Still time for some Winter activities, and a taste of warmer weather to come… until the next snow storm, at least 😉
Meet up at the Bozeman Cohousing property to ski laps on our little groomed cross country ski loop in the old horse pasture.
Skiing the tower falls trail in Yellowstone National Park on a warm March day.
Cohousers enjoy a pickup hockey game on the outdoor rink at Bozeman’s Southside Park
Baby goats on the way…
We’re getting ready for baby goats! The kids and grown-ups worked together to get fresh straw bedding in the barn and set up stalls for mamas and new kids.
Appreciative goats 🙌 😄
Our kids got to ice fish for the first time. A beautiful sunny day to be on the ice even though we didn’t catch anything.
Bozeman’s own Random Acts of Silliness treated visitors to Story Mill Park to a Menagerie of the Imaginary, filled with friendly, whimsical creatures!
Cedar Allison-Bunnell gets the recipe for Scottish Shortbread, offered by Woolbert, the baking blue mammoth
XC Skiing and Hockey
Enjoying some of Montana’s wide open spaces and natural beauty while traversing on skis and skates.
Raising these kiddos to be ready for playing outside no matter what the weather is easier to do in community. The kids quit complaining that it is only 5 degrees out and instead focus on racing each other to the top of the ski hill!
Ready, set, go! A beautiful, cold, fun day of cross country skiing in Yellowstone National Park with our soon to be neighbors.
laying some fresh tracks on public land
This seems like a good place to stop… erm… high centered
Calcite Springs on the Yellowstone River in YNP
Not all cohousers are braving the Montana winter (yet!) — Brendan, Jane Lee currently call Hawai’i home, and recently took time to explore the Big Island and Volcanoes State Park. While Carol enjoys the balmy Colorado winter.
Waipi’o Valley on the Big Island
Kilauea Volcano at night
Carol’s Sassy Girl takes an icy swim in Colorado’s February waters!
Hiking around the crater of Kilauea Volcano in Volcanoes National Park
Of course we like to enjoy some good old fashioned grillin’ and chillin’ in the chill.
Spontaneous winter cookout, campfire, and sledding with future cohousing neighbors at the Hyalite Pavilion. The kids braved the braved the cold and by rotating who was in front of the fire, we managed to keep everyone warm.
Ron & Jennifer cooking out – shortly before Ron left to go work on a movie. He works as a production sound mixer.
We have a great big, beautiful Valentine for all of the current and future members of our community: After almost two months of review, discussion, and proposals on the Design Development process, we have agreed on all the refinements to the floor plans and finishes for the Bozeman Cohousing buildings. Studio Co+hab beautifully embodied the program priorities set by the group last year, so the final changes were largely tweaks and polishes based on our collective lived experience.
What began as an exercise in taking stock of how we currently live in our own spaces has crystalized into an exercise in imaging how we will eventually live in our new shared and personal spaces. And that vision of the future is tantalizing indeed.
Our family will be living in a second-floor flat next to the atrium. We’ll be able to bring things from the parking lot to the side door in our recumbent cargo trike. Then it’s up a covered flight of stairs made airy with a high clerestory and into our home. Muddy shoes and boots can stay just outside the door.
Since I’m the breakfast cook on weekdays, I’ll start out in our compact but full-featured all-electric kitchen. The marmoleum floor is soft and easily warms to my feet. The white cabinets and walls contribute to the sense of open light, as well as tease us to consider what more distinctive color we might want to paint them. From the sink in the central island, I can chop kale and onions for our morning scramble on the bamboo counter while I look out at the Bridgers through our living room window. Once she’s up, my wife can drink her tea in the sunny, open dining area, or in good weather, out on the deck, where she’s certain to be joined by our two cats.
On laundry day, we’ll be just a quick indoor walk to the shared washer/dryers in the common house, which will have all the power of high-capacity machines in a laundromat, but none of the bad feng shui. An outdoor drying rack will give our clothes that elusive sunshine freshness. While we wait for our laundry, we can go home, or we can make a cup of coffee in the common kitchen and visit with neighbors in the atrium even when it’s not terribly hospitable outside.
Friday night is our family movie night, and we can either enjoy our personal choice in our own living room, or join the group cinema experience in the common house dining room. Several members are musically inclined, and there will undoubtedly be talent shows and performances as the spirit moves.
Even though none of the private homes are all that far from the common house, other households have chosen to be a bit more away from the hustle and bustle. Some residents will stay warm with an optional wood stove. Options for carpet, marmoleum, and other hard flooring options will suit everyone’s desire for comfort and the realities of kids and pets. Folks living in the smaller homes won’t have to give up too much counter space, thanks to compact appliances just the right size for fewer people.
All told, the efficiently planned indoor spaces of our community will be so inviting, comfortable, and cozy that we may not feel like going anywhere else!
Making and decorating a gingerbread house took the kids to the Candy Jar to pick out decorations
Baking goodies to give family as gifts has been a tradition in our family for years. This year, I felt compelled to make 6 different kinds of treats and bake 2 pies to compensate for a COVID Christmas. 😂😂😅😅 Its a good thing Annaliese likes to bake with me- we made quick and fun work out of baking, decorating and packaging for delivery!
