Weather or Not

I tried several times this weekend to get out to the lot to edge and furrow the garden in preparation for the planting early next month. We ended up having quite wet weather over the weekend. Whats worse, it was starting and stopping all weekend, so it was next to impossible to "squeeze" anything in.

We have also identified the garden center where we will be able to get the vegetable plants we want to grow, so now it just a matter of having everything lined up properly.

I will be working on it through the week. More to come.

Finished Product

Here it is looking SO much different then it did before I started : )

More to come....

New Face, New Topic

For those of you who have an RSS feed to this site, or happen to actually check in still hoping that I just was asleep at the wheel and am suddenly going to post pictures of a nearly completed home, I'm back, and with a new head of steam on a new topic.

Gardening. Thats right, the family and I are going to attempt to grow a whole mess 'o vegetables (and a little fruit) this summer in the good old city.

Since we are unable to build on the other lot, we have decided to use a good portion of the backyard as a vegetable garden. It seemed like the logical thing to do with the volume of fresh fruits and vegetables we eat, so we decided to go for it.

So, I took the above plot of grass, rented a rototiller from Home Deport, and went to work. The key to this was that we had to take soil that most likely hadnt been cultivated in 50 years, and turn it into viable soil. This meant rototilling the top layer and raking the grass off. Since the ground was fairly hard, I had to do this a second time to get the balance of the big pieces of grass. Once that was done I then went to work tilling as deeply as I could in parrallel lines doing one pass in each direction (east/west - north/south).

Once I was done with those 6 passes at the ground I went through and cut out what roots weren't ripped out. This area had quite a few roots, and it was tedious tilling and cutting all of these out. I also picked out any pieces of wood, rock, or random loose debris (this included a marble, a small plastic toy horse, a large metal hook and bolt, and a spark plug).

I went back to the Home Depot (twice) to get bags of Peat and Organic garden soil. First, I put roughly a 1" layer of peat on the whole area. Then I made a pass in each direction, making sure to take my time so the soil and peat were good and mixed. Once I had this done, I spread another inch of organic gardening soil on top of that. I then made very slow deliberate passes at the ground to mix as much as possible. At this point, the soil was so soft and deep that the rototiller was working at its fullest possible depth, and probably not hitting hard ground at the bottom.

Once I made the last pass, i then raked the dirt back into one level plane while cleaning up the rest of the loose grass, rocks, and wood that was coming to the top through the process of mixing everything up.

Next up is going to be edging the garden and deciding the best way to make furrows for growing the vegetables as well as how the heck to keep all of the local animals out of the garden as well.

It was just a matter of time

Before the issues the financial sector, and the economy are dealing with right now came home to roost. Despite my previous post of encouraging progress from the bank, I got a call today telling me that the deal was not going to work as originally thought. The result, was that the bank was looking for a larger percentage of the loan amount down at the initiation of the loan. As a result of things I had set in motion a while ago, this was what I have been budgeting for to this point, and it was the limit we were prepared to pay out of pocket. While we can afford to pay the extra amount of money, its past our comfort level, and we are going to wait til the spring to see how the market looks at that point.

Up to this point, we had just as much going for us with the down market as we had against. By this I mean that all we were going to give up - small mortgage to big, renting our other house - we were going to be able to mitigate with buying better from the contractors, and getting better deals on items for the house then we would have in a normal market.

Alas, it is not to be for this year. We are most likely not even going to tear the house down. It seems that with everything the way it is, we are better off leaving it up, then renting a temporary fence for who knows how long.

The upside in all of this is we can pull back the reigns and be able to take a good hard look at everything we are doing, so we can get the best deal possible on whatever we are going to use in the house.

I will update sometime in the near future.

Closer to Decision Time Then We Were Last Week

Well, we are through the first hurdle of qualifying for the loan. While that was more a formality then anything else as I did plenty of confirmation before we bought the property, its still an important part of the process. With the general financial health of both individuals and banks, nothing is a certainty anymore.

