bostonbubble.com

[ConcernedCitizen2]

I'd like to buy a plot of land and build my own home that would have very strong green credentials (not so much from a pure tree hugging point of view) but more to isolate myself from direct dependency on the price of oil.

Have you heard of friends etc who have been able to do this in a cost-effective, low hassle way in the Greater Boston area? I suspect I'd have to go to way outside 495 belt or up to NH/ME. I like being close to the city so I think this is an unattainable pipe dream.

What about even buying a really beaten up foreclosure place and tearing it down? Any experience with zoning rules and regs here?

I'm willing to live in not rich and glamorous but fairly safe places like Roslindale/Medford/Malden/Quincy/Somerville etc.

[melonrightcoast]

My husband and I are exploring this, and we have learned quite a bit.

Building a "green" home comes with a premium. Period. If you have a tight budget, scrap that idea. However, building regs for new construction have tightened and new homes now are much more energy efficient, even without Energy Star rating.

The most cost effective builders we have found are modular home builders. The biggest and oldest in New England are Epoch and New England Homes.

The cost of land is still very high. Also, depending on what town you are looking into, there can be considerable site costs and restrictions because of wetlands requirements, septic regulations, etc.

According to the builders we have spoken with, demolition is the standard way new houses are built within I-495.

All that said, we've been quoted $135/sq ft for a new modular home, including septic installation (not design), site costs etc. That price does NOT include land costs.

Also, we are surprised at the number of developers that are STILL buying land at these high prices. They are our biggest competition in trying to buy land ourselves.

Summary: if you can get a buildable lot for under $200K without expensive site costs, you can have a 2000sq ft modular home for under $500K
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melonrightcoast ... are you?

[ConcernedCitizen2]

Hi Melonrightcoast,
Thanks very much for the info. Alas, I think it's going to be above my budget.
This is something I'd like to do but I realise it might be impossible in metro Boston:
http://www.naturalhomemagazine.com/Homes/Straw-Bale-Home-Small-Secondhand.aspx

[melonrightcoast]

[balor123]

Try this guy

[john p]

If you care about "Green" the best thing to do is live right next door to your work so you don't burn much energy in your commuting.

People who actually romantically love nature actually do more harm than city dwellers because city dwellers don't chop down trees to build a 1/8 mile driveway through the woods....

The next big thing is minimalism. The less space and less material means less waste. Because the Green Building Council is funded by contractors and material suppliers, this point is often overlooked because less building material and smaller, more efficient square footage buildings are cheaper to build and use less material. Al Gore is one of those bleeding hearts with his heart in the right place, but doesn't walk the walk on this one. He and his wife live in a 10,000 foot house that uses more electricity than something like 15 average homes consumption.

The next big thing is a building envelope. the exterior walls and roof and foundation are like your winter jacket. If you live in an old drafty house with poor insulating windows you'll waste a lot of energy to heat and cool it.

There are many measures in between that help mitigage energy consumption but those are the big ones.

My wife was getting into the whole Green thing because she saw that cool concert. I told her that she ought to drink out of the faucet instead of getting the Poland Springs water dispenser thing... She also wanted an SUV and when I reminded Mrs. Green that they didn't get good mileage she came up with some of the best b.s. I'd ever heard. She said because I took the train, we as a family were balanced. She was trying to trade on my carbon credits so I threw the flag. She ended up with one of those Subaru Foresters which gets like 25 miles per gallon. She's also driving at least 10 days a week about 20 miles one way to go to "Hot Yoga". I told her she's no better than those celebrities that talk about the environment while they fly around on their private jets. I told her I was the real hero (which I try to impress on her always. she knows better... anyway) I told her I was the hero while I stood and waited for the commuter rail and froze my peaches off while she listened to her IPod in her warm car. She doesn't even have Skynard so it is total bush leagued. I did the Hyannis 10k this weekend and this one old lady had an IPod and I asked her if she had any Neil Diamond on it and she said yes. That's like having high octane gas in your tank.

