RVing: An Alternate Form of Living

You’re gonna live in a van down by the river!”  is what many of my friends and professors exclaim when I tell them about my intentions to begin living in a recreational vehicle (RV) this summer. The exclamation references a skit that was done by Saturday Night Live several years ago about a motivational speaker who lives in a “van down by the river” trying to convince two teenagers not to do drugs using references to the speaker’s miserable life in a “van down by the river.” However, my choice to live in an RV is certainly not like living in a camper van.

The first thing to realize about RVs is that there are many different types. Ranging from the simple camper van or pop-up trailer that only has a bed and maybe air conditioning to fully self-contained units that have all the creature comforts of a small home or apartment, such as travel trailers, Class C, and Class A RVs. My RV is a 1983 Fleetwood Pace-Arrow. It falls under the category of being a Class A RV, which is essentially shaped like a charter bus. However, rather than having rows of seating, it has the contents of a typical one bedroom apartment. I have a living area with a couch and can place a TV linked to a satellite dish on the roof. I have a fully functional kitchen with an oven, stove, microwave, and refrigerator along with a dinette to eat at. My RV even has a bathroom area that has a toilet and shower larger than most of the dorms. Then I have a separate room for my sleeping quarters and plenty of storage for all my possessions. There is not much else a single person in their 20’s needs out of their living situation.

However, I am still frequently asked the question of why I have chosen to live in an RV? It just makes sense where I am at in life right now. My roommate for the last three years will be moving to Orlando when our lease expires, and I do not particularly like the idea of breaking in a new one. Also, it will be possible for me to save a considerable amount of money living in an RV rather than getting another roommate of renting a studio apartment. Currently, I pay a little over $600 a month for my share of the rent and utilities; that is approximately $7200 per year I am throwing away on rent. The reason I refer to paying rent as throwing away money is that you gain absolutely no capital benefit by doing so. You are quite literally making someone else richer without gaining any long-term benefit. I purchased my RV for only $3200 as a mechanic’s special (but hey, I am a mechanic) and RV lot rental with utilities is only approximately $300 per month. Not to mention that my RV has already experienced its maximum depreciation, which means I should be able to get most of the money I put into it when I decide to sell, so long as I maintain its condition, of course.

Not to mention one other intrinsic benefit of the RV lifestyle, you can go wherever you want, whenever you want. All you are is a gas tank away from a short weekend adventure or a permanent relocation.

Resource :http://theavion.com/rving-an-alternate-form-of-living/

UMass student lists dorm room with a view on Airbnb; university officials say “Not so fast

AMHERST — For a short time, $85 might have gotten you a night in a dorm room in the Southwest Residential Area of the University of Massachusetts with the “best view” in town, according to the student attempting to rent it on Airbnb.

It might have been a good deal. That is, if you like to look out over dormitory towers and share a bathroom with college students. The host touted the room’s other amenities on the online room and home rental service, including friendly neighbors.

The student listed it as a “Luxury Room in Southwest” when she advertised her single bed for rent on the website.

University officials have contacted her since and the listing has been removed. Renting out a dorm room violates the residence hall contract, which all students sign to live on campus, said UMass spokesman Ed Blaguszewski.

“Assigned space is not transferable by the student,” states section five of the residence contract.




The university declined to comment further, other than to note that the student was contacted and the listing deleted. She never actually rented it out.

(The woman used only her first name in the Airbnb post and asked the Gazette with remove it from this article because she said she was being harassed and feared for her safety.)

“I used my room as a way to make money and meet other people,” she said in an email interview via the Airbnb website.

Her listing boasted proximity to the dining halls, access to the laundry room and utilities such as a microwave, refrigerator and television.

However, she said in the listing that partying would be off-limits, or else “you will be written up and asked to leave.”

Many other college campuses across the country have faced similar issues with students renting out their dorm rooms.

In January 2016, Jack Worth, an Emerson College student, rented his dorm room three times on Airbnb before he was caught, according to the Boston Globe.

After the Emerson College incident, Katie Theiler, a spokeswoman for Housing and Dining Services at the University of Colorado, told Daily Camera last year that the school was keeping an eye on online rental sites.

