The Haps.

Ok, so these are The Haps.

We've decided to give up on the house idea and live on a boat instead.

Sort of ;)

Oh seasoned readers of the blog, you know where I'm going with this. We like Boat House, and since Sven came up with The Plan, we are probably going to make moves towards making it ours. The Plan is an intriguing one as it involves planning to expand into another house in the near future. The Dinghy is not that house though. It just doesn't seem right, for some reason. We're all agreed on this, and we're also all agreed on our love for Boat House.

The logic is that we will get along with one communal room (and oodles of lovely external communal space) until a further house can be bought, and filled with more of our co-opulent brethren, plus one person who will have been residing at Boat House in the meantime.

I realise this sounds bonkers. We've been spending so long looking for somewhere that would fit, and whinging about how nothing does, and now we've gone and fallen in love with something which is unequivocally too small.

Cope.

This house is within budget, allowing lots of scope for eco-renovating it, fits almost all of our far-ranging criteria, and has a sexay garden which is much bigger than we could ever have dreamed of. How could we not?

We're hoping to have another viewing before next weekend (still some unanswered questions and unphotographed corners) and then move on to the whole offer/valuation/survey rigmarole.

Fun times ahoy!

- Hannah

Sven’s slightly but not entirely made up recipe for Apple Ketchup that Mattie and Finn helped with

(as yet untested because we only made in 2 hours ago)

Makes 10 mostly big jars of various shapes and sizes.
Takes some time

1.      Volunteer to do roofing at Crabapple a few times, making sure that you take enough cloth bags to bring back 3.5kg of miscellaneous apples. Get one co-op member to meet you at the station to help carry them up the hill. Mattie reckons that the mutual aid adds some sweetness to the ketchup.

This is too many, 'k?

2.      Chop the apples up into reasonably small chunks, removing the cores but leaving the skin in because you have to sieve it all anyway and peeling them seems like FAR too much effort. Get someone with eyes of steel to slice 800g of onions. If possible choose someone who’s in need of a good cry anyway, it’s a great excuse.  

3.      Pop the onions and the apples into a large preserving pan that someone had for Christmas last year (festive connection not mandatory for the recipe). Add 1.7 litres of cider vinegar and 300ml of malt vinegar that you saved from some pickled onions because it seemed a waster to chuck it. 

4.      Feel pleased with how things are going.

You should aim to be about this happy.

5.     Add 3 heaped teaspoons of ginger powder of questionable provenance, along with 2 heaped teaspoons of cumin, some oregano, 5 drops of Tabasco sauce (Steady!), 1 ground nutmeg, 2 teaspoons of salt, 2 teaspoons of black pepper and 50g sugar.

6.      Give it a good stir and then go read the Good Shopping Guide with Finn for a bit because it’s taking ages and he likes books. Alternate these two activities, taking care not to stir Finn or read to the ketchup by mistake.

7.      Eventually your house and everything in it will smell of vinegar and the ketchup itself will look very bog like and smell tasty. At this point, turn off the heat and put the mixture through a sieve, regretting not peeling the apples in the first place.

Acursed sieve clogging fiend

8.      Jar and leave to its own devices until one night you really want some ketchup and think you might as well give it a try. (Sven says ‘At least 2-3 months’.)

9.      Feel the love.

Mattie and the Golems

x

House Viewing: Boat House and The Dinghy

This is why it is called Boat House.

So, we went to see Boat House again. A week ago. I suck.

We also went to see the house opposite. It's for sale by the same vendor, and would address the fact that Boat House isn't big enough for us. We would need to expand the co-op, which is a whole can o' worms, but we're generally open to the idea. Hence our nosing at this intriguing property.

Aren't they all intriguing?

The Dinghy is technically down as a 3 bedroom house, with 3 reception rooms. I don't know how estate agents decide this stuff, it's fascinating. It's been previously let as a 5 bedroom HMO, with the large basement reception room as a lounge, presumably. This takes up the whole lower ground/basement floor, and has a small bathroom and garden off of it, as you do. The garden was so overgrown we have no idea how bit it is, but the answer is likely to be "not very".




There's another garden which is totally paved (see left) which is at lower ground level but inaccessible from the lower ground floor. Why of course! This makes perfect sense! So to get from the living room to the main (for which read, bigger) garden, you have to get up the stairs and then down the outside stairs again. Hm. The paved garden was nice though, if seriously overlooked. No naked sunbathing here, then. (With a co-op like ours we need to consider these things.)


The bedrooms were suitably non-descript, the kitchen was pretty tiny, and there's a garage. There's not a lot more to be said really, although that is coming from me as the least keen member of the co-op. I do see the benefits of having two houses, and this house is OK, but I like Boat House much, much better.

After looking around The Dinghy, we had another quick peruse around Boat House. Bless the estate agent, he didn't seem to mind our epic nosiness. It did help consolidate the layout in our minds, and also allowed us to answer a few questions we couldn't resolve from memory. I still like it, and everyone else seems keen too.

