I have a good but casual relationship with many of my neighbors, especially since having a baby. Nothing encourages crossing the street or popping around the fence more readily than a fresh-out-of-the-womb infant! We chat about the weather and gardening and the baby, of course. We wave hello if we are in our cars. We occasionally lend one another implements like wheel barrows, and once, my neighbor Paul even took pity on our snowblower-less butts and plowed our driveway! And yet, there’s a closeness lacking that might be nice to have. If I needed a cup of sugar, I’d drive to the Stop & Shop rather than knock on a neighbor’s door.

With that in mind, I was intrigued by a post over at The Simple Dollar that explained how one could set up a simple neighborhood cooperative.

Household equipment Why not share a lawnmower with your neighbor? How about a snowblower? One great model for this exists in our neighborhood, where one person owns a snowblower and provides fuel for it, but is not in good enough physical shape to operate it. Thus, one of her neighbors actually operates the snowblower, using it to blow the snow out of both driveways (and often doing a large swath of the block’s entire sidewalk as well).

Gardening If two or three neighbors all have gardens, why not specialize the gardens and freely share the produce? This allows one family to focus specifically on a crop or two, making garden maintenance easier for all of the people involved. You can even carry this to the level of canning and/or freezing, agreeing to swap prepared garden products with neighbors.

There are other ideas in the post, though I’m not sure how readily I’d leave my baby with a neighbor or share cooking duties on a weekly basis. I would like to get to know my neighbors, however, as previous to this, I’ve been living in apartments for years and years. This was in the cheapest possible sections of Brooklyn, so there was a lot more wall banging and language barriers than friendly interaction. Now I’m curious to know how well you are acquainted with your neighbors.

Someone needs to feed 75½ Bedford Street a sandwich.

If you’re in the market for some place to put down roots and you have a little scratch to toss around, you have a couple of choices. For example, you can buy an existing house or buy a plot of land and have someone build a fresh house to your specs. When you want to make sure you’re as abso-posi-lutely eco-friendly as possible, it’s time to take a pause. After all, it’s not about living in a geodesic dome or digging out an earth house anymore! Today’s “green” homes — the ones that use less energy, are built using fewer resources, and contain a lower volume of nasty chemicals — look just like their neighbors.

Well, most of the time. This eco-house in the Cambridgeshire countryside is pretty unique, inside and out.

But back to the topic at hand! I know I’ve heard a lot of people say that it’s better for the environment to drive a well-maintained used car than to buy a new hybrid, though I don’t know how valid that is. I’ve been trying to figure out whether that same maxim applies to houses as well. Is it better for the environment to buy an older house that’s already been built and then do what you can to retrofit it for eco-friendliness, or is it better to start from zero (either knocking down an extant house or buying a piece of land) with a new house that meets every criteria for greenitude right from the start?

On one hand, there are plenty of things you can do to greenify your home without having to build a new one. On the other hand, there are plenty of sustainable building materials you might use to create a home that is unobtrusive within its environment. The overall expense aside, how does using a previously untouched piece of land fit into the equation?

I’d love to hear your take on this because I haven’t come to any real conclusion yet and my (admittedly spotty) research hasn’t gotten me very far!

It’s fun to see how much house I can buy in other parts of the country with the $300,000 I spent on my own. Sometimes, I cringe knowing that I could have had a big ol’ farmhouse with a nice bit of land in middle America somewhere. Then there are other times when I have to laugh because my chunk of change buys a mere 250 to 350 square feet of living space!

The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran a piece about the apartments in The Cubix Yerba Buena building in SoMa. The Building is filled with “micro-units,” which are essentially tiny little studio apartments that are smaller than the finished half of my basement.

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When I was younger, I’d hear things like “a quarter of a million dollars” and marvel at how much money that must be. Oh, how times have changed! Most of the real estate in my own neighborhood goes for at least twice that, and plenty of the houses just blocks away from my own last sold for far more than a million!

If I had a million bucks, I’d invest the crap out of it in low-risk investments that would sit untouched until it came time for me to retire. I do plan to save up a cool mil, but writing isn’t exactly a profession that nets you sick windfalls unless you’re a J.K. Rowling or a Stephen King. I’m working on it, all right?

So what does one million dollars buy you these days? Forbes had a great slideshow on its web site illustrating what you can get for that sum around the U.S. The pic above is what you can buy in San Fransisco: a 3-bedroom pad with views of the Bay.

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I just happened upon a The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Staging your Home, which is how you know some concept has officially entered the collective consciousness. Naturally, there’s also a Home Staging for Dummies.

I only saw a single staged home when searching for properties around Boston, and I was more than a bit surprised. I saw many, many houses that looked like the owners (or previous owners) hadn’t even bothered to run a dust cloth over the windowsills. Personally, I was mortified when I couldn’t really even tidy up when showing my old apartment. Yes, I could clean the cat hair out of the corners, but the mountains of boxes made staging utterly impossible. However, the apartment was in a desirable area and cheap to boot, so it was snapped up quickly.