Last year, the Huffington Post found Airbnb listings for dorm rooms at several colleges, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Temple University and the University of Chicago. To Blaguszewski’s knowledge, this is the first time a student at UMass Amherst has listed a dorm room for rent.

Nicole DeFeudis can be reached at nmdefeudis@umass.edu. 

Resource : http://www.gazettenet.com/UMass-student-uses-web-service-to-rent-out-dorm-room-9298375

When a house no longer feels like a home

Washington - Two days before Christmas, the man I thought I would marry ended our relationship. We sat facing one another – he on the long, low green couch he'd brought when he moved from Texas to Tennessee to be with me, I on the white and gray linen sofa I'd bought from a friend whose boutique was shutting down.

As he said the words that ended our relationship, I stared not at him but at a drawing on the foyer wall: a gift from my cousin, depicting me and my partner in front of my little orange house, our pets at our feet. When our talk was done, I stood up and took down the drawing. I set it in the back room, full of renovation detritus, and began to pack a bag.

"You shouldn't be the one to leave," he told me. "It's your house."

"That's true," I said. "But this isn't home anymore."


I fled to my parents house, unpacked my things in the guest room and stayed for a month. While I was there, I made wild, half-baked plans to escape to another city – shorthand for the new life I wanted to have, one I would have to rebuild for myself. I pictured myself hiking in Denver and drinking cold craft beer in view of tall mountains. I spent two weeks in San Francisco, getting lost in a place that was as simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar as I was to myself.

When I returned to my house after Valentine's Day, my former partner had found a new place to live. The living room looked strange and empty without his green couch, and the bedroom still smelled like his dog after Belle had slept next to him in my absence.

I didn't have a template for this, for making my home feel like it was mine again. There were many places I had left, but I always knew I would never return. My childhood home after my parents signed the closing paperwork. The houseboat I'd lived on for a week in Hong Kong. The home of friends with whom an ex-boyfriend had lived while we dated. The crumbling rental where I was assaulted by someone I'd known since high school. My first college dorm room.

It was cleaner to leave and never come back. To let certain restaurants and bars and music venues fall off my regular circuit if they reminded me too much of someone who had cut me loose.

There I was in the foyer of the house I owned, the home I had once shared with a man who often told me he couldn't wait to marry the s – out of me. If it had been in any condition to rent out, I might have simply packed another suitcase and fled.

But I couldn't leave. There was work to be done.

And everywhere I looked, there was some reminder that my former partner had been here. He had been renovating the house and had gotten only as far as the demolition phase. The master bath was purged of its fixtures, the tile torn up.

I hadn't taken a shower at home in a year, though he kept promising the new marble tile would go in soon, that the plumbing would be reconfigured for a walk-in shower to replace the old cast iron tub.

The kitchen was missing one of its counters and there were patchy holes in the drywall where a rustic back splash once hung. The back room was piled high with boxes, including a giant 1960s stove he had bought from a young couple.

When we met, I was coming off a hard few years of personal and professional disappointments, and was clawing my way out of depression. He promised me peace of mind. When he moved in, he built a beautiful deck and pergola off the back of the house, a gesture to show that he had something to offer and the ability to follow through – qualities he felt distinguished him from the other men I'd dated.

For our anniversary, he cut and stained new shelves and drawers for my closet. Everyone we knew commented on how happy I'd become, on the way I glowed and grinned now that this man was in my life.

The progress on the house stalled so slowly it was almost imperceptible, just as our relationship was falling apart. There was always some excuse for a project not to move forward – our single-income budget after he lost his job, travel plans, my grueling graduate program, his long hours doing work trade at a local farm. I didn't even notice the way the things I loved most about the house and myself were getting stripped away, from the ability to host dinner parties and take long baths to my own sense of confidence.

"Don't you have anything to say?" he asked me as he ended things.

"For once I don't have any words," I said, shaking my head.

Eventually, I started putting the house back together. Family friends stepped in to finish the renovation. A handy cousin happened to need a place to live, and moved in with his many hammers and saws. He put the doors and drawers back on to the kitchen cabinets, mowed the lawn and planted flowers.