We are now on to the appraisal portion of the bank's obligatory work. The process now moves to the architect and appraiser to establish as projected value for the home when its finished. This will determine if our budget meets that value. If the two are equal, then we should have a deal, and we will just need to move through the process of closing the loan to be ready to go. If the appraised value comes up short of the projected budget, then we will have to asses how far, and if there are costs that can be pared to get close, or if we are going to have to sit things out for a half year or more. This would be done to let property values settle, or to come up with more money to help finance the deal. This is the spot that I have been most concerned about from the very beginning, as its quite subjective and very difficult to asses in this market.

Nevertheless, they will be doing this either way, and once they are done in a week or so probably a little more), we will know what our options are, and where we are going. This will also be the time that we will be ready to knock the house down. If the demo permit happens to come through earlier then the appraisal, then I think we will most likely bring the house down either way so we can go if the bank gives us the green light.

We took the two trees out of the back of the yard, and its a nice preview to the demolition that is coming. I am going to take a few more pictures this week to refresh everyone's memory, and so that the progress will have a good benchmark to start from.

Either way, in 2 weeks, we will either have a piece of empty land, or we will have a piece of empty land with a BIG hole in it.

I am hoping for the latter, its more fun.

No matter what, the end resut will be TEAR IT DOWN!

If we should happen to not be able to get the financing to work this year, we do get a consolation prize: We get to tear the house down this year no matter what.

I went over to meet with our local alderman last night at his "ward night." If anyone is not familiar with an alderman, its essentially a councilperson that represents a specific area of neighborhood in the city. There are 50 wards in cook county, and each one has an alderman. The alderman is responsible for local city politics, issues like parking permits and trash removal, and any sort of building permit needs to have the sign off of the alderman.

So thats what brought me to Alderman Ariel Reboyras' office - getting whats called an alderman's letter for both the general building permit process, and one specifically for the demolition and excavation. I just needed to sit down with the alderman and his right hand man Carlos to show them the plans, and talk to them about what we are trying to do. This is really just a formality, but its part of the way that Alderman Reboyras gets to know his constituents, and its a good way for people who are applying for permits get to understand the direction and focust of the neighborhood.

Nevertheless, we got the sign off from the Alderman, and he is excited to see the project come to fruition. What I did confirm with them was this: they would much rather have me tear the house down and put up a temporary fence if we dont get the financing, then to leave the house stand through the winter. The reasoning is fairly simple: empty houses are just asking for squatters, and we dont want to foster any of that in our neighborhood. Therefore, this place is going to go down in the 2-3 weeks either way, and for this I am grateful.

If nothing else, it will be nice to have some sort of physical progress on the site for the future of the house. Speaking of which, the trees in the back are coming down on Thursday. Depending on the weather, I may document some of the process just to show everyone the before and after.

Ignoring the fact that we need permission.....

Even though we need the "green light" from the bank, we have to continue to push ahead as though we are building the house. This means working through the demolition and excavation permits. By doing this, we are hoping to avoid several weeks of down time while we wait for the city to approve what we would like to. Also, since we plan on doing this either way, being this year or next, these permits are renewable, and will allow us to be ready when we want to do it. As a result, the money we pay for permits will not be spent in vain.

The process of getting the demo/excavation permit is two-fold. First, the demolition company does their part by applying for the permit, doing the air quality, and rat infestation prevention, and sending approval letters to the alderman, and each of our neighbors. This just assures each neighbor that every possible measure will be taken to ensure no damage will be done to their property during the process. On our end, we are responsible for getting the excavation permit, which means that I have to get signed approval letters from each of the neighbors, and the alderman to confirm they are in agreement with our decision to dig a really big whole in the ground.

One thing that has come up through the course of all of this, is at what distance from the neighbors foundation do we have to be in order to not have to use shoring to protect the other home from having issues due to collapsed land. In the end, this is going to force us to move the house as much as two feet to the west. This will present us with some re-design work in the form of re-creating the north face of the garage so the door is in line with the back door of the house, and if the three in the front yard will then be directly in front of front door. The former will not be much of an issue, but the latter could be a problem, and its something we will know about this week some time.

So, this week we are going to have the two large tress in the back taken down - one is dead, and threatening our neighbors wires, and other is in the middle of the future garage. Once we are done with that later this week, we will be working through the rest of the design to make sure we have things right before we finalize most of the design to go to the permit process.