Phase 2 Homes Blog

I just returned from my volunteer work week in Alabama. It was a really great experience both from a work and personal perspective. The house we worked on was really in bad shape, both from neglect and from Katrina storm damage. The woman did not have running water even and it wasn't clear how long she had been without it. She got water from a relative next door in buckets and brought it into the

With the Carroll Street project wrapping up, I decided a good way to take a break after all our hard work would be to give something back to those in need. I was shocked to learn of how many homes in the South are still in need of serious repair 3 years after hurricane Katrina. Towards the end of October, I'm going to be travelling to Alabama (Bayou Le Batre - located in the far southern part of

There are lots of things happening simulaneously these days at the Carroll Street house as we push to get things completed. Although the list of things to do is still fairly long, they are mostly detail finishing work at this point.

We started re-laying the original hardwood floor yesterday and expect to finish up the floor re-laying by the end of the week. Once its down, we are going to have it

We have working lights and also working audio at the Carroll Street house. We had the electrical work finish up the details on the lighting. We also have working audio in the kitchen. The kitchen speakers were wired in and the A-Bus audio system was connected up allowing us to plugin an MP3 player to one of the wall inputs to play music in the house while we are working. Its very cool and

I just got an email today from Zillow.com ( a home valuation site) that had a link to their Quarterly Home Value report. Their data seems to support our earlier assertion that home prices seem to be holding up here in Sunnyvale and some of the surrounding areas in the Silicon Valley. Their data shows that home values in Sunnyvale are up 2.9% from the previous years values.  Yes, it says up! Its

It seems like the housing market is still doing fairly well here in Sunnyvale. We've seen houses in certain areas with asking prices comparable to those we saw last summer. It has yet to be seen whether or not these house are actually selling close to the asking prices, but the prices seemed fairly consistant in the 4 houses we looked at around the Ponderosa Elementary school neighborhood. I'll