About 5 years ago I helped my clients Tim and Elizabeth purchase their first home in the Cully neighborhood. It was an older home on a nice sized lot with a lot of old house quirks. Earlier this year in the year (though it feels like it was 10 years ago) they contacted me because a new co-housing development was about to break ground right in the heart of the Cully neighborhood called Cully Green. Built by Orange Splot, who is well known for their green building, use of whimsical features and lots of real wood in their buildings, Cully Green is a community of 23 homes- 22 newly built townhomes and 1 home from the 1920’s that is original to the space. Tim and Elizabeth heard about this new community and had gone to a couple of meetings to learn more, and realized this was going to be exactly the kind of community that they wanted to be a part of. Featuring a community building, gardens, and even a sauna- some of the highlights of physical features of living in a co-housing situation along with the opportunity to build a new community from the ground up was super appealing to them. The buildings in the development are built around several courtyards with large covered front porches designed to invite neighbors to pull up a chair and chat. We wrote up an offer on a yet to be built unit in early March,and at the time we wrote up the offer, the expected completion date was around January/February of 2021.
Then Covid hit, and like everything else in the world, the whole project timeline was thrown for a loop as everyone hunkered down at the beginning of the pandemic. With a month or so, it became clear that because of Covid, a lot of the subcontractors on the job were going to have more time to devote to Cully Green since so many smaller projects stopped, or delayed starting. With all of the contractors and subcontractors going full steam ahead, we were notified in early summer that the homes should be ready for occupancy by late October or early November! In late August we put their home on the market and thankfully got a great offer that accommodated Tim and Elizabeth’s closing on Cully Green. The sale on their home went really well, and they closed right on time. As is often the case with new construction, by the end of October it was pretty clear their new home would not be ready to close the first week in November due to paperwork issues. Since we had already timed the sale of their house to coincide with the closing on Cully Green, the Cully Green folks were gracious enough to let Tim and Elizabeth take early occupancy otherwise they would have had to find someplace to stay for a couple of weeks with their pup. So while they moved into their home about 2 weeks before they officially closed, it was pretty still pretty exciting to meet them at their new home and see the whole project finished.