As the kitchen counter tops went back in, and the rotten siding was repaired, I stopped researching apartments in Denver and San Francisco. I wore dark red lipstick and grew out my hair. I watched the cats play in the back yard and the buds unfurl on the trees. I became generous again, and open.

I took long, hot baths. Where my ex's green sofa once sat, I put a fig tree in a white ceramic pot. In the back room that had once been a cluttered tomb of renovation materials, my cousin moved in his dressers and bed. We go for long hikes and drink cold beer together. The house has become a home again, and I've recovered my sense of self.

Resource :http://www.iol.co.za/lifestyle/home-garden/home/when-a-house-no-longer-feels-like-a-home-8700398

Furniture nonprofit debuts new warehouse

Clad in a sequined hat, Anna Richelle ran her fingers across the plastic covering of a room full of mattresses Thursday afternoon. The 70-year-old said she felt quite at home as she adjusted the drawers of a bureau and then wrapped the cord of a lamp around its base.

Richelle has been a regular at the Houston Furniture Bank since 2014. She began as a shopper but quickly became a volunteer, dusting and sweeping for the old facility on Hussion Street before a fire destroyed it in 2015.

"My husband had a stroke, and Oscar (the manager of HFB's thrift store operation) gave me a scooter for him to ride," Richelle said. "I told him I didn't think he'd ride it, but my husband got on it. After that day, there was never another scooter. We just got lucky. The place is a miracle."

The nonprofit dedicated to "Making Empty Houses Homes" debuted its new warehouse at 8220 Mosley with a ribbon cutting Thursday. The 75,000-square-foot space is more than triple the size of the old facility and aims to serve up to 500 families a month within the next two years under a more aggressive business model.

Mayor Sylvester Turner, who spoke to an audience of HFB volunteers, partnering agencies and customers, identified with the Houston Furniture Bank's theme of charity. During his time at Harvard Law School, he needed a mattress and all he could afford was one from Goodwill, he said.

"I came to say thank you to the Houston Furniture Bank for stepping up when the City of Houston needed organizations to do so," he said.

'Like a phoenix'

The nonprofit began in 1992 as a pilot project aiming to help 140 families under the Mental Health Mental Retardation Authority of Harris County. When Executive Director Oli Mohammed realized its potential, he proposed creating a furniture bank to serve the community. In 2003, the furniture bank became an independent agency, and it opened its first outlet in 2008.

Through partnerships with over 85 agencies, it serves between 100 and 150 families a month - an effort that was stalled by the devastating fire at the Hussion warehouse. At the time, Mohammed, promised the nonprofit would rise from the ashes "like a phoenix."

"I knew that there were poor people in America, but when I saw the condition that people were living in, it was unacceptable," said Mohammed, who arrived in Houston from Bangladesh in 1987. "That challenge, that unfilled need. It's very understandably prevalent. If you want to see it, you see it. And it's a condition that doesn't need to exist. That's the point. That's what keeps me going, the thought that 'This is not something that needs to happen.' "

About 600,000 mattresses going to landfills and 300,000 children sleeping on floors would seem to fit in his home country, Mohammed said. In America, it doesn't make sense.

The furniture bank's Designing Interiors - Volunteers At your Service, or DIVAS program, is the creative arm of the nonprofit that transforms local families' homes with donated items.

Challenging stigmas

DIVAS member Connie Hizem said they interview the family like an interior designer would, finding out their needs and furnishing the home accordingly.

"The first house I went to, when we were finishing the apartment, it was interesting because they had this little boy - he was 5 - and there were no books in the house," Hizem said with regret. "Last Friday, we went in with a woman and she had a newborn baby, she was 8 weeks old and premature, and I brought books for the baby."

Founded in 2003 by two Houstonians looking to help the community, the DIVAS soon joined forces with the Houston Furniture Bank.

Member Connie Page said she'll never forget the home she furnished for a veteran who moved to Houston to help her mother afflicted with Alzheimers.

"My husband passed away a couple of years ago. We would always donate furniture and clothing and do what the DIVAS are actually doing now," Page said. "I used to always say to my husband before he died, that that's what we should do - help other people - and I'm so happy to be doing it now, even though he can't see it."

Hizem said the stigma surrounding poor people is something that is immediately challenged by the work. After helping a client in need, she goes home and hugs her children.

