story – Colibri Commons

Our family has dedicated the first day of 2025 to envision and dream about what is next for Colibri Commons. We are dreaming about building a food forest, a small coffee shop/tree house, naming our homes. It is home.

Here there go the names. The existing home is Casa Colibri, the two new units are blue jay house (south side) and owl house (north side). The community space is casa Esperanza and our chicken coop is casa kombucha. Kombucha was a hen was a rescued but that died and was buried at the same site where the coop was later built. So, her spirit protects the coop.

Casa aqua is the green house where we hope to grow aquaponics. And finally, we hope to set a small coffee shop/tree house close to the pond under the big tree.

The food forest is planned to be in a narrow area (19 by 66 ft) on the south side. It would be nice to have a small dome built to integrate with the food forest and the rest of the plants. We probably build that ourselves, just like the chicken coop.

These dreams are not going to happen right away. We still need to recover from the investment of the ADU and restore the soil after all the work done in the property.

Let’s see what five years from now this looks like.

The dream of building this community is an old one. We knew we needed a common space for our commons and we thought about upgrading our garage for that purpose.

Unfortunately, we don’t have picture of the old garage. It was not special and at some point, it was packed with luggage, old stuff, and it was unwalkable. We used to store chicken feed there and had some mice coming through holes. We also had structures that the previous owners left as part of a workshop.

We decided to clean it up and upgrade it in 2022, partially as a result of the failure to start the larger Colibri Commons project with six units (three duplexes) as shown in the old posts.

We invested some of the savings with the idea of creating a gathering and community space. We added a storage room, tried some grey water system, a kitchenette, and some spaces to work with high chairs looking at the coop and garden.

We could savage some of the old wood and plywood and use it for building some raised beds for our front yard. We also went to the ReBuilding Center and Community Appliances to get the furniture and appliances we needed. Nothing was really new, except for the kitchen hood and the water heater.

The space also has a ceiling sound system for indoors and outdoors, in case we want to share the joy of music. We also added a side door to create some flow around the space, by also allowing to open the garage door in good weather.

Finally, we added a heat pump and other thermal features in the ceiling, like a fan that automatically starts when the temperature gets to high, helping to cool down the space.

Currently, our washing and dryer machines and a freezer are there as well. The new ADUs already have their own washer and dryer.

We hope we can use this space for co-working, home schooling, parties, meetings, and other gatherings.

Our hope is that this space can be use for building community, as emergency shelter, and for working together in reaching out our shared goals.

Category: story

New year and dreams renewed – Happy 2025!

Casa Esperanza – Colibri Commons share space