My Old House

Greetings All !

Sorry! I’ve been too busy at work lately to get around to posting this tidbit of news:

Last Thursday, the Independence Examiner (local newspaper) published some nice info about our house in their “Welcome Home” section! This is a weekly “magazine” that gets inserted into the paper every Thursday. I think they’ve been running it for a little over a year now.

Anyways, we made the COVER PHOTO / COVER STORY !!

And what’s nice is, the Examiner has posted the entire magazine for download online:
http://examiner.net/mdRealEstate/images/pdf/WH012408.pdf

If that link no longer works, I’ve put a copy onto this website as well:
http://www.myoldhouse.com/WH012408.pdf

Now, I do have a few small criticisms of the article. The reporter asked me if there were any mistakes in it, I emailed her back several corrections, she said she’d make them, but she never did:

1) Any references to “Greek revival style” are incorrect. That should have been “Colonial Revival style”. I originally thought it was Greek too. You know, you see those pillars at the front of our house and you think Greek Temple. But I’ve been corrected by historic preservationists about that.

2) I’m concerned that folks may come away thinking we had to do TONS of work on the interior of this house, since we bought it three years ago. That’s not true. While there are a lot of things that NEED to be done, we focused more on the exterior. The interior walls look pretty much they way they were when we bought the house (except for the paint color in several rooms).

Now, that said, it IS true that when I made an initial TOUR of the home, I ended up storming out saying “No way, not in a million years!” There were huge, obvious water stains running down the northwest corner soffit, plus you could see spray-foam applied in an attempt to fix it in the attic. Plus, spray foam was also at several other points in the attic ceiling / roof. And the previous owner even used spray-foam to fill in cracks in the exterior rock at the front of the house (instead of using mortar)!!

I could not BELIEVE that anybody would LET us tour the house with those huge water stains going down the side of it.

My wife convinced me to come back and look at it again, two weeks later. The owner had PAINTED OVER THE STAINS with an almost-matching color of paint.

Eventually, the house’s interior did sort of “grow on me”. And I figured I’d just throw a good chunk of money at a very good building inspector and see what he had to say about the place.

3) I was also disappointed that no mention was made of the fact that we’re currently in the middle of the application-review process for getting our house declared and zoned to be a Local Historic Landmark.

4) Maybe I’m nit-picking here. She wrote:

I think she was confusing statements I made about the second-floor sleeping porch on the rear of the house with the roof.

The roof was the first thing that IMMEDIATELY needed to be repaired about this house! It was sagging! It was leaking! We had to have them “shore it up”, by sistering new beams with the attic rafters, just so you could have a couple guys stand on the roof safely, so that they might start replacing the shingles!

(Not to mention the house is 102 years old, not 115. Pick nit, pick nit!)

The sleeping porch, however, was what our inspector, Norm Clark ( http://www.nspec.com/) said was probably in the best condition of any sleeping porches he had seen in his years as an inspector!

OK, enough nit-picking.

The day that the article came out, Wendy Shay from the city’s Community Development Department sent me an application for a set of awards that the City of Independence gives out every May. May is “Historic Preservation Month” here…and that’s when they give out their Historic Preservation awards. Wendy encouraged me to apply.

I’m sure I’m facing huge, stiff competition here. But I’m particularly proud of the exterior renovation project that was completed last year! So, I’m going to apply, based on that. I think it would be great if the painter-carpenters and the historic color-scheme consultant get some kudos for the terrific advice and job they did! After all, my wife and I are “dummies” at this stuff! Oh, we have a sense for what’s old and what’s original and what’s in the best interests of preserving the house. But we had no idea what lay under that old asbestos siding!! The house looked like a typical old white squarish lump of a farm-house, fer-cryin’-out-loud!

So, I’m going to try to get my application in next month for that. I need to gather some photos, type up some paperwork, etc.

I also need LETTERS OF RECOMMENDATION from friends, neighbors, and area organizations, if possible! That might help support our application. (It’s mentioned on the form.)

So, if you believe that our exterior renovation project may have inspired some people around here or really helped improve the image of our neighborhood, could you please type up some short letter to that effect and get it to me before the last week of February?

Figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask. In these days of desktop publishing, that’d be maybe 15 minutes of work for somebody who can type at a decent speed.

Thanks!

David Raasch