There are obviously things which wouldn't be ideal with a two-house setup: one house would have a bigger kitchen, dining room and living room, and would be better suited to communal eating. It also has ALL the garden. Does this matter? I don't know, but we need to think about these things. Having the two houses would create a wider range of possibilities, but also a lot more roof to maintain.

We need to cogitate.

To aid both myself, and anyone else who might need it, with their cogitations, I leave you with this picture of Mattie looking uncomfortable sexay.

 - Hannah

House Viewing: Boat House

 Finally, another house viewing! It's been quiet over the summer with no new sitings of potential houses, but this one has been sitting on the market for a while. We actually got the particulars the same day as those for Labyrinth and The Tardis, but the excitement of those two meant this one got lost, quite literally, down the side of a chair. A massive toddler-proofing clearout of the living room at Golem HQ led to it being rediscovered, and we trundled along for a look this morning.

Boat House resides at the top of a rather steep and well-known hill, and has epic views to prove it.  It also has possibly the nicest garden we've seen on a house yet - terraced but sizeable to both front and back. You can see the sea from just about everywhere. J'approve.  Incidentally, it's called Boat House because the terraces at the back have awesome rope hand rails. My bad that I forgot to take a picture, but take my word for it that it feels sufficiently deck-like to warrant the name.

 The awesome garden-ness was a lovely surprise, and provided an interesting contrast with the outside space at The Tardis. It's funny how seeing one house really makes you re-evaluate others, and for me it was interesting to realise how unhappy I am with the the outside space at The Tardis, and how important it feels for Finn to have a lovely garden to grow up in, even if it does have ALL THE STEPS. Our fitness levels would greatly benefit from living here, though, it must be said. Either that or we'd soon be installing a stairlift. Joking aside, we were hoping to have an accessible property to those with mobility issues, and this will never be that. We're doomed to constantly be trading one thing off against another; such is househunting.

We knew from the particulars that this house does not have enough rooms, no matter how we rejig things internally. Without extending, there is no way to fit in all of our basic list of requirements, but we went to look because the whole thing is within budget.  That potentially gives us the option to extend/modify a house to suit a little better, so it seemed worth a look. 

The interior was a total surprise. This house has another huge hallway, and a big sweeping staircase which I am dying to swoosh down. Much to everyone's astonishment, few of the rooms matched the sizes on the particulars, and the interior space is generally lovely. It helps that it's light, with a tonne of south-facing windows. Win all round. Everyone liked the bedrooms, which is a pretty rare moment in our house-viewing history. Cause for celebration there, methinks. There is space for a co-op office in the hallway, and a lean-to utility room/pantry in the generous side-return, if only to reduce the amount of stuff that would have to live in the kitchen.

Because unfortunately, the communal rooms are another story. To be fair, there are two great sized bathrooms, so no problem there. But the kitchen is small and surprisingly triangular - less than ideal for mass-cooking, storage and dining. There are three rooms on the ground floor, two of which would have to be bedrooms, which leaves only one communal/spare room. Although technically this could work, discussions following viewings of similarly under-endowed houses have led us to believe that it would be anything but ideal to only have one communal room. Some of us felt that this was possibly mitigated slightly by the large garden, but that feels slightly tenuous and I'm not sure any of us were totally convinced. As always, pros and cons.

 There is some extension potential (the house is already extended quite radically on one side) but at the moment we can't quite see a way to make ourselves fit. Also, it has some interesting smells/cracks which might account for it's intriguingly affordable price. Still, we all have a good feeling about it, and it has led to some interesting re-evaluation about The Tardis (more on that below). We've decided to let this house sit on the backburner for now, and to re-visit it at a later date if it still doesn't seem like a write-off. Sven has a slightly bonkers plan regarding how we could make this house work, but I am saving it for a later blog-post as we need to get more information. Mysterious!


In related news, we tried to book another viewing for The Tardis, but were heartily put off by the estate agent. It looks like it is not going to be on the market for a while, and so he is reluctant to show us around. Doom biscuits all round. We're still considering it though, and at the very least, it does provide a good contrast property for anything else we look at.


Secondary Rules Progress

We've been working on these for quite some time. I don't know how long, it feels like forever. We are making progress though, yes indeedy. It's just the slow, consensual type of progress which we are becoming accustomed to on our journey as a co-op. I meant to type up a list of all the things we are aiming to have secondary rules for, but Finn has just woken up, so I shall instead give you some quick examples: income, children, bills, visitors, joining/leaving and grievance procedures, rents, bills, decorating, pets - the list goes on. We even have Rule 7 (disappointingly our particular Rule 7 is only the third definition on Urban Dictionary) to cover pretty much all eventualities that we don't manage to cover in the myriad of other rules.

This might seem like dramatic overkill, but we think it's an important way to shape the culture of the co-op. Radical Routes thinks that they are important too, and having a set of secondary rules, however simple or complex, is a requirement of membership. Respect and common sense come from peoples' behaviour, but it doesn't hurt to have something to point at when something doesn't quite feel right to the rest of the co-op. Agreeing these things while we are all on great terms with each other is also better than trying to thrash them out when there's a emotive issue on the table.

