| Energy Efficiency Meets Beauty in the Circular Home
ASHVILLE, N.C., March 27 /PRNewswire/ -- With rising energy prices and a growing demand for eco-friendly construction, more and more people are coming around to round homes. When Yosh Schulman and his wife, Nili Simhai, decided to find an environmentally friendly option for their new home in Millerton, N.Y., they chose a prefabricated circular home for some of those specific reasons. "My wife runs an environmental education center, so we wanted a home that made wise use of natural resources," says Schulman. "Circular homes use fewer building materials. Their footprint's impact on the environment is minimal. There are heating and cooling benefits, as well." Energy efficiency is important for the couple's area of eastern New York State, where residents experience lots of snow and cold winter temperatures.
Victim of Orcutt fire still unidentified
The Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department is in the process of confirming through dental records the identity of the badly burned victim found inside an Orcutt mobile home that was destroyed by fire Monday.
Sheriff's Sgt. Erik Raney said Tuesday that the name will not be released until the identity of the victim is confirmed, which should take one to two weeks.
However, he said that family members of the person that authorities surmised was found dead in the mobile home have been notified.
Neighbors believed the victim was Doris Hurst, who they said was an Orcutt native in her 80s or 90s. They said she had been sick, possibly following a stroke.
Hurst lived in the home in space 12 of the Town and Country Mobile Estates where the fire occurred, neighbors said.
Special Report: The Mortgage Mess
Mark and Kerrie Russo, a Jackson, N.J., couple raising two young daughters, are struggling to hang on. Less than a year after buying a home in 2005, which they financed with a 30-year fixed rate loan based on a solid credit history, a local mortgage broker began sending letters offering to refinance their loan. A new product, the sales pitch said, allowed home owners flexibility to choose from a menu of different payments from one month to the next. What the broker didn't explain, Kerrie Russo says, is that this was a "negative amortization" loan - an expanding debt that buried the couple deeper in hock even as they thought they were paying down their mortgage balance. .
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