2: The foundation

I'm hoping to not belabor this, so here's a short chronological timeline of how the project came into being:

July '06: I was living at CPX (a co-op in college terrace), but was going to have to move out at the end of September since I didn't have a room for the upcoming school year. I started looking into places to live on craigslist, and saw that Magic (another co-op in evergreen park about 5 blocks from CPX) had a room available for the beginning of September. My good friend Heather lives at Magic, and its a pretty nice place (three properties all right next to each other, 15 adults and 3 kids spread between them, etc.), so I went over for dinner and was very interested in living there.

The one sticking point was that they wanted someone to commit for a full year, which I wasn't sure I could do since I was kind of waiting to hear back about a job. They said that it was fine and to get back to them when I knew better what my situation would be for the next year.

August '06: I still hadn't heard about the job, but was starting to get antsy about finding a place to live. By the time the end of August was coming up, I finally just decided to commit for a full year even though I still didn't know exactly what I was doing, and sent Magic an e-mail saying that if the room was still available that I could commit to it. Unfortunately, they had just offered the room to another guy the day before and he had accepted. Nonetheless, they invited me over for dinner again to talk about the possibility of other (most-likely) temporary housing options.

Their offer was to let me stay for as long as I wanted in this 10'x12' vertical wall canvas army tent they had set up in the backyard, and they said if I still wanted it when the rain started then they would be willing to build a platform for it. I wasn't super-psyched on using the tent as a long-term thing, but went away from that dinner at least knowing that I had an interim place.

September '06: The wheels had started turning in my head, and a couple days later I came back to Magic with a counter-proposal. I reasoned that if they were willing to build a platform, then what about letting me add walls and a roof to that platform? They were intrigued by the idea, and asked me to do a little research into it and sketch something up for them to look at. I sketched up a design, and after looking at it, they came back with a counter proposal that they would let me build the little house I proposed, but that they wanted to make it and even rounder exchange. They wanted me to help them build a carport before starting construction on my little house, and in exchange they would provide all the materials for my structure, and would help me build it.

The deal with the carport was that the city of Palo Alto requires every property to have at least one off-street covered car parking space. In their recent remodel of the corner house, they had converted their garage into a nice music room with a hardwood floor, and when the inspector had come to do the final inspection, he noticed the flammable floor in the garage, and told Magic that they either had to get rid of the floor or build a new car parking space (the carport). Is pretty silly, since there will probably never be a car parked in the carport (there aren't that many cars at Magic), but that’s what the city requires.

To me this seemed like a fair deal, and I agreed to it in early September. As such, I've spent a little more than a month working on the carport, and it is coming to completion soon (within a few weeks, if everything goes to plan). Then the construction on my little house can begin.