My Old House

Greetings All !

Well, it’s been a long time since I made a post here, so please forgive me for that! We’ve been extremely busy… to the point where I’m trying to “finish up various business” and get it off my plate forever.

But here are some relatively-recent minor house-related tidbits of news:

1) New Dining Room Chandelier — One Sunday night, my wife was sitting at the dining room table doing bills, and she suddenly noticed that the chandelier was hanging a foot lower than normal !! We concluded that our new cat, Samson, who is fascinated by anything that wiggles, probably jumped up there to slap at a crystal…and snagged the whole chandelier with his claws! Applying his eleven pounds of extra weight (and no doubt additional force from his rapid dangling) probably forced the chandelier to drop!

Well, it took a couple of weeks, but I finally went out one day to the Mission Road Antique Mall and purchased a chandelier! I believe it to be new / not old. But it’s made almost entirely of glass. It’s a bit like our old one but it has 5 “extra arms” of glass that basically are just decorations. They look like some sort of snaking plant vines. I had THOUGHT, that of all the chandeliers I looked at that day, this one would be the one my wife would be most likely to want, had she been with me.

Based on her reaction, I’d say that I was wrong. She doesn’t HATE it. She just didn’t like it quite as much as I had hoped. Oh well! At least I we have light in the dining room once again.

2) New Outdoor Power Outlets — We hired a friend of ours to rig up a power outlet box on the exterior of the home. This might not sound like such a big deal, but consider the fact that:

a) There WERE NO existing power outlets at all on the exterior of the home.
b) To make outdoor Christmas lights work in the past, I had been running an extension cord from the inside of the house, out through our mail slot!
and c) Three quarters of the lower level is covered on the outside by a veneer of thick limestone rock! How would you propose drilling a hole in that stuff without being obvious or damaging anything?

Anyways, our friend Larry came over one day while I was at work and rigged it up. We had looked at the situation together previously and had agreed that the best way to do it would be to run the line right through the wood framing of one of the basement windows on the outside of the home. The nice thing is that he placed the outlet right underneath the shelter of the rock that lies above that window, so it should stay nice-and-dry. And now I’ll be able to more easily power up things in the front yard!

3) Appraisal — Yes, we just had the house appraised. The reason is that we’ve been running up some credit card debt for the past few years. A lot of it has come from home improvements, minor repairs, and an air conditioner I bought for our LAST house before we sold it. We want to refinance our house so as to take advantage of some of the money we’ve dumped into it and have it “absorb” our credit card bills. Admittedly, this is not something I want to have to do ever again.

That said, here’s how the numbers turned out: We bought this house for $122,000 in August of 2004. I sat down and ran up how much money I believe we’ve plugged into the home.

And here’s what we’ve sunk into it so far (at least for major projects):

Kitchen renovation: $22,492 (kept fairly good records on that one)
New roof for house and garage: $6000
New furnace: $2000
New A/C unit: $2000
Replace front steps near the street and 8 feet of walk: $1700

I THINK that’s all of the major stuff. That brings us to $34,192 invested into our home.

Oh, and we may want to include a little up-tick for the fact that the street-and-sidewalk project on our street that finished this year. I would think that repaving the street, putting in a sidewalk on the opposite side, repaving the left-over lane from trolley-days that sits in front of our house (that was the ugliest / most-damaged thing), putting in a median in the street, and putting in old-fashioned styled street lights would raise our property values a bit!

Now, I insisted that we do the appraisal up-front, because if the house wasn’t going to be appraised high enough, I wasn’t going to go through with the refinancing. Well, the mortgage lady said we needed the appraisal to come out between $145-150,000.

And, whaddaya know, it came out at $150,000.

So, purchase price plus investment = $156,192 (roughly, not including street-and-sidewalk improvements) and appraisal comes to $150,000.

ASSUMING you believe that appraisal was an honest one… which, I’m not so sure it was. The guy who came and did it didn’t have much experience appraising older homes. But then again, he’s pricing it for what your average person would pay for it and not everybody appreciates or understands older homes.

But it seems to me that an appraisal is quite likely to tell you what you want to hear… or at least what the bankers do.

In any event, I’m not all that terribly discouraged because…..

4) WE ARE NOW IN A NEW SCHOOL DISTRICT !! — Whoo-hoo!

This might be a bit hard to explain to people who don’t live in or near Independence, Missouri. But here goes:

Back in the 1950′s, this area we live in was unincorporated, existing in the area between Kansas City and Independence. When the people had to vote on which school district they wanted to be in, Kansas City appeared to be the smarter choice at the time. Independence’s school district didn’t really have its act together yet. All the jobs were in Kansas City. The money was there. The future seemed to lie there. And so, the people voted to be a part of that district.

But it didn’t take long before they became disatisfied. In the 1970′s, as the economy of Kansas City started to feel the pain…and as people realized that the Independence School District was becoming quite good, some people wanted to get this area out of the KCMO district and put it into the Independence district instead. It went to a public vote… and the idea was shot down.

