be involved, pop along to the website or Facebook page to see what the haps are.

We're still happy to meet people interested in the co-op movement and to help with the setting up of any fledging co-ops within travelling distance. As members of Radical Routes we have the privilege of receiving support and wisdom from a lot of other co-ops - in fact, we couldn't do it without them - so if you're interested in starting a co-op, please come and pick our brains! 

- Hannah

There are now 3 sets of forks on the fan-trained plum tree

Golem Work Day, May 25th 2015

Hello all!

I'm just briefly posting to let you know we are having a work day on Monday May 25th. There will be a range of jobs including painting, cleaning up wood before waxing it, sorting storage for our new tool room and, for those who love to smash things, lifting the remaining concrete in the garden and digging out any glorious Victorian flagstones that we find.

There will be a tasty noms provided for lunch and undoubtedly reams of tea and coffee during the day, and you can nose around our new communal room and fabulous garden. If you're interested in coming along for any length of time, then contact a Golem either via email, Facebook or face-to-face so we know who to cater for.

Hope to see you then!

- Hannah

Looking for Loanstock

Well, I didn't realise it had been quite so long since we had done a blog post - and how things in the co-op have changed since then! Those of you who know us in person will have a good idea of the happenings at Golem HQ, but for those unfamiliar I will provide a quick overview. If you want to skip the overview, scroll to the bottom for the inevitable bit where we are asking for help ;)

In January we got some builders in to do a couple of days work building a cupboard and putting a new door into one of the downstairs bedrooms. We could easily afford the work though, so yay!

Two days later they told us that the house had started to fall down. We could still afford to spend a bit more so that was fine.

A few days after that they told us that actually it was falling down because someone in the past had removed almost everything that should have been holding it up. We started to feel a little worried about the money side of it.

*dramatic music* Suddenly there were props everywhere holding the place up temporarily, structural engineers and all sorts coming in and literally shaking their heads in despair at the work that had been done to the house in the past. We were wondering how much this was all going to cost, but it being that it's not really a very good decision to not stop your house falling down, we had to let the work continue.

At some point it became clear that the entire basement room of the house and half of the ground floor had to be completely ripped out, including whole floors, ceilings, walls and staircases. We thought, right, if all this is going on, let's also do all the work we know these areas need or that we want to make our house more suitable for communal living. Let's do it once, and do it properly, unlike all the people who had messed up the building before.

This is how we went from this (dingy, cramped, poorly laid out) communal room...

 

... to this :D Bright, airy, much bigger communal room with a more logical layout, better access to the garden and a dinner table which actually fits all the Golems around it properly. 

It's the shizz, really it is. But unfortunately the downside is that during the course of this work even more problems with other bits of the house were discovered on top of the things which we already knew needed doing (like all the roofs) so our things-to-fix list has become both shorter and longer at the same time.

And we had the cash to pay for some of it, and an unexpected loanstock offer to pay for the next bit, but for the rest of this job (and the others) we are wondering if you would like to help.

Loanstock is by far the most affordable and straightforward way for the co-op to borrow money, so if you would be interested in investing in a local housing organisation for a fixed period of time at between 0% and 3% interest, please do get in touch. I have added more information about loanstock here so that those of you thinking about it can get the details, but the very best thing to do is to come round for a chat and a cup of tea in our lovely new living room. Drop us an email at golem.coop@gmail.com and we can tell you all about it :)

- Hannah

p.s. In the course of all this it became clear that buying next door was a very challenging option financially and then it went under offer to someone else and that was the end of that. We are still hoping to expand in the near future and are always up for helping other people to set up co-ops. Getting the big repair work on this house done will actually contribute to making both of those things easier, so although it seems like a distraction it is all still helping toward our master plan. Phew!

We Need More Golems

So there's this house that lives next door and we are hoping to buy it and expand our hippy empire. It's shared accommodation with five bedrooms and communal living space, a kitchen and a garden. You can have pets, you can put pins in your walls, and you know those creatures called 'Landlordes', well... the bad news is, you still have a landlord. The good news is that YOU are the landlord.

If you want:-

- Control over your living conditions and accommodation
- A chance to live sustainably and share skills in living sustainably
- A chance to take a house out of the hands of the market for good; to perpetually provide affordable housing so long as there are tenants to occupy it
- To sack your landlord
- To kick the patriarchy in the face
- To grow and eat strange vegetables you've never seen before
- To decorate your living space however you see fit
- To live in a cult in a harmonious society with no rituals whatsoever. Honest.

We are looking to buy and renovate this property within the year, so we are looking for tenants to fill the rooms in late 2015.

Not a bad spot for a co-op

Here are a few other things you might want to know:-

-We welcome people of all genders, races, sexuality and species
- We don't mind if you are on the dole
- We don't rent single rooms to couples
- We have a crazy old dog


If you're interested, please get in touch! Come round for tea, have a chat etc.

Buying next door will give us twice as much garden to enlushify!