–Megan
The Gingerbread Man
Tor and Aurora’s cookies ready to be iced
Glazing cookies
The annual Christmas Stroll looked much different this year. But Chad and Megan created their own little family fun outing. They have been walking the stroll since they first moved to Bozeman and have loved sharing the tradition with Annaliese.
Downtown is so beautiful this time of year!
Ida and her brother, Sorin, finished putting together the family’s 1000-piece Christmas puzzle, an annual holiday tradition in their household!
Aurora and her grandmother deliver presents to Cuban refugees. She helped plan the gifts for the kids of five families and wrapped all their presents. She says that meeting them was fulfilling and she was happy to give gifts to kids who wouldn’t have gotten any. She even got to speak a bit of Spanish. 🙌
Getting Outdoors
Mark, Denali & Lochlan find a choice candidate
Cutting down a Christmas tree at Brackett Creek
Ida and her dad, Jed, getting the Christmas tree! This tree came from Crosscut, because they’re asking folks to cut down trees in the area where their new lodge will be built! Note Ida’s classy dress for the occasion…
Taking a walk on the ranch, looking for caves. We found animal bones and guano and lots of curious deer.
Chipping away ice to go “ice fishing” in Bozeman at a local stream by our home
It’s getting real, folks! Last week Bozeman Cohousing members convened for not one but two marathon “Design Development Workshops.” Our amazing architects from Studio Co+hab brought the details large and small into focus. The drawings are almost final, and we’ve reviewed their recommendations for everything from roof trusses to door handles–in all over a hundred separate components in the common house and private homes.
Studio Co+hab architects introduce the Design Development process
Now I can much more vividly imagine myself working in the kitchen of the common house, enjoying the glowing afternoon light. An induction stove begins heating water for the pasta the moment I turn it on. While we slice veggies at the bamboo-topped kitchen island, kids play in the room next door. When the meal is over, cleanup goes quickly as we feed dishes through the industrial sterilizer. We mop the Marmoleum floor and we’re done. Going home, the recycled carpet keeps our toes warm, and my wife, Jodi, can play her viola without disturbing our neighbors, thanks to a sound dampening system in the floors and extra insulation in the interior walls.
Show and tell gave us all the pertinent details and specs of recommended products and finishes
Underneath all these materials and finishes, the defining characteristic of our new neighborhood will be mostly invisible when we move in. That’s because state-of-the-art energy efficiency technologies and constructions methods permeate the entire design. The overall goal the community set was “Net-Zero,” which is a fancy way of saying, “We want our buildings to have the smallest possible carbon footprint, all the way down to none.” That is, after all the energy goes in and out, there is minimal ongoing fossil fuel use.
Four major aspects of the planned design and construction aim to get us as close to net-zero as we can given our necessarily finite budget.
First, the Bozeman Cohousing buildings will be all-electric. That’s right, no natural gas will be used or available in the future. Even though our utility provider, Northwestern Energy, is being slow to transition the 40% of its generation currently coming from fossil fuels (looking at you, Coalstrip), as the grid eventually and inevitably moves to all renewable energy, our energy use will become renewable instead of locked to a fossil fuel infrastructure. Not burning fossil fuels for heating and cooking can also significantly improve indoor air quality in our homes.
We want our buildings to have the smallest possible carbon footprint, all the way down to none.
Second, we expect to have full photovoltaic installations on all the buildings as part of initial construction. These solar arrays will be fed into the net-metering system that sells excess power back to the grid, and all of the homes will share the savings in power costs.
Third, the home designs fanatically reduce the need to consume energy to begin with, following the Passive House standard, which defines how to make a home consume minimal energy for heating and cooling. Along with double pane windows and maximal insulation in the walls, floors, and ceilings, each building’s exterior envelope, or skin, will be completely sealed using the AeroBarrier system to prevent drafts. Just like spraying a sealant into your flat tire to patch the hole, AeroBarrier fills even the littlest gaps in the outer walls before the inside is finished.
Also, a thorough analysis of the natural light in every space helped the architects adjust window and solar tube placement to minimize dependence on artificial lighting during the daytime. When it is needed, all built-in lighting will be LED, using a fraction of the power and being much more durable than even compact fluorescent fixtures.
In-depth analysis provided insight into window placement and overall lighting strategy
Finally, the mechanical systems will also be as efficient as possible. Heating and cooling with heat pump technology is just the start. Even our clothes can be dried and our hot water can be heated with heat pumps. And a heat recovery ventilator will circulate fresh air from outside, but use the stale air leaving the house to heat or cool it as it leaves. What’s all this fuss about heat pumps? In essence, they move existing heat from one place to another — either from a hot place to cool it down, or into a cold place to warm it up — without burning additional fuel to generate more heat. We don’t just have to obey the laws of physics, we can take advantage of them, too, and it turns out this is extremely efficient.
Taken together, these thoughtful designs and sophisticated features will help us reduce our energy consumption to the bare minimum. When we’ve put that much effort into sustainable construction, why not be recognized with LEED certification? We decided that the time and money required to be formally LEED certified would be better used in actually making our homes efficient and sustainable, and Studio Co+hab has certainly delivered. The designs actually do incorporate several LEED standards around daylight, material choices, and indoor air quality. And of course the net-zero goal is an objective target rather than a vague aspiration.
