Lather, Rinse, REPEAT

We have been working on an interior project lately. The office/guest bedroom/junkroom/dog's room is finally getting some attention.

This room was Helen's when the house was built. Here is an original photo:


Here's the same corner last winter:


We stripped off the old varnish using the same procedure we have before. I've written about it:
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And of course who could forget this gem, from the days before "blog" was even a word! Here is a web page I created when we still lived at our old place!
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You get the idea...
Anyway, here is that same corner again, with the floor buffer:


Here are the old radiator holes before I patched them:


Lisa staining:


And varnishing:


Now I'll get to start painting, once Lisa decides on a color.

More to come!

New Lid and the Old Place

It's not like I'm stalking our previous house or anything, but even four years after moving I still look out at the old place whenever I'm on that side of town. I had been paying a little more attention this summer after Brian, one of the current owners, said they would be putting a new roof on. He mentioned it would be made of metal shingles. So last month when I went by and saw it was covered in a grid of lathe boards I knew I needed to get a picture. I drove around to the back alley and shot this view from the rear:


What makes me feel really old, is that we put the red roof on in 1996! I hired the job out and am glad I did. I know my limits and laying new shingles is beyond my abilities. It seemed like a bear of a job, since it included a tear off of three old layers of shingles. About 9 months after we re-roofed we got hit by a major hailstorm. Our insurance ended up paying us $4,000 which was nearly 2/3 of cost of the new one.

I went by the house this week and here is how it looks now:


I like the look. The sign out front says that they are stone covered metal shingles, to me it looks very much like Ludowici tiles. Maybe in 15 years we will do the same on Foxcroft but in a green similar to what we already have?

I am so comforted by the fact that our old place is in such capable hands. Brian and Sarah have done a wonderful job of making improvements, and the fact that it is still a single family home is icing on the cake. I must also say that those pictures of the back also show that my paint job, 1998 on the rear side and 1999 on the north still look darn good!

Revisiting Tragedy

At lunch yesterday I sat with my co-workers and watched the news about the VT shootings. It hit way too close for me.

Nov. 1, 1991 was a Friday, it was cold and even had started to snow. Lisa and I had been married for 3 months, and were planning to go out after work and meet some friends at a local pub. Shortly before 4:00 I parked at home and walked downtown. Two blocks from our old house was Van Allen Hall, home of the astrophysics department, on the UI campus. When I went past it there were firetrucks, an ambulance, and police cars all around and yellow caution tape in front of the building. I thought perhaps there had been a fire, but kept on going. When Lisa got to the bar, half an hour later, she asked if we had heard anything about a shooting on campus. We got the bartender to turn on the TV and heard that there had been a shooting at Van Allen Hall, and also at Jessup Hall, the UI administration building.

The initial news reports were very sketchy, I distinctly remember one saying that 5 people had been taken to Mercy Hospital (which was half a block from our home) I turned to our friend, who was a neurology resident at UI Hospital at the time, and said that must be a good sign, since the Mercy ER is much smaller than UI's, people must not be that badly hurt. Mark's response was that this was a bad sign, if people were being taken to Mercy they were likely going to the morgue. It turned out he was right.

Gang Lu, a UI astrophysics graduate student killed Dwight Nicholson, Bob Smith, and Cristoph Goertz three very distinguished physics professors, and fellow grad student Linhua Shan. He then went to Jessup and killed UI vice president T. Anne Cleary, and wounded a work study temporary secretary, Miya Sioson, leaving her a quadraplegic, before killing himself.

It was a horrible event and one that made a small city feel smaller. Gang Lu lived across the street from us in an apartment building, but we never met him. Goertz was a neighbor of my parents. I had taken an ed measurement class from Anne Cleary in the summer of 1986. The days that followed were painful. In a class discussion one of my 5th graders, mentioned that her parents, both graduate students, were very worried how people would react, they were Korean and even though the perpetrator was Chinese, they were afraid of facing discrimination and suspicion. Another student delivered papers to Gang Lu's apartment.

