The Louisville MLS Blog

Homearama 2012 for the latest in Louisville Real Estate

If you are looking to buy a home in Louisville, get some ideas to fix up your current house or if you just like to look at other people’s homes - hope, inspiration, or interest is just around the corner. The Home Builders Association of Louisville’s annual Homearama begins July 14th and runs through the 29th.  Homearama began in 1968, and is a tour of new homes, showcasing home builders, interior designers, landscape architects, and craftspeople. This year’s Homearama is unique in that it is taking place at two separate locations; the Rock Springs neighborhood and the Shakes Run neighborhood.

Rock Springs is located on Highway 22, a mile past the Summit. With a convenient location, and many amenities, the Rock Springs Community is a great neighborhood to be a part of. Rock Springs offers its residents a playground, nature trail, and is close to Springhurst and I-71. Rock Springs is marked by its impressive entry feature, a striking rock fountain. 

Shakes Run is located off of Shelbyville Road on Fisherville Road. Shakes Run is a beautiful community, with 70 acres of green space including creeks, a fishing pond, and walking trails. There is a clubhouse with a junior Olympic sized pool, and wooded lots available. 

For Homearama, Rock Springs will have ten new homes to tour, and Shakes Run will have seven. Many of the homes will be featuring energy efficient products, outdoor living spaces, and finished basements. Each house in Homearama will be given an energy efficiency index rating, so you can compare each home like you would compare two cars with gas mileage.

At Homearama, available homes are for sale, as well as artwork and furniture. If you find a home you like, you better hurry, of the ten new homes in Rock Springs, eight have already been sold.  

Bob Thieneman, the Rock Springs neighborhood developer, is expecting 30,000 to 40,000 people to show up to the event this year....

Louisville's Forecastle Then and Now

Music lovers are anxiously counting down the days until next weekend’s highly anticipated Forecastle Festival. Forecastle will be celebrating their 10th anniversary July 13-15 with the most impressive line up of bands yet. Headliners include Girl Talk, Wilco, Bassnectar, and Louisville’s own My Morning Jacket.

The Forecastle Festival began in 2002 as a free Summer festival in Tyler Park with the purpose of bringing the like-minded music community together.  A grass roots venture, talent played for free, infrastructure cost nothing, and the event only cost five-hundred dollars to produce.   JK McKnight, the brains behind the operation, decided the following year to add something special to the festival.  McKnight invited sculpture Mike Ratterman to head up the effort in bringing in the local art community.  The 2003 Forecastle Festival included over thirty local artists exhibiting their work under the Tyler Park limestone bridge. In addition to the artists, environmental and socially-conscience activists educated audience members.  This was the birth of the Forecastle trademark slogan Music.Art.Activism. Creating a unique experience where music, art, and activism went hand in hand was brilliant, and is working for the Festival to this day.  Over the next few years, Forecastle continued to grow in size and popularity. It quickly outgrew it’s Tyler Park home and needed to find a new one. The Festival moved to Cherokee Park, the Mellwood Arts Center and then finally found it’s current home at the Waterfront.  

The Forecastle Festival has been nationally recognized in many well-respected publications and media sources.  After a noteworthy performance by the all-female rock trio “Sleater Kinnley,” the Festival was shoved into the National spotlight.  The band announced that they would dismember shortly after their Festival performance,  so everyone, including MTV, CNN,...