[melonrightcoast]

john p: too funny about your wife

Yes, I think you have brought up a very good difference in being "green" and being trendy. I think actually being green, which I think of as reducing consumption of energy and materials and recycling/reusing materials, is very difficult for the average American to grasp. And many people (myself included) have our limitations about what we are willing to sacrifice to be "green". My husband refuses to take a travel mug with him to Starbucks, even though he goes 5 times a week. Absolutely refuses, even though we have two or three travel mugs. So, not only is he wasting $ at Starbucks, he is wasting a bunch of trees using their paper cups. But I can only nag so much and then it gets pointless because he does not want to change. For me, I don't want to sacrifice on home space, mostly as a compensation for the long winters here and having family stay with us for extended periods.

I would love to put a geothermal heating system into a house, but there aren't many companies doing it here yet (compared to West Coast) and they cost a lot to install compared to a typical furnace or boiler (don't know the exact numbers). We have friends that did it out west, and they are very glad they did now that energy prices have spiked.

If every one of us truly tried to be a little more "green", I think we'd 1)amaze ourselves at the reduction of energy and materials used 2) wreck the American economy. I taught an ecology camp to middle school kids several years ago, and one of the games we played was meant to show them how much energy was used by simply buying bagged carrots in a grocery store vs. growing them in our garden:

Grocery Store: grow carrots, pick carrots, wash and sort carrots (machine), peel carrots (machine), bag carrots, transport carrots to store, transport carrots home, wash carrots

Garden: grow carrots, pick carrots, wash carrots, peel carrots

But if you look at that from economic point of view, if we all started growing our own carrots, there would be A LOT of jobs lost.
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melonrightcoast ... are you?

[john p]

I have a couple of friends who are the real deal when it comes to the whole environment thing. We did a day trip to Wellfleet a couple of weeks ago and we walked around the Cedar Swamp and the sand cliffs at Marconi Beach. Oh, and we got those Wellfleet Oysters and washed them down with that Buzzard's Bay ale... anyway, what was my point...

oh yeah, they said that you actually get more healthy by eating local produce because it helped build immunities to certain local alergies or something.

These guys are out there and when they saw I used an electric trimmer to do my hedges they looked at it like I clubbed a baby seal. I didn't have the time to do the Mr. Miagi Karate Kid trim job so I just did the Marine haircut. I got their point about it, but I'm a new homeowner and I need a little more time in the oven to get it right. Oh, my wife of course wanted that "Green" fertilizer which cost like 10 times the amount of Scotts. Many of my neighbors offered help when they saw my lawn getting kind of burnt so I was between a rock and a hard place. It was kind of weird because you'd find people who had spent their careers in the industry telling me opposite things like oh, you're over watering it, or you're underwatering it or don't water at night to dump all the water on it at night.

Anyway, the other thing is that this whole Stimulus stuff for "weatherization" will most likely be a scam for the most part. In many cities we have "Community Development Departments". These used to be the old adminsters of Community Development Block Grants. Typically, people would apply for these home renovations and they'd get approved for a grant or loan and some local inspector would come out to make sure the job was done right. In many areas this whole practice was corrupt kind of like how people used to scam the automobile insurance industry and now you've got rules about photographs, inspections, etc. Obama's Tony Rezko was a guy who used to embezzle money that was set aside for poor people in their slums in these capital improvement projects. It is very funny for me because I have street smarts to see the corruption and some technical knowledge to see how many of the token gestures are boneheaded.

Oh, last note, I read an article about a month ago in the Globe about this "Green" office building in Cambridge. I wrote an e-mail to the author of the article and told him how the image of the building did none of what it said from a performance perspective. The author e-mailed back and said that the Globe took a photo of the wrong building..... I wonder how many shitheads sent notes of praise to the writer as he is supposed to be some big muckety-muck in the architectural critics world...

[balor123]

Southpark calls it "Smugness".

[john p]

http://locus.cwrl.utexas.edu/jbrown/node/182

Oh, that's a pearl.

