The wonderful Matt Mourning of Dotage (one of my favorite urban blogs ever), has -- for some reason -- seen fit to link to Our Little Easy in his latest ( and ever-marvelous) post, despite my not-very-urgent posting schedule here. The two prior posts were actually typed and put up after the good folks at STLPechaKucha asked me to present, and I decided to present on Old North...and had nothing to offer up as URL except this pathetic little blog, and its handful of posts.

OK; I've learned my lesson. At least one post a week. You never know what might happen! So this is a wake-up call. The other thought I had was this: I started this blog so that I would have a nice record of the process of buying and working on a rehab in Old North. Sort of like keeping a picture album, back in the days when network TV and Fotomats were cutting-edge cultural instutions. My first instinct is to offer some back-tracking to chronicle what's happened with the house thus far, and really, since we've made about as much progress with the house as with the blog, I guess this isn't a complete and total tragedy; the most interesting stuff has not happened yet. Though I think my next entry will be about the epic battle that took place in the new garden beds over the past few rainy weeks, when I marched out into the side yard, armed with a spray bottle of peroxide water, to do battle with the dreaded, mulch-loving Dog Vomit Slime Mold, aka Caca de Luna...

We got lost in Granite City for an hour and a half tonight (that's a long ol' story, one I don't think I have the vim/vigor to tell right now). GC is one of the most surreal cities I've ever seen at night; weirder than Vegas. There is something about seeing functional Midwester industrial-agro architecture, backlit by refractory flames, that makes me feel like I am dreaming even though I am awake. We got stalled by a train that seemed to roll on forever. We could finally see the last car in the distance ... but then the train stopped. And then it started going backwards. And it was the only obstacle between us and Rte. 3 (i.e. the road home). We stopped at a 7-11, but the cashier didn't know how to get to Nameoke Road (i.e., the other road home) and the customers were too drunk to give proper directions. So we drove and we drove. We drove by a huge and seemingly deserted hospital; past VFW Halls and shivering people of indeterminate gender, always in hoodies, walking down the sidewalk with freshly purchased bottles of liquor under their armpits, hands shoved in pockets. We drove by an abandoned storefront whose purpose had once been, according to the sign on the front, plaster casting. Then we drove past many small dark houses with flickering blue windows lit with TV sets, and empty train cars, and spidery trees. When we zoomed over the bridge, I was so disoriented I didn't realize we were home until I saw the Corner Cafe on Salisbury. Even though it was closed I have never been so happy to see it, even happier than the last time we had lunch there and the teacup matched my manicure.

Evil Pigs and Falling Bricks: This is What Motivation is Made Of

When we were in Salt Lake City over Christmas, someone drove by, got out of the car with a can of hot pink spray paint, and drew a pig with fangs and a bouffant on the side of our new house. We closed in November (that's the embarassing truth about how well I've been able to keep up with this blog; I didn't even note that we bought the damn house!), and since then, it seems like it has suffered one disaster after another. First the pig appeared (Ben, our amazing neighbor, went out into the cold on Christmas Day and whitewashed the brick -- this photo is post-whitewash) and last week, I had the horrible realization that there are bricks falling off the facade. I'm perplexed; the bad tuckpointing on the front has been holding for the past five years, and then after we buy the house, it starts to crumble? It's almost as if the house is trying to create some kind of emergency that will panic me to the point of finding rehab funds by any means possible, traditional bank loan or otherwise. Luckily Graham, who will eventually be our G.C., needed some writing work done, so as labor swap he came over to inspect the state of the roof, to make sure it was not going to collapse (and stabilize it if so). According to Graham, there are to reasonably dry beams holding it up, but we still need to get a brickmason over there tout suite to start doing some triage work on the brick. I've been looking at peer-to-peer lending sites, trying to find some kind soul who will loan me 10,000 bucks or so, hopefully without a 30 percent APR.

So you may ask: how'd you get yourself into this fix, dummy? Don't most people roll the price of the house and the construction loan into one big mortage? Well, let me tell you what happened while this blog was languishing away. Someone in the government decided that a great way to fix the housing crisis was to legislate that you could pull comps only from a one-mile radius around the house you are buying. Maybe that's not such a big deal in other neighborhoods, but in Old North, it meant we were hosed. This happened the week we were scheduled to have our 401K paperwork go through. So that $120,000 203K loan suddenly became a $60,000 loan. I don't know if you've scoped out the going rate for new sewer systems, or even drywall, but for a gut rehab that doesn't cut the mustard even if you're talking about an 800 square foot house like ours. So we decided to use our downpayment money to just buy the house outright. I have to say, it's an odd feeling to own a piece of property free and clear. I don't have any illusions that things will stay that way -- at least if we have any intention of stabilizing and actually living in the house -- but now we have the worrisome situation of owning a house, and only the ability to do the elbow-grease jobs on it, like cleaning the paint off the brick and disposing of all the gross old moldy drywall and pink panther insulation.

The good news is that just up the block, Habitat for Humanity will be rolling in to build some teeny-tiny houses (you can see renderings on the Old North blog, here). Teeny-tiny enough to give us a comp. But they are also clockin in at $90,00 or $100,000. Of course, no one is giving out 100 percent loans anymore, even if you can buy the mortage insurance, but a comp...! That's hopeful. They will be finishing up one of those little square houses a block up from us around May, so in the meantime, if we can protect our little house from viscous people with cans of pink spray paint, and pray that all these freeze-and-thaw cycles don't do more damage to the masonry we will be okay. That said, I have been doing something I've never done before: going to HGTV's site every day to enter a dumb contenst. The prize is a big fancy house in New Mexico, which, if I won, I would probably donate to the Taos Arts Council or something. It also includes  $500,000 in cash. I'm not anticipating either one of those things ending up in my possession, but if some weird star aligns and all that falls into my lap, I'd rehab every house on the block - all three of them.

The only other thing I have to say today is that I am swearing off using exclamation marks for a while. I gave up coffee several months ago, and looking back at my earlier posts, which were hyperacttive to say the least, I'm wondering if there wasn't a caffeine-to-exclamation point thing going on there. I think I've been a lot more restrained about my punctuation since giving up the joe. As I reread my earlier posts, I am thinking that's a very, very good thing. Cheers to non-jangly nervous systems, and to pulling out the loud and excitiable punctuation only as often as one might reach for the fire extinguisher.