Sweet Pond Eco Community
773 Guilford Street
Brattleboro, VT 05301
sweetpondeco@yahoo.com

Please note this website is for informational purposes only. We are still in the planning stage and the project and community features may continue to change as the project evolves.
  

Project & Updates

  

Execution

The land for Sweet Pond was purchased by T and Z who are serving as the developer for the project. They have funded the soft costs and pre-development work to date. This includes engineering studies, architectural design, project management, and of course carrying the property. The Sweet Pond team extensively researched cohousing, eco villages, and other forms of intentional community in developing our model. On a daily basis we meet with the various members of our professional team and are ushering the project from vision to reality. Major site work will commence followed by construction of units when the first three units are under contract. The Sweet Pond team will manage the project through completion of construction when control and responsibility for the community will fully transfer to the rest of the members.

  

Timeline

  • June 2006 - purchased 102 beautiful acres of land in Guilford, VT
  • Summer 2006-Spring 2007 - visited other co-housing communities, did extensive research, fully developed our model, began soils testing and surveying
  • Summer 2007 - began house design, site planning, and lots more soil testing
  • Fall 2007 - set the number of units, location and lay-out on property, and selected our house design
  • December 07 to January 08 - we are finishing the final design phase, setting prices, and working to secure construction financing
  • February to March 2008 - first units will be available for pre-construction purchase
  • Spring 2008 - we hope to begin major site work when the ground thaws with construction on the first homes to follow

4/8/08

    Our first site improvement project is nearly complete. In the past two weeks we have had some trees and brush cleared from the apple orchard where the homes will be built. The logs have been stacked and will be used for some outbuilding construction and firewood for our first winter. The stumps will be removed later in the season but it was important to get the trees down while their was still snow on the ground. We will begin to thicken the tree line along the wall on the inside of the wall along Sweet Pond Road later in the Spring or early summer.

3/18/08

    We have finished switching the website back to a format that everyone can see. Research indicates that 3% of internet users in the US had browsers that could not read the old site properly. There is also a bug in the new Internet Explorer which still has not been fixed and was causing chaos. Mozilla makes the world a better place. http://www.mozilla.org/

2/16/08

    Homes are now available for presale. We will have our next Open House on Sunday March 9. If you have any questions about the project or homes please let us know.

1/31/08

    The next newsletter is going out tomorrow, February 1 but is available today on the website. Open House February 10 1:00 for interested folks. Legal documents are all done but we are waiting for approval from our attorney before we post them online. We will have copies available at the open house. The Virtual Walkthrough has been delivered but in two pieces and the commentary is showing up funny. This is being worked on by Justin our Media Wizard and will be up tomorrow.

1/16/08

    All of the old material and a lot of the new stuff is now up and available. The virtual tour should arrive any day now, in the meantime check out the still shots in its place. Legal documents are set to be finalized by next week so those will go up as well. Still to come this week is more information about Guilford, Brattleboro, lots of pictures, and more community information. We are still scheduled for the open house this weekend but the snow is a bit deep for a tour. Please rsvp via email to sweetpondeco@yahoo.com if you plan on attending. We will announce the meeting date for next month soon!

1/11/08

    As you can probably see, our website like Sweet Pond is in a transition phase. We have finalized the house design and now are just working on some final aspects of pricing. Very soon we will be able to begin offering units for sale, after filing the appropriate paperwork. We had the site redesigned so as to allow for lots of information on what we are all about, what we are building, and why we are so excited about it. If you are curious, we are doing the update in bits and pieces because a couple different people are working on the different sections so we need to leave them all on the server, even if they are not ready. Peace.