That was the way it looked on Wed (2/20). As of yesterday, the entire roof is framed.

We’re expecting that we’ll be moving in some time in the fall of this year. Yikes! This means deciding what to do with our condo in Cambridge prontissimo. Should we sell, should we rent it out? And in either case, there’s plenty of fixing up to do.

This morning, I took Emma to a soccer refereeing course in Westborough. After dropping her off, I drove to Berlin and did 3 turns on a 3 mile loop around our future home. Notice how it says “Sawyer HILL”? To which I have this to say: NO SHIT! This was supposed to be an easy slow-paced nine mile run. Instead, it was a serious hill workout. Once we actually live there, I expect to quickly be in awesome shape because of all the hill running.

The site was buzzing with construction activity even at 8am on a Saturday morning. The beeping of heavy equipment backing up can be heard for miles. Our closest neighbors must be getting batty.

And yes, this means I am in training again: weather and flu permitting, I will be running the Hyannis Half-Marathon in two weeks.

As it turned out, it was exceedingly difficult to find an appropriate site for our neighborhood in the western suburbs, close enough to SVS for a reasonable commute. The zoning laws of the towns out here are designed for large houses on large plots and generally do not allow the kind of clustered neighborhood we were planning to build. We went through many possible sites, several times we thought we had found the right spot, only to be thwarted by technical problems with the site or NIMBY opposition from abutters. In the mean time, our group evolved to include families with other educational philosophies, singles, and older couples whose kids had flown the coop.

Two years ago, we were approached by another cohousing group, Camelot Cohousing, who in turn had been approached by the conservation agency The Sudbury Valley Trustees, who in turn had been approached by the Selectmen of the Town of Berlin, MA. There was a large parcel that used be a tree nursery that was coming up for sale. The town had the right of first refusal on the parcel and did not want a typical subdivision that would turn all that very attractive land into asphalt driveways and large houses. The Sudbury Valley Trustees convinced the selectmen that cohousing was a great solution. As part of the arrangement, the project would fall under the state’s 40B housing law, which would ensure that 25% of the units built would be “affordable” under state guidelines. The selectmen agreed to the plan. Camelot and Mosaic Commons would jointly develop the land, building two separate 34 unit cohousing neighborhoods, and preserving most of the parcel as conservation land.

But before the project could go forward, we would have to get a comprehensive permit from the town’s Zoning Board of Appeals. That process turned out to be much more adversarial and contentious than we had been led to expect. Abutters fiercely argued against our project and the board itself was very skeptical about the merits of our project (and frankly, of our “strange” lifestyle). After two years, however, in what for us is still a stunning turn of events, the ZBA granted us our comprehensive permit this past January and the appeals period just ran out without any appeals having been filed.

So, we are ready to finalize our designs, break ground this summer, and move in to our new homes in the fall of 2008.

Even though the average size of the American family has shrunk, the average size of a new home has grown from an average of 983 square feet in 1950 to 2,330 square feet today, according to the National Association of Home Builders. The percentage of new homes over 2,400 square feet has zoomed from 10 percent in 1970 to 38 percent today. The percentage of new homes with two-car garages has grown from 39 percent in 1970 to 82 percent today.

In a New York Times feature this week about ”living large” in the exurbs, a sales representative joked with a family that was looking at a model home, ”Lots of places to hide, aren’t there, boys?” It is mathematically impossible for the rest of the world to live like this. As the boys play hide and seek for a moment, the parents play out the fantasy that hiding from the reality of consuming a quarter of the world’s energy and producing a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases is an all-American right.

Jackson finishes by urging us to ask “ourselves if we need that much room in the exurbs to hide from each other.”

I like this way of looking at what we’re doing with cohousing: not hiding from each other.