Many details came out later about Lu's anger at perceived slights, the inability of PhD students in sciences to get work in a changing China, his fascination with "Dirty Harry" movies. However I think the most moving and powerful summary of what happened was written by Jo Ann Beard. Her acclaimed personal essay based in part on the killings, called "The Fourth State of Matter," was originally published in The New Yorker. It also appeared in the 1997 edition of Best American Essays, and was later published in her collection of personal essays, "The Boys of My Youth." Beard worked as an editor for a physics journal at the university and was a colleague of the victims, working closely with several of them.

"The Fourth State of Matter.

My thoughts go out to all of the those people in Blacksburg.

Back to Square One

Well, our prospective buyer on our old place pulled out, citing the contingency that it was cost prohibitive to meet current code for a medical office. (Our neighborhood is zoned residential office, due to its proximity to Mercy Hospital) So we are back to square one on that front. If anyone wants a great place in a town that's consistently in Top 10 lists for places to be (last week's news was that the Iowa City Community Schools are ranked as the #5 public school district in the U.S. by some national economic development consortium) drop me a line!

At Foxcroft Lisa and finished stripping the old varnish off baseboard and around the French doors. I then rented a floor buffer and stripped the floor too. Next step will be wood bleaching some water stains, then staining and varnishing the baseboard.

House Anniversary/ANZAC Day

Today is the 19th anniversary of my moving into our current house. I moved in on the hottest April 25th ever in Iowa City, 92 degrees. I closed at 8:30 AM and moved 7 pickup loads from my apartment in downtown Iowa City to the house. Every load went down a complete flight of stairs out of the apartment and then up a complete flight in the front of the house shown above. (The house did not look that good then) I had two friends helping me, Dave Marsh and Steve Nicknish. Nick died 6 months later in a fall while camping.

After moving the first thing I did that night was take the storm windows off the porch and sit out and play my banjo and guitar. The first song I played was Eric Bogle's "And the Band Played Waltzing Mathilda." The song is the most powerful anti-war piece I've ever heard. It tells the story of an Aussie WWI soldier, in the Australia-New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) who was part of the assault on Gallipoli, Turkey. The battle began April 25, 1915, and resulted in the needless slaughter of nearly a generation's worth those countries men. ANZAC Day is celebrated today and is Australia's equivalent of our Veteran's Day.

Today's house anniversary is nearly as bittersweet. We accepted an offer to sell on Saturday, and while we are excited to move to Foxcroft, I will be leaving the house in which I've spent nearly half my life. This is where I brought home my bride. This is where she and I brought home our children. This is where we have gathered with friends and family to celebrate holidays and successes. This is where we met to go to Nick's funeral.

I didn't intend to write all this when I sat down, but sometimes that's what happens. I will miss this place...

"There's a FIRE next door!"

I thought it unusual that my phone would be rining at 10:15 at night. I had already talked to Lisa and told the the girls good night before they went to bed. I had only two more days in Kansas and then I would be back home. So when my cell rang Wednesday night, I knew something was up. The house next door to our current home was on fire, 5 trucks were there, our oldest was sleeping soundly and the youngest (whose room is nearest) was watching. We live two blocks from the central fire station so hearing sirens is not unusual. With a hospital half a block away there are a fair number of false alarms, but Lisa said she suddenly realized that they were right in front of the house, and right after that she started to hear the windows explode. She immediately went out and told the chief that she lived next door, and there were two children. He said that they'd let her know if they needed to evacuate.

The fire started in the attic, which is where the landlord lives. No one was injured thankfully, and the firefighters got it under control quickly. There is about $50,000 in damage. When I got home yesterday, all the dormer windows in the attic were blown out, and you could see the scorch marks outside each dormer. The home is the oldest structure in our quarter section of the block, and was identified as a key property when our neighborhood received National Historic District status. There is a dumpster outside the back now, and burnt objects are scattered around. I haven't seen Ralph (the landlord) to find out how he's doing, but he does have family in the area, so I'm sure he's OK. The tenants are getting their things out too. It's really sad to see all this.

Besides being extremely relieved that there were no injuries, from a completely selfish standpoint it's a lot easier to be selling your own house when the one next to it isn't a smoking pile of ruins...