Whatever It Needs To Be

My sister Alison blogs over here, and as you can see, she's much more diligent about keeping her blog updated that I am. But after experimenting with tumblr, and getting kind of burned out on it (I'm sad to say I have defaulted into becoming a chronic re-tweeter and re-blogger) I decided to come back here, and make another heroic attempt to keep this poor thing going. I mean, hell, I've gotten almost 700 hits and posted less than 10 times, so...here I am. I write for a living, so this format just feels more natural to me, even though this culture is moving more and more toward communicating in 140 characters, or just pure images.

Back to Ali's blog. My sister also puts me to shame as far as her energetic approach to everything she does. She spins wool from fleeces, dyes it and knits mittens and socks for her whole family; makes chocolate pudding from scratch; and silversmiths her own jewelry. She was always a lot better at teaching herself new skills just by reading a book and following the directions. Once, when my Aunt Linda was babysitting, she walked downtown with us and let us pick out a toy from the cheapie store, as long as it was under $5. Alison bought herself, I'm pretty sure, some nice jewelry; I bought a magic set, complete with paper playing cards and a little plastic pea-and-walnut-shell game. When I got it home, I dumped the whole thing out on the table and started trying to make sense of it. She'd already grabbed the instructions and told me, "It says here, 'For best possible results...'" "Maybe I don't want best possible results!" I yelled, which meant I just didn't have the patience to read the instructions, something that is (embarrassingly enough) true to this day. I cook intuitively, which is why my food is often inedible. Sometimes I have to assemble something backwards, take it apart, and then put it back together again. Ali just knows how to do stuff right the first time; she's careful, methodical, and good at following directions. Which is why she can read and speak Japanese, cook really good clam chowder and sew. Me, I 've read a whole bunch of poetry, can size dresses just by looking at them and traveled to strange cities solo, getting to know them by getting lost in them.

Anyway, if you want to see how amazing my sister is, look at her Flickr page, where she posts her projects. It makes me tired just looking at it. If she owned our bungalow, it would be finished already, down to a hand-painted weathervane on the roof!

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.

Neighborhood as Living Room

One thing I know - if you're a sporadic blog-poster, you don't earn yourself much of an audience. I've been super lazy with this blog, but today I was looking at Ben and Heidi's website, and - eek! - they put a link to this blog in their links list! So now there's some pressure to actually post something here more frequently than every six months, if only not to embarrass them!

Also, I wanted to put in a plug for the Old North St. Louis Home & Community Tour, which is coming up May 9. You can see Ben & Heidi's amazing house, and Graham & V's rehabbed charcoal warehouse, and Tom & Susan Tchetter's swoon-worthy house (which pretty much got me fixated on moving to Old North by hook or by crook). I also wanted to post a link from Kaid Benfield at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who has been an effusive cheerleader for ONSL. I'll bet there are at least a dozen people who will want to buy him an ice cream at Crown Candy when he finally gets that long-promised neighborhood tour. 

And hey! The temp is supposed to climb this week. Thom and I have been doing a little work on the lot next to the house. Thom was the hero, digging out some nasty, decaying orange shag carpet that had been dumped on the lot and was disintegrating into the dirt. (Gross). He has it in a pile now and we just need to get a few of those big Operation Brightside bags from one of the neighbors so we can get rid of that nasty mess! We also planted a wee plot of strawberries near the front. We have some chives, southernwood & pennyroyal going in next. Stay tuned for some photos .... 

Progress, in the Form of a Mushroom

Ben and Heidi, our soon-to-be neighbors, who are busily rehabbing across the street from the apartment (their progress makes my head spin!) commented last week during the 14th Street Mall tour and open house that it had been quite a while since I'd updated here. This is true; we had some truly awful computer problems, and we were reduced to getting on the Internet via a tiny Eee! netbook, which has a keyboard about the size of three saltine crackers laid end-to-end (not really conducive to blogging). Also, we were unable to dowloand any photos from our camera to its not very hefty memory. This weekend our new tower finally arrived, and we're back up to speed with the computer. So, back up to speed with this little project (hi Ben and Heidi!)

