3/30/08

Final design meeting set—Property mystery solved
It's been quite a while since entries. There is a meeting at the architect’s this Friday after a delay of a week to review the plans. My builder will be attending too. They should be close to done on the design side. I’m sure there will be some changes but I should have enough to go to the bank with—I’m very excited to see them. This might be the formal start of construction.

I did some detective work on the Methodist church property. I e-mailed White County’s mapping office and they were very kind to provide me with a satellite map of the area. It does not show any additional property the other side of my building other than the lot owned by Mrs. Henry. I then e-mailed the assessors office and after a few back and forths got this in final answer:
“After talking to a co-worker who is familiar with the properties, we realized that our mapping was not correct. We show you own the old Robertstown school house on .33 acres (plat book 58, page 72) and the little house south of you belongs to Mrs. Allison. So that means your property IS ADJACENT TO Angela Henry’s property at the end, near Elrod St. She owns the last 50 feet between your building and Elrod St. We have corrected our maps to show this arrangement. Previous tax bills have been verified as for the correct acreage and buildings.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
The parcel we showed as being owned by the Community Evangelical Methodist Church does not exist, and the parcel records have been deleted to correct our records.
So, now, parcel H04E-039 is Allison to your south, H04E-040 is your property, and Ho2e-041 is Angela Henry on the corner.”

So this clears up the question of ownership and my hope to pick up some room on that side. Mrs. Henry owns all that land and I must now get her permission for the roof overhang. I called her but she is elderly and I’m not sure if she knew what I was talking about. I will send her a letter like I did with the Allisons to see if we can get a written easement. I am still worried about access to our building though her lot and possible damage to her property.

2/27/08

Basement Plans-Wine Cellar?
Mr. Cain sent me over his plans for the crawl space—now officially a basement. Certainly looks nice to me, with plenty of room for wood and wine. The basic idea is to poor a slab with a wall inside the existing wall supporting a shelf. He’s giving us some options on the entrance—minimal or expensive. One with an full height door—the other with the stoop down, step down traditional root cellar thing. I’m leaning toward the later. We will need to get some cost on this but in my mind it’s already done. Jim might be able to get busy on it and that is my intention, if affordable.

2/17/08

Recycling Lore-Wide Shot
It was not quite as nice a day this Saturday as last. - but still warm. I rode up to my father-in-laws and we took his truck down to the shop. I got to work loading the wire an copper pipe. Bob and Bonnie helped. We were told that all the soldered joints must be cut out to get grade #1 or $3.45 lb. - so I hacked them off. It was much harder bundling up the wire and it took several hours to get it all loaded into Bob’s old Ford pickup. We started out about 3 p.m. for the re claimers up GA 384 25 miles away in Cornelia. It turned out to be quite an adventure. We had only about a quarter tank of gas and bad directions - finally after an hour, a few anxious moments trying to find a gas station, and cell phone call, we made it to Bobby’s Recycling. It turned out to be a treasure trove of mountain personalities fulfilling all your wildest stereotypes. I gave a hand getting all the pipe and wire out and weighing the different grades. We had a 197 lbs. of wire plus the pipe. They wouldn’t give me anything for the wire inside the metal pipes so strip it out if you get a chance. They gave me a slip and I took it to the office, a young lady wrote me out a check for $497—Not bad.
I took a few nice shots using my wide angle - two stitched together for this picture of my entire world on Center Baptist Church Loop.

2/9/08

Heading to Helen-Window shots
Sautee Nachoochee Valley can be about as pretty as a place gets. The weather has been great for February and I was looking forward to the drive up—put the top down—brought the dog. I took pictures with my digital all the way up, and when I got there at about noon I took a lot more—160 or so.
For some reason they left two windows in place in the courtyard area - plus the eight boarded up ones in the shop. They cleaned up the glass pretty well but we now have a pile of twisted window frames adding to the mess outside. Next week I want to gather up all the copper wire and pipes and take it to the re claimers.
Bonnie and I hung around and bumped into the neighbors. We ended up talking to them for a while —they have a scotty too. Took a few more shots and headed up to the Wurls to check in. I went home the long way via Dahlonega and Dawsonville- got back about 6p.m..
For some reason only the last 40 or so pictures came out—Dang, cause the ones that did were very good. I added some to the demo slide show. The light was brilliant all day. I’ll be going up again next weekend.

2/7/08

Windows pulled out today Midtown meeting?
Jim & Co. pulled all the windows out except in the shop today. They ended up busting out the masonry fairly easily acording to him and pulling them out with the truck in most cases. I'm going up Saturday to see and do a survey of the block damage. I would guess it must repaired before we go to much further. The entire back right corner might have to be rebuilt along with a few headers along the back windows. Jim was thinking we could bring it down and get a bobcat in there to dig out some of the dirt in the crawl space. Then put it back up.
Sounds like it might be the easiest way. Bob Cain wrote to me that he had some ideas for that area so I want to check with him before we go much further.
Might be time for another midtown meeting. This time it would be good to have Mr. Johnston in attendance.

1/27/08

One jump ahead - not with out a few questions.
Loaded the wife and the dog in the truck and headed up to the shop Saturday morning. It was supposed to snow but the clouds gave way to clear skies. We got in about noon and took a look around. Huge change in a week. The roof was completely gone and they had cut the slab floor out in the back section. I was shocked! — It’s a huge volume when you see it with no floor or ceiling! I don’t know why, but I thought they only needed to cut the slab back about 10 feet. The floor was such poorly supported that they had to pull everything out. It exposed a very large crawl space that could be exploited for quite a bit of storage. I would like to be able to access it from the inside — even a trap door of some kind would be great. There is also a staircase going from the back that was covered with the shed that housed the air compressor. No one had ever noticed it in all these years. (Check out images in the demo slide show)
The process has revealed quite a few areas that will need the block rebuilt, most noticeably the rear right corner. This is the section of the wall that was forced out by the slumping slab. Jim pointed out some separation of the wall from the slab along that northern face of the building. The bobcat also hit the wall near the double door doing some damage.
This was big job - one that I had underestimated in both impact and costs. It ended up being 3 times my revised estimate. Plus we have quite a bit more to do. We need to take out 33 windows. I gave Jim the OK to take one out and give me an estimate on how much more that will cost. It might be something my crew could do. We also could dig out the cellar a bit more and power wash the walls - if we have water access.
On the lighter side they found an odd assortment things in the crawl pace. Parts to an old wood stove, fire bricks, a fifties smoking pipe, and a strange pestle shaped rock (native American?) that might have been used for grinding corn. The also kept quite a few sections of slab we might be able to use for stairs, walkways or possibly the fireplace hearth.

1/23/08

Land Developments — The plot thickens or thins
Jim told me this weekend that the lot on the right was actually two lots split length ways. One is owned by Angela Henry the one adjacent to us by the Community Evangelical Methodist Church. Well, this is not good. The land area has just been reduced by 50% and I'm sure the price for procuring it has not.
Jim also gives me a few copies of the info from the White Co. tax office along with our building permit. Among them is this tax map of the lots. There are four lots - not three?
#39-through #42. 39 is Harrison Allison. 40 should be Wurl Wood and then there are two more lots...41 & 42. It gives the lots width at the road of 60'- 60'-60'- 45'. The math does not work because that is 165 feet and my building is 99' and according to my plot plan the lot the left is 50' and Allison's is 68' that's 217ft.
Obviously something is incorrect here - I need to do some more investigating.