I'm sending this post from my mom's. My computer got hit by lightening on Friday night. We've got a new one on the way (it was something we've been considering so we knew just what to get). It should be in by the time I get back from my vacation to Boston and other parts of Massachusetts with Tim's family. I promise I'll make up for my absence with lots of great pictures.
See you soon!
Friday morning started off with a demonstration by Catherderal Stone Products on some of their masonry patches, cleaners, and strippers. It looks like some very impressive stuff.
I then took a tour of the Park Inn hotel. It was in much worse shape than I had thought. There's been a lot of water damage and all of the time and money so far has been put towards making it water-tight once again. It's the right thing to do, but I think the preservationists are meeting with a lot of resistance from the local government and community. Hopefully they can keep a peacefully existence! Here's the City National Bank that shares it's east wall.
At lunch four different Iowa communities talked about what works for their communities in getting people motivated and interested in their projects.
After lunch we took a tour of the Stockman house. And then walked through the back yards of some of the homes in Rock Glen. Two privet owners of these homes were kind enough to open their homes up to our tour. Both they Blythe and Melson homes were done by a man named Water Burley Griffin. Both he and his wife were students of Wright and took over his work when he left Mason City due to the exposure of his affair with the neighbor lady. Now I need to catch the next showing of the PBS show In His Own Right on the life of Griffin.
I'm definitely a conference junkie now. I'll have to start selling house parts to afford my habit :)
Today was the first day of my conference. I had a great time even though I felt a little out of place. Most of the people there were community development people.
The first session was given by Dan Carmody who is an expert in property development. He is currently the principal developer of Renaissance Rock Island, IL (by the way I LOVE Comedy Spotz!). He was an incredibly dynamic speaker. The title of this opening session was "Building Better Cities."
His major point was the rules have changed and we are now working in a global competition. They key to winning this competition is a combination of density, details, and diversity. Some of his other great points were:
The second session I attended was on tax credits. It was basically an overview of both the federal and state rehabilitation tax credit programs and an refresher (for me) of the national standards of preservation from the department of the interior. The most interesting part was the presentation was given, in part, by Anne Grimmer who is the Senior Architectural Historian for the Heritage Preservation Service Program. She co-authored the standards and a lot of the other information of the National Park Service website. And to top it off she's from my home town. How cool is that!
At lunch Anne gave another presentation on preservation of more modern buildings.
After lunch I attend the session on Section 106 review which was interesting, but pretty much irrelevant to me. I'm really regretting not going to the other one on building codes. However, I did get a copy of the power point presentation so I'll have that to go over.
To end the day I attended another one of Mr. Carmody's talks. This one was titled "Real Estate Pro Formas." It was basically a overview on what developers should be looking at to make a property cash flow and be appealing to financial institutions (and also some what into what Main Street programs should do to encourage this development). Here are a few of the points that caught my ear:
But probably the point that hit closest to home was:
He said this in relation to the story of getting their first project appraised. I hope I'm remembering this right, but the appraiser wouldn't appraise it as a unit as future condos since that had never been done before and so he had no compairables. So the developers had to seek a second opinion. We had the same thing happen when we had the house appraised. It seemed to come in way to low, but when you looked at the comparable properties it was not so surprising. They were horrible! Yes the square footage was the same and they were all country properties, but that's where the similarities ended. I'll have to try to remember to get some photos of the properties on the blog. One of them is a doozy of a remuddle that I almost called the realtor and faked interest in just so I could make fun of how badly it sucked. But since it's not really funny completely destroying a beautiful folk Victorian the tour would have just depressed me.
But back to the conference. All of the presenters had amazing photos that made me want to work for the State Historical Society and see all of the great projects that are coming across these people's desks.
Also the conference was held in this great facility, the Music Man Square. They have a fake main street built in the center of the building.
What's on par for tomorrow?
I am defiantly a conference kind of girl :)
Yesterday I finally put on my thinking cap and recreated a table runner my mom has in vinyl composite tile. As I type Tim is on the other side of the doorway drawing out the lines on the floor so he can begin to glue the pattern down. The star will sit right below the light fixture and make a kind of "preview" into what we have done in the mud room. The center of the star (which I still have to cut) will be the pale yellow. The rest of the room will be the pale yellow with (hopefully if we have enough left over tile) a dark yellow border. I'm getting tired of cutting out all of these patterns so I think in the coat room I will just have a checker board pattern.