Why stage? According to a study conducted by Realtor Joy Valentine, staged homes tend to sell more quickly than their un-staged counterparts. Even better, the average difference between the sale price and the list price is 6.3%, versus a paltry 1.6% for unstaged homes. That means mo’ money. It’s pretty easy, too, when you consider the basic rules: declutter, let there be light, give a good first impression, show off your trendiest and more beautiful stuff, make rooms look bigger, and hide life’s detritus.

You are, after all, selling a HOUSE not a HOME, and there’s a big difference between the two. My mother-in-law had a beautiful house filled with fabulous antiques that really enhanced the space from the point of view of someone living in the house. But her house didn’t sell until she took the advice of her Realtor and put all those wonderful pieces in storage. He said, and I quote loosely, that people coming to see the house were gushing over her antiques and forgetting all about scrutinizing the structure housing them. Oops!

Here are some basic staging tips from About.com:

• Arrange sparse pieces of furniture in an appealing grouping known as a vignette
• Showcase a generous usage of soft fabrics such as silk, lambswool, satin
• Display unusual knickknacks in units of 1, 3 or 5
• Drape window coverings with simple lines
• Add unique elements to shelving, bookcases and fireplace mantels, which draw attention to predetermined areas

If your furniture isn’t that hot, pick the best pieces and stow the rest. If you don’t have any high-end knickknacks, pick the funkiest, hippest ones that will have mass appeal–think a kitschy vintage glass elephant statue, not a penis-shaped lava lamp. Frankly, I try to keep my kitchen and living room at a staged home level of neatness all the time because, hey, I never know when the Queen or Patrick Stewart might drop by.

Whatever you do, for goodness sakes don’t “chop” your pillows. That was considered cool for about a week until someone finally had the guts to tell the San Francisco staging company that started it all that chopped pillows look ridonculous.

…beach huts are going for £60,000.

That princely sum will buy you “The Ark,” which measures a mere 5 meters by 1.8 meters, according to the Daily Mail. For 50 years, the vessel (crafted using reclaimed timber, driftwood, and the upper bits of a grocery van) has stood on the mud flats of Burnham Overy Staithe, near King’s Lynn, Norfolk…and it shows.

Max Sowerby, of Norfolk-based Sowerby’s estate agents, said: “We’re getting strong interest already – generally from people who have second homes in the area.

“Some people who see it say ‘that’s a lot of money for a beach hut’.

“Others say it’s incredibly good value and ‘where else would you find something like that?’. You wouldn’t get permission to build it now.

That’s an incredibly good value these days? Take away the bed and it looks like the inside of my garden shed! Something has definitely got to give and soon.

If you’ve never checked out Prefabcosm, you’re missing out. It’s a resource for pre-fab and modular homes that’s full of cool images (real snapshots and concept designs) and links to manufacturers of slick, boxy structures. I like to browse in case I ever decide to replace my little cottage with something that will be delivered to my property on a series of trucks.

The Loblolly house from KieranTimberlake Associates LLP forces me to sin because every time I look at the pictures I start to covet it. It’s named for the tall pines that sit on and around its site on the Chesapeake Bay, and it’s crafted from pre-fab panels that distribute radiant heating, hot and cold water, waste water, ventilation, and electricity through the house. How cool is that?

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Even though I bought a house and am going nowhere fast, I still like to browse the home listings. My enjoyment is increased markedly when a house is staged well or I’m enamored with the decor. In the case of this single-family dwelling on the market for a cool $949,000, I think I’m not so much enamored as I am hypnotized.

You, like me, may not have the dough necessary to remodel your kitchen with the goal of making it look like a converted Nascar pit, but you can take the same aesthetic and apply it in the space you already have. Okay, it will cost you a little cash, but not nearly as much as you’d spend hiring a contractor to come in and put up a new checkered backsplash.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

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I live in one of those towns whose name inspires images of grand well-established homes to form in people’s minds. The fun part is that some people will automatically assume I live in some sort of high class manse when the truth of the matter is that I live in a home more akin to a cottage. Looking a the homes for sale in my area is odd because I think of my town is being squarely suburban when I am indirectly surrounded by richie riches. Hey, at least the schools are good!

So just for fun, I thought I’d post some pics taken from the real estate listings of homes currently for sale in my area. If there’s the same sort of economic divide where you live, give us a link to some of the more beautiful houses on the market.

This home costs $3,150,000, which means it’s ten times more expensive than my little abode!

The room you see before you is part of a house that’s even pricier at $4,600,000.

$4,950,000 will buy you one heck of a view, apparently.

I’d planned to post more snapshots of opulence –being that there are plenty to be found — but WordPress is apparently having some kind of uploading hiccup. So for now, all I have to do is sit and wait for all that prosperity to trickle down to my side of town, right? They do say a home is an investment!