Rejected

New yoga pose- dejected dog

We heard back on our Neighborhood Preservation Tax Credit application today. It read like any typical rejection letter: “Thanks for your application, there were SO many submission, not everyone can be accepted…”. There is good news in the letter, though. We can reapply in 2013 for the work we applied for in 2012 as long as some of the expense will be incurred in 2013. The other good news is that we can finally start on the roof repairs!

Electricity puzzles

BAB has a plethora of old & odd electrical devices and panels. Unfortunately not too many of them function very well, which has also been the woes of previous owners, evidenced by the vintage “layering” of makeshift repairs and replacements. The oldest and one of the more interesting panels greets us at the front door – originally intended to be “on display” as its glass door would allow everyone to see the pretty copper bars and turned-wood switch handles.

But now it’s crapped up, messy, and someone painted over the glass…

Our oldest electrical panel – circa 1913

This was the starting point, or more accurately, the first thread to unravel, of one of two electricity puzzles that have been nagging at me – one six months old, the other six days old. It was time to solve those puzzles.

Puzzle 1: Six days ago, we suddenly lost power to half of the second floor – we don’t do much up there except regular emptying of our tarp-and-bucket rain collecting system, but

Tax Credits

The B.A.B. is located in a National Register of Historic Places, Grand-Bates Suburb Historic District and is a Contributing Building as an Industry/Communications Facility. The Landmarks Association successfully filed the paperwork with the Fed’s in August 2009, close to the time we bought this place. That means the property is potentially eligible for State and Federal Historic Tax Credits.

It is also located in a Census Bureau 35% Qualifying Area for the State of Missouri’s Neighborhood Preservation Act (NPA) Tax Credit. That means the property is eligible to participate in the lottery for State Tax Credits.

Those are complicated ways of saying that, if all goes well,

Lucy has a sister

After a year of settling into our new place, we finally fulfilled the promise to Lucy to get her a sister.

She came to us through the wonderful volunteers of Come Bye Border Collie Rescue. The process took

Stickin’ a fork in it…

…cuz we’re calling the bathroom DONE!

Our last chapter in the bathroom project: the sink base. It seems like it’s taken forever but it’s been just about 8 months.

And as usual, there were a couple of prerequisites: grouting the joint between the wall base tile and the floor (Reason #7 to be angry with our tile guy); and sealing the granite floor. I’ve got no pictures of the grouting – maybe because I was so pissed and couldn’t figure out why tile guy neglected to grout it.

The sealing of the tile was pretty easy – just time consuming. Since we’ve been using the floor for a long time, I needed to scrub and clean it really well before the sealant. And then I put down two coats.

Watching sealant dry is boring.

Sue documented our acquisition of the sink base in this post so I won’t repeat all that. She touched on the fact that we didn’t have the typical plumbing arrangement – most of you have your plumbing coming out

Even Little Projects Bite

A short update on the Bathroom progress: installing a small towel/accessory bar in the shower.

Sure – that sounds easy, but even the tiniest little projects at BAB like to bite back.

For this towel bar (that would have a max of a few pounds of anything hanging from it), some plastic sleeve anchors would work fine. As I wrote in a previous post, I like to make extra long lines on tape, like crosshairs through the hole center, in case the drill tries to walk away.

Drilling holes for first anchor

While I used the hammer drill, I did not use the hammer action; it’s just that I happened to have the right sized special stone bit in the hammer shank style.

Speaking of the stone, these stone tiles are a type of limestone, and in the closeup pictures you can see lots of fossils and sea shells. The walls take on a beautiful depth & richness when wet, and while showering we

This guy- he’s crazy!

We were back with the Alberti kids last Saturday, in our now traditional place as the first lecture of the semester. Gay introduced us as “Tom, this guy, he’s crazy, Sue, she’s crazy, good crazy.” We usually share stories about our project, opportunities we’ve discovered with salvaged treasures and the many ideas we have for the B.A.B. This time, though, Gay asked us to talk about what we want to be able to do on the second floor and then let the kids come up with their own designs.

The program has grown to over 100 kids ranging in age from 4th graders through high school students

It was a full house of kids, some we’ve seen for years, but many new faces, too. We left them to

Mirror & Metal

The next installment of our Bathroom completion: the big mirror on the wall. I was half tempted to refer to this post as the big ass mirror, but I’m figuring that we’ll have a BIGGER mirror upstairs in a later phase. But what’s cool about this mirror is that it’s one of those freebies, re-use-ies, just-happens-to-fit-well-where-we-need-it things.

But backing it up, here’s the blank wall before installing the mirror…

The wall that wants a mirror installed

The blue tape pieces in the pic show the locations I measured of the bottom of the mirror and top of the glass countertop.

Dan Mitchell gave us this big mirror over a year ago – and it’s been stored leaning against a wall in the front room since then, untouched other than

Estate Sale Run Ends with a Bang

We had another weekend of estate sale finds. This time Tom found the usual collection of unusual tools including some more of those funky rubber gloves.

This time there's a pair of funky gloves in my size

The key item that Tom found were some

Jacoby in Fulton

Driving back from a meeting in Jefferson City, I had some time and it was a pretty day, so I got off the interstate and went on a side trip through Fulton, home of Westminster College. The campus is where Winston Churchill gave the famous speech where he coined the term ‘Iron Curtain’. What does our B.A.B. have to do with the former British PM? The Winston Churchill Memorial is listed in the Jacoby Art Glass project records. This is another situation where I surprised by what I found.

Churchill Memorial Exterior

The building was