By the time I hit town in 1989, a desegregation lawsuit had Kansas City working its butt off, busing white kids into black neighborhoods and vice versa. This forced mixing of the races was intended to, I think, “encourage”, racial equality and equality in opportunity of education. I never quite understood why they simply didn’t fix what seemed to be the original issue: that the black schools were not receiving enough funding as the white schools. Seems like it was a funding issue to me.

Of course, mixing of the races in schools seemed like a good idea. Diversity CAN be a good thing.

However, the whole desegregation lawsuit thing came to an end. Federal funding halted. I switched careers and entered the computer world (not that that had anything to do with the deseg case).

Fast-forward to present day. What people all over the Metro now realize is that the KCMO School District Leadership has been a failure for the past twenty years. They’ve gone through at least a dozen Superintendents, keeping them an average of just over 2 years, I believe. The Board has the real power, and their membership seldom changes. They certainly do not listen to or work with people over here in that former “no-man’s-land” that is within the Independence city limits, but is still in the KCMO School District.

If you were to get into a car and drive from Truman Road west into Kansas City, and if you were to think about the neighborhoods and their boundaries as you drive, you would see this HUGE GULF between Kansas City and Independence. It’s about a mile across, I believe. It basically starts at the top of a hill on the east. The road goes down that hill a few blocks until it reaches the interstate… I-435. Once you go under that, you go through a sort of “dead zone” of the former Armco Steel property: huge metal shed-like buildings that stand empty… the industrial park of an era long gone. Truman road travels west along a bridge over this area. Then you go up a slight hill and you are into the neighborhoods of Kansas City.

By car, this “great divide” is only a 3 minute trip. But socially, this is a HUGE GAP. This geographic disconnect, plus the interstate as a north-south divider, create a natural “wall” between Independence and Kansas City.

You would think that with all of our high-tech cars and communications devices, the KCMO school district wouldn’t have a problem making the people in Western Independence feel involved, feel like they’re a part of the process. You’d think that communication with parents and residents would only be a minor obstacle.

But the KCMO school district has made extremely little effort to engage people over here.

I’m getting long-winded. Let me get back on track here:

A little over a year ago, a huge number of people on this side of town met at the Englewood Theater with State Senator Victor Callahan. He told us he had sent out a survey, asking his constituents what their problems were. Over 90% of the surveys he sent out were returned / mailed back to him. (!!!) And over 90% of those identified the fact that they were in the KCMO School District as being their BIGGEST problem!

A huge grassroots effort began that night. Soon, the Northwest Communities Development Corporation had church and civic group leaders in Western Independence meeting. After that, 10 churches of different denominations joined forces to pray for the area(!)

And very soon, the Senator had a plan that would put the idea of getting out of the KCMO District on the ballot for everyone to vote on!

It wasn’t easy. Kansas City had to vote to in order for this to work. The good Senator successfully pushed through an ammendment to the State’s constitution that basically said that if one district voted yes and one district voted no, it would go to arbitration by the State… UNLESS the “no-saying district” was unaccredited — then they would automatically lose !!

Well, in early August, in just 17 days, volunteers including myself and my wife gathered over 10,000 signatures to get this question on the ballot !!

And then the KCMO District had the nerve to try to ignore / not follow the petitions! We took them to court… they lost… they appealed… and they lost again. Nothing like trying to ignore thousands of the people who are paying you!

The issue went to the ballot this past Tuesday, November 6th. And we won!!

We laugh about the huge percentage of people actually living in the affected area who voted FOR this school district change (it was 40 to 1). Talk about unity.

In Kansas City proper, the vote was much, much closer… but the tally had to be counted according to school district, not according to city. So they had to add our numbers in. In the end, people in BOTH the Independence School District AND the Kansas City Missouri School District approved this issue!

Now, since this site is all about our house, some might think we were in this for the property values. And, to some extent, that is true.

However, WE AREN’T PLANNING ON SELLING. Also, we have TWO GRANDCHILDREN who live in Western Independence and will soon be school-aged. Their education is a bigger motivator for us.

Plus, our hearts were in this for THE PEOPLE OF THIS AREA, OUR NEIGHBORS. We want to see hope instead of despair and anger on our neighbors’ faces. We want to see the people of the area encouraged, since people have a tendency to show that hope by fixing up their homes and interacting a bit more with their neighbors…they make your neighborhood a nicer place to live in!

I could write for hours about our experiences in this entire grassroots effort. And it truly WAS grassroots! It felt so wonderful to be a part of something collective, something that had an outcome you just KNEW was going to be historic!

Congratulations to all of our neighbors!

Whew! Quite a long post today. I’ll do my best to post more frequent updates.

Our house is going to be on a Christmas Homes Tour… a new one, called the “Holly Trolley Tour”, which benefits the Engelwood Botanical Gardens. The tour will be on December 8th, from 11 AM – 3 PM. Tickets are available at Changing Seasons in Englewood. There are 5 homes on the tour so far. Tickets are $8 in advance, $10 the day of the tour.

Terry is working extremely hard (and I’m doing my best to help out) in getting the house decorated in time for that event!

Thanks for stopping by the site!

-= Dave Raasch =-