Earning My Stripes

More work has been done on my hall. I am only 14 years into my three year project at this point and I have been meaning to paint the hall for, say 10 years. So while the weather was cold I got the walls and ceiling painted a beige color all the way up to the landing leading to the third floor. The plan has always been to go for a beidermeier look since the house was built before 1848 and years ago I wanted to paint two or three shades of beige vertical stripes in the hall. I routed through some old tins of paint in the basement and found two shades of grey that I could use with the beige. The next step was to mark the walls at regular intervals, draw vertical lines using a level and then put masking tape adjacent to the line.

When that was done the second color was painted between the tape. Then narrower lines were marked and masking tape placed for the third color to be applied.

So I got to this point and I was happy. The walls looked dull and boring which is very beidermeier.   However the wife and daughter did not like it. They thought it was too dull and I was instructed to jazz it up a little and tie it in with the rest of the house.

Red and green are recurring themes around the house and I have red and green paint. I had to go and buy another three rolls of masking tape to add the next round of stripes. You can see that I added a designer touch with my Gucci stripe! This was a real pain to do because the red paint somehow reacted with the original white paint that was on the walls and in many areas the paint peeled off when I removed the tape causing much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Needless to say there was considerable touch up adding several days to the project.

I will never recommend painting striped walls. The task is very time consuming and requires oodles of masking tape. However, on the bright side, I will never have to paint the hall again and it looks quite good.
The stripes make it easy to line up pictures and furniture!

I have no idea who the old couple in the picture are. That was found in the attic of the house we bought across the alley in October 2013 which I will be telling you about shortly. The lady we bought the house from and who lived there for 89 years couldn't tell me who they were either. I suspect that they were either her grand parents or her uncle's parents. Regardless, the picture looks good on our wall.

Let's Play a Game (Part 2)

Today was trash collection day. However there is more to today's City customer service story. I went out to my truck that was parked across the street from my house to get a sheet that I had left on the back seat. I last drove the truck on Monday evening and was parked on the street instead of behind my house because I had got stuck in snow in my alley on Sunday morning as we were leaving to go to an auction. Since there are still copious amounts of snow around my house I parked on the public street figuring that in a few days I would move the truck back to it's regular spot. I found this stuck in the driver side door. It was left this morning.

My truck, which has no snow on it and has been parked in one spot for 36 hours gets a warning for "Overtime Parking" which is an offense I have never heard of before. The officer would have run my plates and known who the vehicle was registered to and could easily determine that it was parked across the street from owner's property. Someone must have complained.

Now what is so amusing about this to me is that my car has been parked in front of my house all covered in snow and has not been moved in over a week but there was no warning posted on it. So, I was out scraping the snow off the car this afternoon so that I could drive it when the garbage truck came up the alley. I stopped what I was doing. Ran to the house. Grabbed the iPad and set it on video so that I could record whether or not they would take the trash that has been sitting for four weeks now. I got so excited when the guy got off the truck and pulled my can to the lifter. Then this happened.

My guess is that the rug had froze to the bin and so they took the whole thing. Something that would not have happened if the bin was emptied during any of the three previous pick up dates. Now if I remember correctly, in order to get a new garbage can from the city, I need to report this bin stolen and file a police report. Isn't it ironic?

Let's Play a Game!

Let's see how long it takes the City of Dayton's waste collection department to empty my garbage can. Here is the scenario. Over three weeks ago, on February 4th to be exact, I put out the garbage can for the property that we bought across the alley from us. I took an area rug that was falling apart, folded it and secured it with duct tape and dragged it out to the alley and placed it on the top of the can because the can was already half full. When the garbage truck arrived in the afternoon I watched from my window as the guy emptying the bins pushed the rug onto the ground, empty the bin and left the rug laying in the alley.
I went out immediately, picked the rug up and placed it in my bin. Here is the picture that I took from my window.

Here is a picture that I took after witnessing the collection crew drive by it the following week.I added a few sheer curtains to the bin. I have several garbage bags of stuff sitting in the house that I need to put in the bin but as you can see there is no room and the City workers won't empty it.