I've been searching for a trash can for my kitchen for the last year and a half. Which I know sounds crazy, but when you are a perfectionist that sort of thing tends to happen. We were originally going to have one of those in the cabinet pull-out kinds, but then decided against it due to a severe shortage of cabinet space.
I've been looking at wooden ones with flip fronts for quite sometime, but in the end they all just seemed a little to cheaply put together for my taste. And then the other day I found it.
Meet the Sunbeam 20-lit. Yellow Retro Step Trash Can from Target. It's soft yellow color is going to look beautiful against my old-kitchen green walls! The only problem is going to be if it's cat proof or not.
Last October we stopped into a local landscape place and asked them to come out and give us an estimate. They said sure they'd be out next week. We waited, but no one ever showed.
This spring we were driving by the place again and decided to give it another try. We stopped and put our name in again. We ended up getting an appointment set up for last Wednesday. I was so excited. I got my "dream" pictures together and a list of some of the plants I was interested in.
Wednesday morning I got a call from the place. Since it ended up being so nice out the landscaper decided to cancel our appointment. They are a month behind you know. We'll call back around the fourth to reschedule another appointment. Wow, is it just me or does telling a potential customer that they are not a priority kind of a mistake. I know it made me feel pretty crappy.
That afternoon I was checking out the house blogs site and came across this post (see #5). Time to move on right.
So this afternoon I checked out the yellow pages and came across another landscaper. I gave them a call and they suggested that if I was able I might send some photos and they would take a look at the project before we came in for a meeting. Five minutes on the phone with this place and I'm already farther than I was in 9 months with the other guys. I sent out an e-mail with some photos and my "dream" pictures and plant ideas. I'm excited to get the ball rolling on this. Tim and I just can't seem to agree on anything landscaping wise so I'm excited to see what a third party comes up with.
Check it out...
and I'm going to attend (well that is if I'm one of the first 25, I'll let you know)!
I've never been to a conference before. I had to ask if I could show up and hour or so late on those days. "What for," my boss asks suspiciously. "A conference," I meekly reply. "What kind of conference?" "One that has absolutely nothing to do with work, it's on preservation." I get a funny/dirty look and he says ok. What he doesn't understand is that my need for money to feed my preservation addiction is the reason I come to work most days. But thanks anyway Ed, you're the greatest!
I'm so excited I just read the brochure over and over again. Hey! We need some sort of slang term for preservation nerds like myself. Anyone have any creative suggestions???
WooHoo!
You know how they say that starting one project leads to other projects that you had not originally planned. Well check this out!
So I've never actually posted a picture of me in the pink tool belt. That's because when I'm wearing it I've always been working alone.
Yesterday it was sitting in the office as I was working on a post, and Tim picked it up and was hamming around with it.
It's the closest thing he's come to picking up a tool in months. (I'm just being catty because he looks better in it than I do!)
This is the decorative glass in our living room window. 
This is where it should be in our foyer window.
This is where the decorative glass from our foyer window is. 
Right here.
When Persis owned this house (it was always a rental for her, she never lived in it)she removed the glass window and installed it in her home in town.
What do I do about this? It's even more beautiful then the glass in the other window. It has this different sort of green cast to it.
Do I try to talk to the current owner of the house to try and get it back? When we first bought the house we didn't know that is what happened to the window. We bought replacement glass for it. Do we offer them the replacement glass? Do we just wait for the house to come up on the market again and try to purchase it then?
I think I might have been better off not knowing what happened to it.
Bonzer building repair called back about the barn.
Not good.
With a roof- $30,000 and with out a roof- $15,000. That's a lot of money to spend on something you'll never use. Especially when we would like a garage and a hanger, that we would use. And I know it's silly, but I feel like this would feel a lot less like an acreage with out that barn.
Things like tearing out the plaster in the house made me so miserable, but it was a compromise I could make because we could replace with something very similar. We could never build anything even close to this barn.
-sigh-
Marble Rocks answer to the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
I read somewhere, and I'm sorry but I just don't remember where, that our fast paced life style is part of the reason that we have lost the "character" in the exterior of our homes. In Victorian times you would never have been able to drive by someone's home at 60 miles an hour. So houses were interesting since you had to look at them for a bit.