The secondary rules also serve as a good way of outlining what living in our co-op will be like, both for ourselves and for future potential members. When they're done, we will also post them on the blog so that you can have a nosey at them in all their verbose glory. For now, have a gander at these from Mary Ann Johnson Housing Co-op and Rhizome Housing Co-op to get an idea of what we're up to.

- Hannah 

We're back. Sort of.

Hello lovely people!

As Lotte so brilliantly told you in their prior post, we have been away in fields in various places across the country. This has included adventures to Earth First camp, Dance Camp Wales, Women In Tune and the Radical Routes Summer gathering, to plug but a few. We're all glad to be back in our own beds.

And they're still the same beds, because we still don't have a new house yet. Sad times indeed. The search continues, and so do various other machinations of the co-op process. We have another secondary rules workshop (click here to see the secondary rules of an established housing co-op) planned for next week. We also have a repeat viewing of The Tardis and a viewing of another interesting property on the cards next week, so we're not just sitting here twiddling our thumbs. Well, we're managing to squeeze that in too.

We had our first meeting in quite a while this evening, and although it was slightly fraught (tense issues were discussed), we slipped back into consensus decision-making and honest discussion in a way which felt affirming and brilliantly familiar. For those of you with a dread of meetings, I cannot recommend consensus techniques enough. I miss them when I'm in meetings where they're not used. Go and have a read about them, and see if they could make your meetings less arduous.

Right, I'm off to be a Viking for the weekend with this shady lot. Although I'd like to think that swapping modern society for a societal structure from a thousand years ago counts as radical social change, I have to admit that really, I just like dressing up.

We'll post soon about our house viewings and progress on the secondary rules. Fun times, even if we don't have new beds yet.

- Hannah 

*honkshu* (by Lotte)

Our co-op is slightly on hold a little bit. Due to festival season (commonly known as Summer in colloquial language), and therefore many of our members being in fields in far distant lands, sometimes as far as England, it is difficult to be looking around houses. Especially Tardis houses that are technically not at all for sale.

I can assure you that we are not completely asleep, though. I don't feel able to speak for the others, but for me, I am mostly banging on with the gender activism. My latest exciting thing is convincing the UK Deed Poll Service to offer a gender-neutral title on their documents, thus convincing hopefully many more organisations and companies that genderqueer people do exist and won't accept Miss or Mr or whatever.

I also somehow ended up in Lesbilicious.

Leave a comment if you want a signed photo, people.

Starting as we mean to go on...

We have already written the bulk of our secondary rules, and the gist of most of them is that it is the co-op's responsibility to help and encourage it's members to be socially aware and responsible people. Part of this means finding ways to help each other to get involved in things we may find challenging - whether that be doing the co-op's accounts or attending a demonstration - rather than admonishing people for not taking part.

Today this manifested as us going on a picnic in order to discuss the concept of social change. A tricky subject, and thus best accompanied by a tasty lunch and a nice view. As members of Radical Routes (RR) we have promised to be involved in radical social change, but what this really means is a hot topic of debate both within RR and our own co-op. Personally I feel like I have an understanding of the concept of social change, but one person's radicalism is another person's every day, and arriving at a working definition is fraught with difficulty.

To try to work out what radical social change means to us, and how we can help each other to do more of it, we took ourselves up to Rosehill Quarry, assembled lunch on a bench and tried to get our heads around the matter. We used one of our favourite meeting tools - the go-round - to find out what it is that interests us as a group. Queer issues were at the forefront, closely followed by environmental ones. Parenting also got a look-in. We pondered whether our aims involving these things were radical, how we might support each other in campaigning on these fronts, and what we could work on as a group to provide a focus to our activities.

What struck me about these discussions was that they come from a solid foundation of wanting to support each other in our own interests. We thought through ways to use the co-op structure as a basis for forming a wider group, and devised ways in which to lend weight to each others' plans.

Predictably, some of these plans involve cake.

What we end up doing is still open to discussion, but we have ideas, and know that we will have others to help us. We each stated what we were prepared to do, and we have a full spectrum from letter-writers to those keen on more direct action. Change takes all sorts.

Sometimes I think about the notion of the housing co-op, and it seems like a lot of work for somewhere to live. I already have somewhere to live, and so does everyone else in the co-op. We could stay where we are and save a lot of time spent in meetings. But in the short time we have existed, and without us at any point owning a house or even all living in one place, we have already become much more than just a group of housemates. We cook and buy food together, share childcare, help each other with all manner of projects. We are learning about consensus decision-making, non-violent communication, and the compromises and strength that co-operation brings.

Having the co-op as a focus enables us to do far more than just dream of living in a non-landlord-controlled property. I don't know if any of this counts as radical, but our society would certainly be changed for the better if we were more able to share, work together and resolve issues peacefully.

As a rather over-used, but still true, Gandhi quote goes: "You must be the change you wish to see in the world".


Hannah