New Google Map

It looks like Google has updated the satellite shot of our neighborhood. I'm still new enough to our home to be surprised to see the relationship between our house and major landmarks nearby. Here is a link to the satellite/map hybrid view:

Foxcroft 'hood

Our home is right in the center of the group of houses in the woods. The dominant features are Kinnick stadium and University Hospitals to the east. Also in that vicinity are the old field hockey field, outdoor football practice field, UI Recreation building, the indoor "Bubble" practice facility, and UI baseball diamond. The photos must have been taken in about 2005 since the recent football stadium renovation is not shown. To the north and west of our home is a 12 acre ravine of woods. Beyond that is a commuter parking lot for the University and Finkbine Golf Course.

All God’s Children Got Shoes

Well maybe not, but some of the upstairs baseboard now has base shoe. I installed base shoe Sunday in the sunroom and the hallway. Our local “big box”store (Menard’s) has pre-stained and varnished base shoe on sale so I got some to try it. The color match is acceptable, not great, but at the price and not having to stain and varnish it is OK. Here are some pics of it installed:





And while I was going back and checking things on the blog I noticed my Very Scary Halloween Update had the wrong photo. Here is the corrected version so you can actually see our spooky house:

Very Scary House Update

It’s Halloween time! Since we have picked all the pumpkins ahead of last night’s frost it really feels like fall. Halloween is big here at Foxcroft(but then what holiday isn’t?) This year Lisa bought the best holiday decorations I’ve ever seen. Two big plastic sheets with cat’s eyes on them. We hung them in the front gable windows upstairs, and at night with the bedroom light, combined with the lights on porch, our house looks like a giant monster with an open mouth





The really scary house stuff though is that I cleaned the garage last week. The garage is truly my bete noir, it is so racked out of square in the front that the doors won’t close, it needs a new roof and has some rot along the sill plate. Of course the quick answer is to demolish it, of course I’m trying to figure out how to fix it. I’ll need to use a turnbuckle system to pull it back to square it in front, but keeping it that way will be the challenge.



Now everyone’s garage gets messy but ours was pretty amazing. I took 8 wheelbarrow loads of DIRT out last week, the back 1/3 of the place was buried about a foot deep. Two years ago I took out 6 bags of dry concrete that had been laid on top of the dirt at the back of the garage, some time in the 1950’s. My guess is that this berm was to keep someone from driving through the back of the garage. The result of all the dirt however has been the garage has been a small rodent breeding sanctuary. I found a mummified squirrel skeleton (keeping with our Halloween theme) that explained the bad smell last fall.



Here is a shot of the floor, only the edges of the garage are cemented, the center was gravel to allow oil to drip out of the car.



So to finish the spooky theme, here is a picture from the night of the Iowa – Ohio State football game of the Outback Steakhouse blimp over our house. This was my best picture, the first one looked like all those old fuzzy UFO photos.