A Poem as Lovely as a Tree?

It's dark, but this is our neighbor's enormous oak tree. People tell us all the time that that tree must be at least 150 years old, but Mike next door and I laugh because we have a photo of the two houses in 1929 with no tree there! When the new subdivision Foxcroft is in was platted in 1926 the land was all pasture. The realtors planted at least two fruit trees in the back of every lot and gave owners a choice of elm, white pine, or catalpa for the front. Only some of the pines are still left, but there are lots of BIG trees in our neighborhood.


Here is that photo:


And here is how our two houses looked from the same spot in May 2006:


Today is our last leaf vacuuming day, so we've spent even more time than usual raking.

We have four large walnuts. The story is that Bess brought these as seedling from the family farm when they moved to Foxcroft in 1928. I am tired of walnuts. I know I should be collecting and shelling them, but after a wheelbarrow load full in early October, I've been dumping them in the back ravine. I've put 7 wheelbarrow loads down there. This year they all lost their leaves in nearly a single night. Here are two in the front yard


Here is the really big one next to the garage:


This is a look at our side yard with our crabapple, and our neighbors giant oak and maple:


This is a look toward the far yard, we have another walnut, a black cherry, some hackberry, and then the neighbors pines:



Here is the oak across the street, it must be a pin oak since it still has all its leaves:


And with all these trees we then get a 3 foot high wall of leaves when we rake them to the street:


And here's a pile of walnut leaves and hosta debris:


This is what the street looked like when we left this morning, tonight they will all be gone:

Take a Look at This!

I worked Friday night and Saturday and painted the first floor bathroom ceiling and I must say it looks great:



Now for those that are a little underwhelmed by this you must know that the old ceiling was quite bad and I resorted to drywalling over it. Here is a shot with a little bit of context:



We started on this bathroom way back last spring, but haven't done anything until the last two weeks. Longtime readers (all three of you) may even remember all this but here's a quick recap:

May 2006

• The Mushroom Factor
  
• Mushrooms Galore
  
• Something Underfoot
  

July 2006

• 7 Days of Frenetic Work
  

So two weeks ago I got 1x8 boards and Pete and I put them down for our baseboard





I spent the last week heat gunning the old paint off the casing for the door, cupboard, medicine cabinet and laundary chute. After that I painted the ceiling as noted above.

On Sunday Pete and I started installing pine wainscoting to cover the badly cracked fake tile plaster.





We worked together for about 2 hours and got the short laundary chute wall and the long wall with the medicine cabinet finished



After Pete left I started on the window wall and got it started. I probably could have finished it Sunday night but I went with my neighbor Mike downtown to hear Illinois senator Barak Obama speak at a Democratic rally.



I came home from work Monday night and finished the window wall



Then I went back and put 1/2 inch base shoe on top of the baseboard and put 3/4 inch quarter round at the bottom of the the base.



I then went down and brought up the primer so I could put that on the wall where the plumbing is, my thought is the sooner I can him back to install the toilet and sink.



I finished about midnight last night

Who You Gonna Call?

The phone rang last night about 9:00 PM. Lisa answered and said hello then said, "Oh no! Oh my God! Yes, he has stuff for that, I'll send him over!"

It turns that Ben, our neighbor behind us, had gone into the bathroom at their place (a rental) and shut the door. He went to leave, but found that the latch bolt in the lock was stuck and he couldn't get out. He managed to pull the hinge pins, but with the door in the jamb that doesn't really help. Amy, his wife, called Lisa.

I went over with my wonderbar (big flat pry bar) and my pussyfoot (smaller trim pry bar) to offer assistance. I asked Ben if there was a set screw on the door knob on his side of the door (There was) so I passed a butter knife under the door to take the set screw out. When we got the knob and spindle off, it was apparent the spring in the latch bolt had failed. I then pried off the stops on either side of the door (in hindsight I only needed to do the lock side) and with the stops off I could see the latch bolt. Ben slid the butter knife through and pushed and I went from the other side with a putty knife and we got the latch pushed back so Ben could open the door.

He was embarrassed and grateful, Amy was happy she hadn't been the one locked inside as she said she would have hyperventilated after about 10 minutes. Ben said from when he discovered he was stuck until we got him out was only an hour.

In talking to my colleages at work today the comment was made:

What would have happened if Ben had been alone or lived by himself?

The answer of course was that he wouldn't have bothered to shut the door.

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.

Random House History: Repairs

I've posted before about the treasure trove of information we received along with our house. (All we had to do to access it was sort through 75 years worth of accumulation.) I ran across one of those great pieces last night, it's a 3 inch by 6 inch memorandum book that Bess would jot down what she paid for house repairs, and materials along with other tidbits, such as how much fabric it would take to make curtains for 3 kitchen windows and the back door "9 yd a yd wide for two 1 1/4 in hems."



For as organized as Bess was, a big head scratcher is why isn't this thing chronological? It skips around from page to page. I think the earliest dated entry (there are lots without dates) is
April 19, 1932
Pool lot 60.00

I know this refers to the pool that Bess and Helen built in the back yard, but was that the cost of everything? That seems high... They also didn't start digging it until 1933, I thought they had the ground already, maybe they expanded the back yard?