"You can't imagine that feeling. We're ridiculously lucky," she said.

Resource :http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Furniture-nonprofit-debuts-new-warehouse-11056571.php

Voices Café builds community through music

    Now into its fifth year and after some 40 shows, Voices Café remains as strong, if not stronger than ever — as both a respected monthly music series supporting local and nationally touring musicians, and as a community-based gathering raising funds for worthwhile nonprofit organizations.

“Voices Café’s intention from the start was to support musicians, raise funds for social justice, and to create a community gathering space for music that’s powerful, provocative, fun, and uplifting. That’s what we started talking about when we were conceiving Voices Café,” said David Vita. “Little did we know that it would actually turn out that way.”

And turn out that way, it has. This season alone, the series has presented remarkable singer-songwriting talent, like Abbie Gardner and Molly Venter, two members of the celebrated folk trio Red Molly, in separate shows with their own bands. And Susan Werner comes in next month. This weekend, gracing the stage and returning — by popular demand, no doubt — are country hit-makers Don Henry and Craig Bickhardt performing at 8 p.m. on Saturday, April 8.

The series also has an important fundraising component. “Voices Café is part of the Social Justice Program at The Unitarian Church in Westport,” explained Vita. “The ticket sales first go to pay the musicians, and supporting artists is part of our mission. Then the money goes back into the community.”

Vita related a perfect example of the latter. “I was recently speaking with Claudia Connor, the president and CEO of IICONN in Bridgeport, the International Institute of Connecticut, which has been settling refugees here for 99 years. I asked her, ‘If $1,500 dropped from the sky tomorrow, what would IICONN do with it?’ She said that they would buy a trailer to move furniture. IICONN sets up on average an apartment a week for an arriving refugee family. They have donated furniture to pick up and store, and furniture in storage that needs to be delivered to the apartments. They were always looking for volunteers with a truck or a van, but if they had a trailer to hitch to a car they could do it themselves. I said, ‘Done!’ And we raised the money to purchase the trailer, between Voices Café and our Sunday Share the Plate Offering. That’s what Voices Café is all about.”

Pretty amazing stuff. As is the music itself, like this weekend’s headliners. Don Henry is as polished a performer, as he is hilarious. Plus, he’s an award-winning songwriter. His song, “Where've You Been,” won a Grammy and Song of the Year honors by the Academy of Country Music Song, Country Music Association, and Nashville Songwriters Association International, all four accolades in the same year.

Craig Bickhardt’s songs found their way onto platinum and Grammy-winning recordings by legends such as Johnny Cash, Martina McBride, Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, B.B. King, Jonathan Edwards, David Wilcox, Kathy Mattea and Alison Krauss. He’s got nearly 1,000 songs in a catalog that includes four No. 1 country hits, “Turn It Loose” and “I Know Where I’m Going” recorded by The Judds, “In Between Dances” by Pam Tillis, and “It Must Be Love” recorded by Ty Herndon.

As to the superb talent that Voices Café attracts to the stage, Vita explained: “We have people on our committee who are so knowledgeable about the music and visit other venues and hear new sounds that there are so many more musicians that we’d love to have at Voices that we just can’t squeeze in. And Tim Wilson does our booking, and he has a great ear for talent.”

And the crowds seem to appreciate the efforts. “Our audience base is solid and continues to grow,” said Vita. “At practically every performance, someone will come up to me and say that it’s the first time that they’ve been to Voices Café, how could they have not heard about us before, and that they’ll be back! And then they do come back. First-timers become regulars, strangers meet new people, and then it has a large family gathering kind of feeling.”

Voices Café is located at The Unitarian Church in Westport, 10 Lyons Plains Road, Westport. Seating is cabaret style. Call 203-227-7205, ext. 14 or visit www.voicescafe.org. Doors open at 7:30 p.m.

Concert update: The Zombies show at the Ridgefield Playhouse, which was postponed last month due to a band member’s illness, has been rescheduled for Monday, May 8.

Mike Horyczun’s Sound Surfing column appears every Saturday in The Hour. Mike can be reached at news2mh@gmail.com

Resource :http://www.thehour.com/news/article/Voices-Caf-builds-community-through-music-11055972.php