[ConcernedCitizen2]

I know I'm going to get some flack for this one, but believe me I do shower, wear makeup and read People magazine like any normal person. I can't wait to see the hate mail coming!!!!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7213574616695878568

It's a bit slow so here were my original notes:
GBP 10,000 to build (this is not a typo)
Featured on Country File
Amazon Nails helped him build
2 bed house
Brian Stingwer
Abergewaney, Wales

Can you imagine me building this in a brownfield site in Quincy as I'd like to? I won't make it out alive.

p.s. totally agree on the smugness
I try to be green but then I checked my carbon footprint and even thought I live in a 1 bed apartment in the city and take public transport, I have the carbon footprint of a family of 6 with 2 SUVs because of all the flights I take. You can't really win.

[john p]

the lady with the mullot and the grizzly adams guy are great. Remember Grizzly Adams and how he was friends with that bear. Think about that chimpanzee that went bezeerk on his owner.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmbAleKTIN4&feature=related

I guess the bear in this movie acually killed his trainer.

[GenXer]

I know somebody who built a house in a suburban town in MA. I wouldn't wish this on anybody, unless they would like to learn the meaning of the term 'cost over-run'. Also, the meaning of 'quality' and 'deadline'. After that, they will learn the meaning of 'ARM' or 'Alt-A'. And thereafter the word 'layoff' would send them to a hospital with a heart attack. And don't forget, when your house is down to $500k from the $700k you paid for it, with the median house prices in your town being $300k -$400k, then you will understand the meaning of 'despair'.

If you'd like to build your own house, NH may be a much better place. I'm sure there are some western MA towns where that can be arranged pretty cheaply. But who wants to commute 100 miles one way to work...

[JCK]

Probably worth investing in a good lawyer to draw up the contract if you're going to build a house. If you don't have price cap in the contract, you can be sure the contractor is going to take you for a ride.

[john p]

Construction is kind of about politics. If a contractor has a good reputation established, they either grow and maintain the reputation or start to cash in on it and start ripping people off. If you are well connected and people in the community trust your word, contractors are less likely to mess with you. If you're a young yuppie couple and they screw you and complain, the contractor can tell everyone else that you were high maintenance and their reputation might go unblemished.

In a growing construction market, builders try to do a decent job because they're hoping to build their reputation. If it is going off, it is harder to coordinate because subcontractors don't show up on schedule etc. In a down market. Material costs go haywire if the US dollar falls, we get global demand or material suppliers have cut back on inventories and you get these supply chain imbalances. Material costs fluxuations and getting peopel to show up to the job are the biggest wild cards.

When you have more tradesmen than work, you often see Unions trying to stretch out a job by limiting the numbers of bricks you lay in a day or making sure people get a coffee break etc. In a balanced market, their claims make sense because you can burn your back out pretty quickly if the market doesn't have a circuit breaker. Looking at the pot bellies and luxury pick-up trucks, you can get a sense that this is not a real concern as it once was. Managers also try to stretch out a job by mismanagement. Like I was saying about entropy, they waste working energy by directing things into disorder. Contractors are masters of giving excuses and actually getting paid to fail. So in a down economy contractors get politically connnected and then blame everything for delaying the job and adding costs.

The way to solve this is to get a younger company where the owner does the actual work on site, they have completed many similar projects and have very good references from couples just like you. If people don't do their homework and young couples give a job to someone that is full of crap, the guy that should have gotten the job most likely will be the subcontractor of the snake oil salesman that got it. Another way to protect yourself is to have a specifications list of the materials you want. If you have good drawings that capture the scope of work and you pick out the specific countertops, cabinets, windows, carpets, moldings, staircase treads railings and ballustres, the roof shingles, the siding, etc. they won't be able to do a bait and switch and give you substandard faucets and light fixtures. Often times they offer "allowances", but if you have a specification list it gets you out of that grey area. Also, as far as construction financing, cash flow can be a problem. Often times a bank won't give you all the money until certain things are completed so if you don't have adequate cash reserves a delay in one trade could hold up different levels of financing.

I think a family business is a good route and if they have a similar house that they have done, you're in the right category.