Good Riddence to Bad Rubbish!

This is interesting. If you have been a follower of this blog since before 2008 then you know full well what prompted me to run for the position of Mayor in our great City of Dayton, Ohio. If you haven't followed this blog for the last 4 years or longer then you can read the post here and a follow up post in 2009 here.

What happened to those houses? Well an interesting thing occurred. Someone from Chicago decided to invest his daughters college fund in tax liens for a quick return on his $100,000 investment. He bought a bunch of tax liens from that Florida investment company holding the liens on many city properties and then made a trip to Dayton to see what he had invested in. Once he realized that he had just wasted his daughters college fund on a bunch of useless property he held on to them all for one year and then negotiated with the City to give them away so he could get a good tax write off. So in December 2010 these two houses became the property of the City. I made it known that I would be interested in acquiring the parcels should the houses ever be demolished. I even had the wife call three demolition companies this year to get a quote on both houses so that we could negotiate something with the city to make them come down. None of the companies responded. I suspect they felt the houses were too close to the neighboring ones and they had enough demolition contracts already with the City that these two properties were not even worth quoting. Well, the City ended up contracting them out for demolition with one of the three firms we called as an extension of an existing contract. They know I am interested in the lots so that may have been a factor. I came home on Monday evening to this.

 By Wednesday the lots looked like this

 and this.

Now, just to be clear, I pulled no strings to have this done. I wouldn't want anyone to think that I am trying to take advantage of my position to improve my own neighborhood. After all, I have been in office for two and a half years and could have pressed for this back in 2010. These two houses have blighted my entire block for over 10 years. Now they are gone and I can reclaim some of the land that was once an original part of the Edgar and Volkenand homestead. Hopefully I will get a phone call asking me to cough up some money to buy the lots in the next few weeks. I will gladly hand my money over to the City for this! Of course it now means that I will have more grass to mow ......

More Molding Installed

The time has come to install more molding in the dining room. If you recall, the last time I posted about this the windows and doors were finally trimmed out and the room was starting to look finished. Well, now it is more finished! I have been installing base boards, chair rail and picture rail over the last two weeks whenever I get some spare time. The plan has always been to paint the chair rail and picture rail gold to match the gold in the chandelier, mirror frame, picture frames and the wall paper in the room. I started with a hammered finish metallic gold spray paint which produced the result in the three pieces on the right side in the picture below. To antique the gold I used my old friend, Amber Shellac. Two coats of the stuff produced the three pieces on the left. I painted some black edges to some of the molding to make the gold color stand out even more.

This picture shows some of the chair rail and base board in place. The room is almost finished at the time of writing. I just have to install the molding around the fire place area and on the ceiling before it will be done.

In this picture you can see the picture rail at the top of the wall. It defines the color change from dark green to dark red and is certainly more tidy than the wavy hand painted line I have had to look at for many years! You will also note that I added red and yellow painted daisy details to the corner blocks on the doorways. These compliment the details in the ceiling medallion which you can view in this old post.

So, slowly things are getting done around here. All be it very slowly .....