A lot of Catching-Up to Do !
Well, it’s been way too long since I’ve posted here. Please forgive me!
The warm weather of the past month has brought me a sudden burst of activity…. both yard-work and more relaxing events.
I get such a kick out of watching my wife, Terry, as she goes around the yard, discovering surprising new plants sprouting up in the yard ! (Remember, we’re new to this house, so this is our first Spring on the lot! We don’t really know what all to expect.)
Although I enjoy growing things, I don’t enjoy spending hours in the yard working at it. So, Terry and I are thinking about ways to reduce the future maintenance required by our garden…. plus, we’re planning just what we’d like to see planted in the yard in the future. The yard has its own set of wonders, but it also has its own set of problems. I’ve started a notebook and have been reading library books for a few weeks now. Last week, I even took a tape measure and measured out the locations and sizes of various objects on the lot. I then sat down with graph paper and made a to-scale drawing of the property. My hope is to photocopy this model and use it to sketch out ideas of what we want the lot to look like… where the problem areas are… and overall, just plan what we want to do.
Meanwhile, the biggest problem on the interior of the house is finding the time to keep it clean! I’m just talking about the weekly dusting and vacuuming stuff. Thank goodness the kitchen floor is a laminate. That makes mopping it up fairly easy.
I did enjoy a nice little project about three weeks ago: washing all 31 of the house’s windows, inside and out !! Fortunately, the windows were completely replaced with replacement windows two owners ago, I believe (although the last owner had tried to take the credit). The windows are at least 9 or 10 years old. But, for the most part, they’re in good shape. I was able to wash them all in just over one day. And I only had to go outside and use a ladder for only one window. Thankfully, that window was actually on the ground floor. It’s the rectangular one near the main stairwell… a window that I’d really like to replace with stained glass some day. Just because of its shape and design, you can’t just pop it out and clean it. So, I had to go outside to clean it and it was too high to do without a step-ladder.
I really recommend that, if you haven’t tried it, when it’s time to wash your windows… use a squeegee !!!
I really have to thank “Family Handyman” magazine for this. (I’m not a subscriber, but I’m considering it.) I had read an article in there a few months back about how to clean your windows: what equipment to buy, how to do your strokes, etc. I had ear-marked those pages and remembered to go re-read it right before tackling my window-washing.
This stuff’s kinda fun, if you get to go to the hardware store and buy a new tool to use with it. A squeegee’s definitely the way to go! I can’t believe my parents used paper towels all those years!
I’ve posted some new photos in the image gallery for SpringTime!
In there, you’ll also see at least one shot of the new roof we put on the house last fall. I think you’ll agree that green was the right choice to go with! (Some people may think that that was the obvious choice, given that our front porch is also a green. But I swear that that front-porch color drifts into blue-green a lot more than I’d like. I prefer forest-green. Terry and I are trying to come up with a THIRD color to use on the exterior of the home as a trim color. If you have any suggestions, please let me know with a comment to this post!)
The city started working on our street last week. They scraped away the old asphalt. This comes a whole lot earlier than expected. According to Mark Killie, our neighbor who’s the head of the “Neighbors of Winner Road” association, the City said that they were ahead of schedule on their Street Resurfacing project, so they thought they’d get started on our street early.
We were concerned that this would interfere with the major project we’ve been planning for our street this summer: The installation of a median to separate the main road from the “extra lane” in front of our house. ( This media will include some nice antique-looking street-lights. ) 16 out of 19 property owners along Winner Road agreed to tax themselves to help pay for this project. The city is going to pay for some of it with some grant money we applied for.
Well, the city assured us that getting started on the road resurfacing won’t hurt our project work coming up later in the summer. So, we’re encouraged!
At last night’s City Council meeting, the city approved the distribution the Community Development Grant money from the Feds. But apparently, exactly how MUCH money each project will get from that grant still has yet to be determined. We’ll see what happens.
Meanwhile, we’ve learned that the other side of the street may, in fact, get a sidewalk put in this year after all !! Although the need for a sidewalk was the original problem that got our neighborhood talking with the City about infrastructure improvement, we didn’t really think we could get a sidewalk put in and paid for this year. However, our City Councilman, Don Reimal, has strongly said to us that he really thinks we can secure the money. He’s very enthusiastic about the project and he’s been a fantastic help to us!
So, there’s a lot of things going on in the neighborhood!
The one other thing I wanted to talk about briefly today is how I’ve just gotten started researching the history of our old house. I spent about 4 hours at the Jackson County Historical Society last Thursday. The gentleman there, David, was a FANTASTIC HELP to me! He pulled books from the shelves for me, identified useful information, photocopied things off… all while I was carefully reading through the materials he was showing me.
I think I will probably have to start a separate section on this website for the house’s history, as I discover it. Of course, I’m starting to get a lot of hard copies of documenatation. And I don’t think I necessarily need to scan this stuff in to the site. But still, I’m going to have to find some way to organize it. There are an awful lot of names turning up in my search. I need to organize them and possibly trace some family trees.
One tidbit of history I’d like to relate.:
At least one of the photos I posted last fall showed the “extra lane” between Winner Road and our house. I’ve managed to learn a bit of history about this, some of which a lot of people around here don’t seem to realize.
Everybody says that this “extra lane” was originally a traffic lane… and between this lane and the lane on the East side of the street was… the tracks for the Street-Car. This streetcar apparently used to run from somewhere near or on the Independence Square up to 24 Highway.
However, what I learned is that this streetcar was preceeded by an actual railroad! Yes, it was a single engine with two passenger cars, each of which could hold about 30 people. This train was called the “Dummy Line”!
(Yeah, with a name like that, you’d think they must have “known I was coming”! However, the word “dummy” here has something to do with the fact that the train could move backwards just as fast as it could move forward.)
I found a book that told about how one A.E. Winner (for whom Winner Road was originally named?) originally came up with the idea for this railroad. It was apparently designed to be a much-needed connection between 15th street (in Kansas City? now 24 Highway?) with a rail more towards Central Independence.
I’ll have to provide some actual quotes from the book later.
So, first there was a train with a road on either side. Then the streetcar replaced the train. Then, when the streetcar disappeared, apparently the two traffic lanes were brought side-by-side and the “extra lane” bordering the homes was created… which is now used by the neighborhood as “extra parking”.
But, coming this fall, this “extra lane” (which is 20 feet wide at one end and I’d estimate to be about 60 feet at the other end)… will be set-apart from the main road by a median and street lights.
I look forward to the day I post those pictures !!
Thanks!!
-= Dave =-