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Watering Green February 24, 2010

Filed under: Home Innovations — tracee ribar @ 4:07 pm

Two local guys are helping folks keep flowers and foliage green without sucking your water bill dry. This is taken from their site, www.rainbrothers.com and tells the story of how it all began…

Our story begins with two friends: Jonathan, a long-time community gardener living on the near eastside of Columbus who, after working with an amazing group of people at Old First Presbyterian Church in trying to grow bountiful community gardens to get fresh produce into the struggling neighborhood, discovered that water access was a major problem; and Zach (aka “Gordy”) whose passion for sustainable development meshed with the water access problem, giving birth to a rain barrel.  So the two friends built rain barrels for the community gardens.  And then they built rain barrels for other gardens.  And, soon, people all across the great land of Columbus were requesting that rain barrels be built for them.

A business was born.

But wait, there is more. These guys are awesome. If you want to help the environment, save money AND have an enviable outdoors blooming with an abundance of greenery and eye-popping color, well these guys could be your “feel good” answer.

According to the RainBros, the average roof size for those of us in the United States is 989 sq. ft.  On that size roof, with a 1” rainfall, a household can collect roughly 560 gallons of rainwater.  Columbus, Ohio (where the Rain Brothers live) averages 37” of precipitation per year, which equates to over 20,000 gallons of water going down a resident’s downspouts every year! Wow.

In their words:

*We (all the partners of Rain Brothers) commit to live simple and sustainable lifestyles, and to ground our work in communities where poverty strikes most deeply, in hope that we can provide employment opportunities and a learning environment to help create meaningful employment.

*We pledge to invest profits in our community and in ideas/projects that further a “greening” and an inbreaking of justice within our locale.

*We commit to not let fear or a quest for profit control us, but to make every decision in faith, love, and a commitment to serve.

In other words, we are more than a business — we are prisoners of hope and believers of a vision.  We are “the little business that could… and is!” 

Come, build something with us.

Amen Brothers!

 

market trend February 22, 2010

Filed under: Real Estate — tracee ribar @ 12:54 am

reprinted from RIS media 1.2010

Homes are trending smaller but here are the top ten”must haves”:

Paul Cardis, CEO of AVID Ratings Co., which conducts an annual survey of home buyer preferences, said there are 10 “must” features in new homes:

1. Large kitchens, with an island. “If you’re going to spend design dollars, spend them where people want them—spend them in the kitchen,” McCune said. 2. Granite countertops are a must for move-up buyers and buyers of custom homes, but for others “they are on the bubble,” Cardis said.

3. Energy-efficient appliances, high-efficiency insulation and high window efficiency. Among the “green” features touted in homes, these are the ones buyers value most, said Cardis. While large windows had been a major draw, energy concerns are giving customers pause on those. The use of recycled or synthetic materials is only borderline desirable.

4. Home office/study. People would much rather have this space rather than, say, a formal dining room. “People are feeling like they can dine out again and so the dining room has become tradable,” Cardis said. And the home theater may also be headed for the scrap heap, a casualty of the “shift from boom to correction.”

5. Main-floor master suite. This is a must feature for empty-nesters and certain other buyers, and appears to be getting more popular in general. That could help explain why demand for upstairs laundries is declining after several years of popularity gains.

6. Outdoor living room. The popularity of outdoor spaces continues to grow, even in Canada. The idea of an outdoor room is even more popular than an outdoor cooking area, meaning people are willing to spend more time outside.

7. Master suite soaker tubs. Whirlpools are still desirable for many home buyers, but they clearly went down a notch in the latest survey. Oversize showers with seating areas are also moving up in popularity.

8. Stone and brick exteriors. Stucco and vinyl don’t make the cut.

9. Community landscaping, with walking paths and playgrounds. Forget about golf courses, swimming pools and clubhouses. Buyers in large planned developments prefer hiking among lush greenery.

10. Two-car garages. A given at all levels; three-car garages, in which the third bay is more often than not used for additional storage and not automobiles, is desirable in the move-up and custom categories.