Another favorite is this page:


From the top left it reads:

Mr. Switzer painted
kitchen + cupboards
Aug, 1947 19 hours
labor + material 115.00

Rufus Wagner's "Joe"
removed dining nook seat
"gooed" the roof- new screen
in H's window- repaired
library window 26.59

1935
Singer Sewing Machine 50.00
" " table 23.92

June 16- 1939
China Closet 23.95

The right hand page from the top:

Bought GE Refrigerator
Aug 1, 1939- 128.00
+ (160 deduct for old one)

May 19, 1948 (W.A. Gay)
86# hind quarter beef 49.07

April 27, 1948
Heavy wire to house (220) Nate Moore 55.08

March 31, 1948
Wagner Connell Co.
shower, electric water heater 40 gal
stool- 327.25

So I know 1947-48 was a big update year (20 years after the house was built) they took out the half wall and one seat in the kitchen nook, repainted the kitchen, upgraded the electric service, and converted the basement room (kindling room in the blueprints) into a bathroom.

Here's what the nook looked like originally:

 and what it looked like when we bought the place:

As much as I like the look of the original I do appreciate the extra room you get when walking in the back door.

Lisa suggested that as a preservationist I tell Pete that I will pay him historical wages!

Who has time to work on the house?

Apparently not me during September. I have managed to paint some cupboard doors and get the baseboard in the girls’ rooms finished, but too many other things happen around here in September. Including:

Iowa Hawkeye Football

We are a block from Kinnick Stadium so every home game is like Mardi Gras. The stadium went up the year after Foxcroft was built and I have a lot of old photos of the place, including this one shot from our front porch in 1934:

Kinnick just finished a 2 year 89 million dollar renovation and before the first home game they dedicated a statue of Nile Kinnick (University of Iowa Heisman trophy winner in 1939) the day before the first home game. Let me give you some background on Kinnick: He was the grandson of an Iowa governor, the UI senior class president, Phi Beta Kappa, and chose to go to law school after graduating in 1940 rather than play pro ball. He dropped out of law school to join the navy as a pilot in WWII. He was killed when he ditched his plane in the Atlantic after developing an oil leak on a training flight rather than risk the carrier crew with a landing on deck. In his acceptance speech for Heisman he stated he was glad to be battling on the gridirons of the midwest rather than the battlefields of Europe. He was the epitome of "scholar athlete." Bess, who built Foxcroft, watched Kinnick play in that 1939 season, and wrote in her daily diary after Iowa upset #1 Notre Dame: "Iowa 7 Notre Dame 6. I still feel faint!"

I took the girls to the dedication and got some good photos:

The Hawkeyes beat Montana 41-7, then went on the road to beat Syracuse 20-13 in double overtime. Then they were back at home for the annual battle with the Iowa State Cyclones. Rowan went to the game with me:

Both school’s bands played at halftime

And of course the students mobbed the field after the game

The rest of you can see the excitement of Kinnick Stadium this coming Saturday when ESPN Gameday will broadcast all day from inside the stadium, and at 7:00 PM CDT the #13 Hawkeyes will play #1 Ohio State in a nationally televised game on ABC.

This will be a huge event, and I admit I am dreading it a bit. Two weeks ago for the Iowa State game, tailgaters (people who party where they park their cars) started next door at 6:00 AM. That game kicked off at 11:00 AM (a frequent starting time here) Many people in our neighborhood rent parking spots in their yards at $20 a game, so we get lots of partiers. Most are not a problem, however we had a girl from the neighbor’s tailgaters passed out in our driveway at 9:30 AM. With a kickoff 8 hours later than usual I’m afraid that many folks will start partying at their regular time and be unconscious by 4:00 PM. Lisa and I plan to have the girls stay at grandma’s out of town. Otherwise the crowd noise (70,000+) will last until at least 10:30 PM and they won’t get to sleep. Then imagine those folks all walking through our neighborhood in the dark, and driving home. They will either be deliriously happy for upsetting the #1 team in the country or really angry for losing to the #1 team in the country. Either choice is likely to be loud and perilous. Wow "delirious" and "perilous" in the same paragraph, and I'm not on a ladder!

Besides all the football last weekend was the 36th Annual Iowa Friends of Old Time Music’s Fiddler’s Picnic. I am proud say I’ve have been at 23 of the last 24. Here is a picture of Rowan playing on stage with other violin students. The guy playing backup banjo in the back with the funny hat on is me.

So maybe, I’ll start getting home projects done again soon. Right…

What’s the Difference Between a Bishop and a Carpenter?

One has a Cope and Mitre, the other cuts a cope or miter. Installing the baseboard has made me think religious thoughts. Here is a link to what I first thought of when considering how to cut the trim: Cope and Mitre.

Pete and I installed baseboard in the sun room and down the hallway on Sunday. I finished some more backband tonight so as soon as we backband the doorways inside the girls’ rooms we can start baseboards in both of those rooms. Then I need to get quarter round and we’ll be finished with installation and I can try to reglaze windows before it gets too cold

Saving Time in a Bottle...

We "buried" our time capsule this weekend. The rough opening for Rowan’s door was too big, so it made a perfect space to place a time capsule before trimming the inside of the doorway. So I burned every digital photo I had of our second floor construction onto a CD, and put it into a plastic bag along with a letter saying who we were, and that all of us signed. Since we put it in Rowan’s room, she also wrote a separate note. We also enclosed xexox copies of the original blueprints for the house.

Here’s the bag with the CD and the letters:

And the blueprint copies:

And with the hole covered:

A funny story: I left several time capsules in our previous house, and when talking with Brian and Sarah, who bought our place, they told us about finding one, almost. I had left a 2 liter pop bottle with pictures of all of us and a letter in wall cavity when remodeling the bathroom. While on their honeymoon last fall, Brian and Sarah got a call from their contractor saying they had found a time capsule while they were working. Extremely excited when they came back from their trip the happy couple asked to see the time capsule, and the contractor sheepishly told them that after reading it they sealed it back in the wall!