Plaster Restoration in the Van Gogh Guest Room

One of the two guest bedrooms upstairs, known as the Van Gogh, was once the site of the only full bathroom in the house, having been built into a corner of this room a very long time ago. (You can click on this link to a blog post about its demolition from April 2009. Scroll down to the bottom.)

Well, for the last five years, that room has been waiting for final restoration, with the front half badly damaged and with peeling paint from past leaks, and the rear half simply exposed new drywall and unfinished flooring and bathroom paint still on the corner of the ceiling.

Enter Estate Plaster, Inc., and Philip Lamachio and David Mearns, who started working on the house in mid-June. The Van Gogh was the second room they tackled, and here are some during and after shots of their good work:

Meal No. 931: Brendan's Moroccan Bistro Chicken

A night of planned but also welcome-but-unexpected guests, so I turned to the recipe shared with me by former student Brendan Shanley, because it's great with a crowd and with unpredictable arrival times.

Also, with the demolition of the rear wall and the old sales building that was right above my kitchen window, I now actually get to catch a glimpse of nice sunsets to the west, like the one I saw this evening while I worked on dinner:

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"Layered Green Bean Casserole," a long-time Jones family favorite.

Classic Old Bottles from the Wall Demolition

The guys from Lowder who were working on demolition of the rear retaining wall found a number of mostly intact old bottles that had been buried in the fill, and they pulled them out and passed them on to me. I haven't gotten them cleaned up yet, but I think they'll be suitable souvenirs of that project and the passing of that old wall. I was excited to see that two of them are easily identifiable: a vintage Dr. Pepper bottle and a vintage Nehi bottle. Unfortunately, the Nehi bottle has a chipped rim at the opening at the top but that just gives it character. It's not like I'd be looking to sell them anyway.

The Back Wall Is No More

Meal No. 893: Crispy Dijon Chicken Breasts

A new recipe for dinner, called Crispy Dijon Chicken Breasts, served with a dijonnaise and chive sauce. It got pretty rave reviews from this evening's small gathering of good friends. I tossed quinoa and peas on the plates to go with it, and there were some red velvet cookies available for dessert.

Also, by late this afternoon, the crew from Lowder Construction had completed the demolition of the building behind the house and cleared away all the debris:

The next thing I'll be watching for is the beginning of the wall demolition. It is likely to begin next week, but it is not certain!

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"Crispy Dijon Chicken Breasts," from 30-Minute Supper Recipe Cards in Cook's Country, October/November 2007.

"Red Velvet Cookies," in Cuisine at Home, September/October 2013, p. 46.

Demolition of 325 N. Broad

Thursday 02 January 2014

Let's begin with a quick photo from recent history:

February 2012

This photo is from the southwest corner of the expanse of lot generally known as 325 N. Broad Street. This property extends the entire block from Holly Avenue to my south, up to Fourth Street to the north. You can see that the one-story brick building at the back of this lot backs directly up to the back of my house.

For years, this was the used car lot for Modern Chevrolet, which was a major downtown dealership that was founded in 1933. Since Modern relocated its dealership up to the north end of town, on University Parkway, this building and lot have mostly been empty. For a time, it was the leasing office for the condos and townhouses that were built on the main Modern new car lot. For almost two years, it was home to a private ambulance service. For several weeks, it was used in the local production of a motion picture in town. But it's mostly been empty.

Commercial Realty, Inc., which is developing the new 751 W. Fourth office building to the north of the house, now owns this lot and the gravel lot adjacent to my property and just around the corner along Fourth Street (part of which can be seen in the photo below). The plans for now are uncertain, but when they closed on this property, they also inherited the problematic retaining wall that runs along the back of this lot and which backs up to my property. As I noted recently, part of this wall gave way with the long soaking rains we had just before Christmas Day:

Photo Taken from Rear Attic Window

That whole wall is going to be taken down, and the process began early this morning with the demolition of that abandoned sales building for the former used car portion of Modern Chevy. I was pretty much mesmerized by it all day long...I love watching stuff like this.

Caught sight of the beginning from the back hallway window.

The first scoop or two has been taken at this point.

The operator of the crawler-excavator handles this
machine with tremendous finesse.

View from the 4th Street entrance of the gravel lot beside the house.

View from up top, near the intersection of Holly Avenue and Broad Street.
You can see the back of the Roediger House
(and the attic window from which many of these shots were taken)

The attic is unfinished and I straddled floor beams at this window
to capture as much of the action as I could.

A cold rain started late morning.

At the end of the day, all that was left standing was the
shell of the storage room on the back.

Isn't this why we put windows at our kitchen sinks?

Changes Coming to the Back Wall

The double-lot that makes up my property is 120 feet across and right at 100 feet deep. The house squats on a fairly large portion of it and sits within feet of the north property line. When I built the addition on the back, my architect helped me to maximize its size by pushing fully out to the 20-foot set-back limit ordained by county building codes.

The property behind the house was, at one time, the used car lot for Modern Chevrolet.

When Modern moved up on University Parkway on the north side of the city, the original dealership lot was developed into condos and townhomes. The used car lot, though, has been mostly sad and used for various itinerant things: it was the leasing office for those new condos; it was home to a private ambulance service for nearly two years; it was the base of operations for a film crew for a couple of months. It does sit up considerably higher than my lots, and there is a tall retaining wall that goes the complete length of this property from Holly Avenue all the way to Fourth Street.

That wall is not in very good shape, starting behind my house and continuing up to Fourth.

Well, big things are about to happen.

The gravel lot on the north side of the house has been purchased by the same crew that's building the new office building on the north side of Fourth Street.

They've done their soil testing:

They've had the power cut to the building behind my house:

They have blocked off the gravel lot (most likely so that nobody will be parked there when and if that shaky wall suddenly gives way!):

And it's expected in mid-December that this wall will come down, which will radically change the look out the back of my property. It's also going to open me up a bit and leave me feeling a bit vulnerable, once that wall is gone and the adjoining property has been sloped. I might have to rent some fencing or something to make me feel safer. And also to keep Cyprus in check!