Painting is done! Old house recognition!
Greetings All !
Last Saturday, our painters came out and finished painting the exterior of our house! It will be a few days before my schedule and sunny weather will “overlap” so I can take some good photos of the house.
The painters did a terrific job! They paid great attention to detail. And as I looked around, I have found ZERO drip-marks or places where paint was accidentally brushed against rock or other surfaces where it should not have been. They even painted the basement window frames and the furnace and dryer exhaust vents that exit out of them!
In other good news: The City of Independence’s Community Development Department has a program that gives homeowners a bit of recognition for owning homes that are 100+ years old. Basically, you fill out an application and provide your evidence that the home is over 100 years old… and they then send you a nice metal plaque to hang on your home!
(They have funds to pay for only 10-12 plaques per year, as I recall. So, if a lot of people apply in one year, the later ones would probably have to pay $110 each for their plaques. We were fortunate enough to have applied early enough in the fiscal year, so that the City paid for our plaque!)
I’ll try to get a snapshot of this plaque posted on the site in the next few days. I just picked it up yesterday, so I have to install it today.
Next, I want to take a lot of the evidence I dug up regarding the house’s history and age and apply for Local Historic Home Status / Designation.
A word about the house’s age: When we bought the home, the owners and the MLS record said that it was built in 1889. When I looked into their sources on this, I found that in the property’s abstract, there was a mention of “A house”…. on the property. This tidbit was apparently given verbally to the gas company, who then put it on their files. (I mention that because a lot of people will tell people who just start to research their home that they should go use whatever is on the gas company’s records as “proof”. Well, I found out that the gas company will just list whatever the homeowner tells them.)
Well, after removing the asbestos siding, I emailed some photos to a professional historic preservationist in Kansas City, who said elements of the home went as far back as 1903. And a careful study of the abstract revealed that the carpenter (and wife) who owned this property between 1890 and 1910 took out substantial loans in 1905. Plus, the property taxes on the property went up by a multiplier of SEVEN TIMES in between 1905 and 1910!
So, I believe that the house was built in-between 1905 – 1908. The carpenter’s wife died in 1909 and he sold the property shortly after that.
I might also mention that this same carpenter, Rufus O. Kerby, purchased the lot that the Kerby-Kille house, a nice bungalow-style historic home about two blocks south of here, sits on and built that home during that same 1905-1908 time-period. So, he was a fairly busy guy!
Anyways, because of the loans, we’re saying the house was built in 1905. But that’s an approximate date and it wouldn’t surprise me much if I later discovered that it was actually 1907 or 1908.
I guess one thing I’ve learned from doing research on the build-date of my home is that it’s surprisingly hard to “nail down” an exact year on a build-date… at least here in Missouri, it is. I would not be suprised at all if I were to discover that some famous historic mansions in this area have build-dates that are also “approximate”.
Thanks for stopping by the site!
-= Dave =-