So, progress: we've walked through the house with what we hope will be our general contractor and our brickmason (more on that later) in order to prep all our paperwork for the bank. But what really cheered my spirits was receiving our garden lease paperwork from LRA (aka the City of St. Louis' empty building and empty lot division), which I signed and returned to Mrs. Warfield at City Hall, with a money order for $5, which gives us the right to mow 7,000 s.f. of grass, though my plan is to plant the ground up with water-conserving native plants that don't require upkeep. We're expressedly prohibited from turning the lot into 1. an obstacle course or 2. a baseball diamond or 3. erecting playground equipment on the site - they have nothing to fear, cleaning and planting will keep us plenty busy, with no time and energy left over to channel towards building playground equipment, missle silos or anything else on this spot.

In any case, on Saturday, we wandered over to our new leased lot, next door to the Little Easy, to check out the space. It looks like we'll be purchasing a large roll of trash bags and doing a spring cleanup to get rid of all the Night Train bottles, empty beer cans and misc. weird paper trash. I think much of that has blown there; just to the right of the lot there are two empty LRA buildings which Barbara has dubbed "The Twins;" one suffered a fire, when I'm not sure, but the windowsills are charred. It appears that someone was bunking down there at one point, judging from the discarded clothing, sleeping bags and empty White Castle packages. Maybe someone lit a drum one cold night to stay warm? In any case, the trees next to the house didn't burn, and while they are pretty gnarled and need to be trimmed, they're still standing. While inspecting them, we found the very alarming fugi above growing out of a wound in one of them. Ugh!

My first fear was that it was some sort of toxic puffball that was going to explode and blow poisonous spores all over the lot. Like there's not enough to do with the soil testing and remediating for lead, arsenic and who knows what else that's left over from the building rubble under the grass. Turns out, though, and this may be even more alarming than the thought that this is some sort of noxious Truffala from outer space, is that this is, believe it or not, a culinary delicacy. As a matter of fact, it's even medicinal. Yes, folks, you are looking at a rather dingy example of the hairy tooth fungus (it even sounds awful, doesn't it?), aka "Lion's Mane," aka "Monkey Head," aka "Hedgehog Fungus," aka "Pom Pom mushroom," aka Hericium erinaceus. Gourmands grow it on purpose (you can even buy a kit), and foragers charge a pretty penny for it at farmer's markets. When not covered in soot, these little guys are snowy white (one description I read compared it to "a polar bear's paw") and, like all exotic foods, it "tastes like chicken." I do not recommend anyone coming by to pluck it off the tree and fry it up with horse chestnuts and pea pods, though. No, this is one grizzled old bear's paw/monkey head/pom pom/hedgehog. Lord knows how long it's been there. I took it as an immensely positive sign, however, that it's been able thrive despite the car exhaust, Night Train bottles and of course the blaze from the building next door. As toothy and hairy and spine-tingling as it is, it's also a mighty sign of life. A medicinal mushroom. A fantastic omen. Like a lot of things on the northside, you can't judge by appearances; lurking under the duskiest and off-putting exteriors, there's medicine and nourishment, waiting to be acknowledged.

Now, the Paper Trail ...

On Sunday, I went to breakfast with Barbara, Janet and Andrew at a swell breakfast joint over in St. Louis place. It had shiny red floors and is the most spic and span place I have ever eaten (I'll have to get the name from Barbara, because you should go there for breakfast ... they have the best pancakes in town). Barbara gave me a list of what I need to track over the course of rehabbing The Little Easy (pictured at left!) It is quite a long list. I called Tom T., who was almost our neighbor at one point, to see if he would be interested in serving as general contractor. Thom has been sick as a dog, so we haven't gone over to make measurements of the place (that's the first step, Barbara tells us). However, we did pick up a 100-ft. tape measure tonight so that we can make good use of the "antique graph paper," pack of pencils and clipboard that Barbara also gave us on Sunday. It gets dark so early (and brrr! It has gotten as cold as a miner's ass out there) but I am so excited. I am all fidgety because I need to get bank docs and a scope of work to Rick Horn ASAP and I feel like I am falling behind. I will have to work fast with Thanskgiving coming up - gotta get this stuff to them fast. This weekend is fairly eaten up, but I am hoping at the very least we can go through the house on Sat, early, and get those measurements, if not before.