You know what made me think of that today...
It's a lazy day around these parts.
I did manage to get some baseboard up in the hall, but lost interest and am now just wandering around trying not to do anything. -sigh-
We have a slight clover infestation in our new grass. Tim keeps talking about getting it sprayed, and I know if we let it go it could kill out the grass.
But if you go outside and walk around the house you're surrounded by the sweet fragrance of the little flowers. It's really the most lovely house related infestation we've had.
I hate going to the doctor with a passion. I told Tim that he is never to take me to medical help with out my explicit permission (which I will never give him). If I am unconscious, well you'll just have to wait for me to wake up. It was practically a wedding vow.
I'm not against modern medicine or anything like that. I just like to have the visit on my own terms. i.e. I like to make up information so I don't sound like a big sissy (one of my greatest fears- being a big sissy), or have any unwelcome testing done (another greatest fear- needles).
I had one of those on my own term thingys scheduled for yesterday morning. I was so nervous I didn't sleep hardly at all. So I finally got up and going and ended up getting into town way to early. For those of you not aware there is a calculation to figure the amount of time you can sanely spend in a waiting room.
Loved the three little "climbing" windows.
So I think this may be the raciest post House Blogs has seen yet. So we'll start off slow...
here's part of my arm after the fall.
And here you are my loyal readers. My first time on the internet with my pants off, be kind.
Do you know how difficult it is to photograph your own leg?
I haven't looked this bad since after our wedding (inside joke for friends and family- sorry).
Just before heading out to work (early for the stress thingy) I realized that I never did post the fact that actual work got done around here.
Last night Tim got the mudroom floor finished.
And the light up in the coatroom (along with more paint).
Inspired by his motivation this afternoon I got all of the baseboard for the up-stairs hallway hauled up-stairs, and put in proximity to where it needs to go. Creating a sort of maze that I'm sure I will fail to navigate when I get home tonight, thus skinning my one healthy knee. Sorry, I know I said no more complaining, but I had to throw that in.
I just went up-stairs. Norman, my white cat, tore out of the bedroom as soon as I walked in. I yelled after him, "I know you did something, and I'm going to find it." Four feet later I did. He threw up. All over the pink tool belt. I am very upset. I figured eventually it would get dirty and loose some of its "sparkle," but not like that.
They are offering a stress management class at work today. I wasn't going to go. Maybe today's events are signs that I should re-think that decision.
Tim got up this morning and left for his first crop spraying in an airplane experience in Nebraska (I think). It's also his first time using Round-up so cross your fingers he doesn't spray the wrong field and we have to sell the new furniture to pay for some guys crop.
So I was peacefully sleeping away when I was rudely awaken by a roaring sound flying by my window. The second time it happens it finally dawns on me it's Tim in the plane.
I jump out of bed,
throw on a robe,
race down the stairs,
miss the last stair,
take a nose dive into the pile of wood work at the bottom.
It hurts! But I don't even look at my wounds because I can hear him going over the house again. I get to the door and stand on the porch yelling, "ouch, ouch, ouch!" and look over at the barn and there are the structural repair guys who were supposed to come yesterday.
So I run in the house (Tim doesn't make another fly-by so I don't get to see him). Clean up the big gashes in my arms and legs, and change into something a little more decent.
When I get back outside the guys are back inside the barn. I stick my head in to apologize for the unpleasant experience/sight, but they were to caught up in how cool the fly over was to notice my embarrassed apology.
So I then make the stupid mistake of asking how things look. It sounds like it's a lot worse than we had thought. We knew the foundation was good so there's no surprise there. And we knew that the side walls were separating from the rest of the structure. What we didn't count on was how badly rotted the floor of the haymow was. It sound like that will have to be completely replaced with new supports before they can start repairing the side walls. Then of course the new roof needs to be put on. After that they said any other work can be done at a later time (i.e. after you crawl out of the massive debt these fixes will put you in).
Is it too late to go back to bed and start the day over???
So we are moving the couch through the mall on a cart yesterday and this family with three young girls walks by, and one exclaims, "Oh mom look! Isn't it beautiful." Tim and I just looked at each other and grinned as we left their excited explanations in our wake.
