My Old House

Issues and Events involving our Home in Independence, Missouri
My Old House on Winner Road
5/28/2009

Garage repainted!

Filed under: Garage,General — Admin @ 7:01 am

Greetings all!

I’ve just posted photos of our garage, as it looks following our repainting efforts last week!

Please note that the north and south “side windows” were NOT repainted…and therefore look kind of stupid at the moment.

The reason for that is, right before we were going to paint this, we had the inspector come out for the 353 tax abatement program. And she said that we will have to either return those windows to normal, functioning windows that are NOT boarded-up…. or remove them completely and replace them with siding.

Well, in the interest of security, we’re going to have them removed. (Our garage was broken into about two weeks after we’d moved into this home back in August 2004. I boarded up those windows shortly thereafter.)

Here are the pics: http://www.myoldhouse.com/gallery/categories.php?cat_id=26

I really need to make a post about the kind of paint that we used. It’s the same stuff that was used on the house: Sherwin-Williams “Duration” paint. This stuff was pricey ($43 per gallon!), but it goes on really nicely…and it has a LIFETIME guarantee! And after two years on our house, it’s only peeling in a couple of places where it was painted onto METAL (gutters, window sills). Clearly, those metal areas should have been PRIMED first, but I don’t blame our painters. Not very much is peeling off of that metal at all, just a bit. I hope to do touch-up on those locations on the house shortly.

Thanks for stopping by the site!

-= Dave =-

5/23/2009

Joining the “353 Tax Abatement” Program

Filed under: General,Landscaping and Property,Rooms and Areas,Systems — Admin @ 9:42 am

BACKGROUND:

The City of Independence has developed a “tool” for encouraging homeowners and landlords to fix up their property. This tool was successfully used to revitilize Harry Truman’s old neighborhood, which is just west of the “Square” in Independence.

Two years ago, this tool was modified a bit and then “opened up for applicants” to folks on the city’s west side who live NORTH of Truman Road.

This past January 1st, this same tool was made available to folks living south of Truman road, all the way to 23rd street, I believe.

The tool itself is called the “353 Tax Abatement Program”. Here is the city’s page of information on available tax abatement programs.

Signing-up
The way this program works is… the homeowner …

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Garage Exterior Replaced

Filed under: Garage,General — Admin @ 6:50 am

I just uploaded 5 photos of our garage that were taken about 10 or so days ago. They show our garage immediately following our “exterior replacement project”.

Before this work, the garage was covered with a deteriorating white fiber-board-like product called “T-111 board”. Rainwater plus a lack of horizontal flashing were causing this stuff to fall apart badly. (There’s another section of that image gallery where I uploaded “before photos” a few months ago. I invite you to take a look!)

We hired “Inviting Spaces LLC” to tear off most of this T-111 board and replace it with something called “SmartSiding”. I say “most” because we decided to only remove the lower 32 inches worth …

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