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We've Moved! July 28 2010

Our new address is:

1402 Third Avenue  Suite 515
Seattle, Washington  98101-2120

Our phone number (206 956-0883) remains the same.

The lease on our space at the Terminal Sales Building--which we'd occupied for ten years--was coming up for renewal. Our space there had tons of raw character, and we did a thoroughly green renovation of it eight years ago. We would have liked to stay, but unfortunately TSB's new owners weren't willing to negotiate a good rate for us despite a 20% vacancy rate for office space downtown.

With the excellent help of Dan Stutz of CBRE as a tenant rep, we found and negotiated a lease for a nice space in the Joseph Vance Building at Third and Union. The LEED-Gold certified building (renovation completed in 2007) is home to our friends Sightline Institute and a great community of other progressive organizations including Fuse Washington, Climate Solutions, Stockholm Environmental Institute, Washington Conservation Voters and more. There is a shared conference room on our floor, as well as bike lockers, showers and changing rooms in the building. The building even composts! The Joseph Vance Building meets the 2030 Challenge now  with building standard energy efficient lighting, light shelves, efficient steam heat, operable windows and no air conditioning necessary.

We're walking the talk with a "Not So Big Office"--reducing our square footage by about 30%. With the more compact, efficient layout we still have the same capacity for workstations we had in the old space. With fewer square feet and a lower rental rate per square foot our rent will be half what it was. We will put that extra cash toward paying ourselves more equitably, additional employee education and better employee benefits.

Our tenant improvement work was simple, and executed quickly and affordably by Odyssey Builders. We combined two suites into one, painted with our favorite paint, Yolo Colorhouse, and will be installing efficient T-5 Lightoliler PowerWash uplights brought from our old space on track reclaimed from Lightolier Northwest's showroom relocation. We'll also be relamping our Tech Lighting track lights with LEDs from Lighting Supply. We were able to salvage and reuse virtually all of the reclaimed fir and pine and recycable polyetheylene partitioning system and all of the FSC-certified plywood bookshelves built by former employee Michael Lentz in the new space. We left behind only the cork floor from Ecohaus.

The move itself was quite smooth. We (well, Geoff mostly) had already taken everything apart in the days preceding, and packed everything possible into 70 Frogboxes. Frogboxes are reusable, recycled plastic boxes similar to Amazon Fresh boxes but bigger, which you rent and return. After investigating moving by bicycle and finding that too much to organize in the time we had, we hired EcoMovers. They brought five guys and two small trucks, and in four hours moved all of our stuff out of the old place and into three different places in the new building (our suite on the 5th floor, a temporary staging area on the 2nd floor, and our basement storage room) for a bit over $1,000.

It's hard to believe we've been here almost a month. We still have a fair amount of organizing to do, but we're up and running and getting started on new projects. We'll have an open house in the fall--please come and visit!

-RH