Staying in a warehouse

I’ve been meaning to write about the place I was staying in when I first arrived back in San Francisco for a while, but for various reasons almost all related to forgetfulness, have left it until now.

As Pat’s house was full the brim with people, Amir and I were looking for somewhere else to stay for a couple of weeks mid-May, and found this place on AirBnB. The back story is that a group of friends from Wisconsin all decided a shared living space would be fun, and arranged it so that they were all free to move at a pretty similar time.

They found an ex-car repair shop somehow, and moved in pretty much immediately. It was a bare shell when they bought it – just a large space with a small office, oil-stained floors and an extractor fan. That was a year ago, and they now have about 4,600 sq ft of livable space, which is housing something like 13 people. It has 10 bedrooms, a home theatre, a couch suspended on chains and a tiki bar. As part of their build out they basically built a whole second floor complete with emergency netting in between walkways to catch drunks (and people sleep on it sometimes, also).

We had some great times in the warehouse, and it’s been great popping back there since to enjoy cocktail hour. I started Bay to Breakers there this year, with the world’s spiciest 7am Bloody Mary, and last week, they had a Russian-themed party to celebrate with two Muscovite newlyweds that were staying in the warehouse.

The atmosphere you get when there’s a bunch of interesting people all living together was great, and has definitely motivated me to find / create something similar when I’m not so busy…

Warehouse Project

Well, it’s been quite a while since my last post, but not for lack of stuff to report. One big thing I’m pretty excited about are plans I have to move into a huge warehouse slightly north of where I’m currently staying.

The building has been used for a few things – the owner ran an import/export business out of it for a while, and most recently it was Hillary Clinton’s campaign office here in San Francisco. There’s a group of about 14 of us who are all going in on the warehouse together; I knew about half of them before we started planning this project, and luckily I really like all the rest of them who I’ve met over the last few weeks.

There’s a definitely lean towards a Burning Man sort of crowd, and all the fun and games that go with it – we’re definitely going to have some sort of workshop on the ground floor for building projects, idle tinkering and Burning Man preparation. It’s also a nice blend of arty and techie types, a mix I think could work really well when building out a living space.

The warehouse is in the Soma district of San Francisco (about 10 minutes bike ride north of where we are in the Mission at the moment): , in a good spot near most of the nightspots we find ourselves in at 5am nowadays. There’s a little community garden straight across the street from us, and quite a few other group living spaces too, which we’ll use for inspiration and tips.

The building itself is absolutely enormous – it has three floors, totalling 12500 sq. ft., plus a flat roof. It’s big enough that we can comfortably use the bottom floor for a party space, workshop, secure storage, bike racks, spare rooms and so on and still have ample room on the middle and top floors for nice common areas and bedrooms. There have been lots of floor plans flying around (seemingly led by the techie people), and the more artistically creative people are throwing about some awesome ideas about how we can put our own touch on the space.

There’s still a lot of open questions about whether this will all go through – trying to coordinate 15 people is not easy – but we’ve got a lease from the landlord, and a bunch of committed people who seem to understand what a big undertaking it will be to convert an essentially empty shell into the sort of comfy, safe and unique place we want it to be, so I’m bullish.