Now, for those reading this who don't know, I was Mayor of this city for 4 years and one of my pet peeves before getting elected was the way that waste collection did a shoddy job for their customers. We made some vast improvements on many fronts in those 4 years. However, it seems that since the new administration (which is really the same four council members who were there before I was elected plus one of their old school board friends) is doing exactly what they did before 2010. That is ignoring the citizens. So this past year they gave themselves a pay raise, made a renewable part of the city income tax permanent by misleading the voters and have imposed a street light assessment on most city properties based on the previous year property value. (Yes, property values declined this year but the assessment is on the higher rate. We have to pay an assessment on a vacant lot as if the house was still on it ....) All these fees and taxes mean job security for the city employees so they are back to treating the customers who pay those taxes badly. It is nice to know that the former mayor is treated the same as every other citizen. I wouldn't want special treatment, I just want the garbage can that I pay for every three months and use about once every six weeks emptied when I place it in the alley as I am expected to do. If you don't believe they are ignoring this can then watch what they did this week on the 18th.

While the trash collectors were ignoring my garbage can, the current mayor made headlines on February 11th in her state of the City speech about a customer service initiative to improve relations with the citizens. Something we never had to do during my four years, since I was described as the most accessible mayor the City had known. Another point I need to make is that the population of the City had declined continuously for 20 years until I was elected, Then it actually started to increase. Customer service begins at home and if you can't provide good customer service then your customers will start to leave once again.

Sometimes it Takes a Year or Two or Seven.

See this picture? It was taken in November 2007. It shows the doorway between the hall and the dining room. To the right is a door that we bought for $5 at a yard sale. The plan has always been to put that door up.I found a picture from 2005 and that door was in it too! It has been there a while.

Now look at this picture that was taken in January 2014. You will notice that the door is still there.

Now you would think that I would be smart and put the door up to keep the heat in the main part of the house. That is not the case. I never do things for obvious reasons. I tend to do things to solve problems. We have a problem with one of our three cats. Actually two of our cats are a problem. One is getting old and craps everywhere. It is runny crap, not easy to clean up. She is good at keeping to hard wood or tile surfaces and has a spot in the hall where she regularly leaves us a gift in the morning. I also think she has Torrette's syndrome but that is another story. The other cat is the real problem. She likes to come upstairs at 4 AM and call out a lot. If the door is closed she will scratch at it until someone wakes up and opens it for her. Then she will wander around and call out .... did I say A LOT! This is repeated at 5 AM and again at 6 AM. Been going on for weeks. I finally had one of hose "Aha" moments and told the wife that if I put that door up and something to stop her from jumping through it until I get the glass replaced it would stop her from coming upstairs and guarantee us some sleep. This past weekend, guess what I did?

You can see that I reused one of my political signs from 2009 as the device to stop the cat from getting into the hall. I was so proud of myself, the next day I went and found the can of shellac and now it looks like this. Amazing what alcohol will do!

So now the cat is mad at us and hides away all day. That first night the she could no longer go upstairs and annoy us, she peed on one of the floors!

I Like Things to Work!

Back around 1996 I bought this phone from Design Tuscano. I think I paid around $200 for it. I bought it for several reasons. I liked it. It went well with the decor of the house and, since I had a couple of room mates at the time, it was not a phone that you can talk on comfortably for hours. The handle is heavy and it will not sit in the crook of your neck very well. If at all. It is also a good item to throw at bad people of you can disconnect it first!

Sometime in 1997 I bought this phone at an antique mall for $60 and spent two days trying to figure out how to rewire it so that it worked. It still has the original 100 year old wiring. I got it to work perfectly after inspecting the refurbished phone's inner workings but since it is all original the sound is not great and it sounds like I am speaking down a tube to someone on the other end. Which in reality, I am. Someone once told be that I sounded like I was "far away" and since they were calling long distance it was true. I was far away!

They worked great for years. Take forever to dial a number and we hardly use them but they are very useful if the power goes out. Our cordless phones need an electrical socket in order to work. Cell phones require charging and I don't own a cell phone. In fact, I owned a cell phone once back in 1988 and it looked like this:

 

The little hand held ones that fit in your pocket cost around $2000 at that time. I didn't need a phone that badly.

Anyway, all was well until we switched our phone and internet over to ATT U-verse last year. The phones ring when someone calls but they could no longer dial out because the new equipment doesn't recognize Decadic dialing, otherwise known as Pulse. This bugged me. If we lose power, which we did in 2013 for three days, we have no readily available way to communicate except that I keep an old touch tone phone hooked up in the basement. This is so I don't have to run through three rooms and up the stairs to get to a ringing phone!

Well, one day I Googled "Pulse to tone converter" because there had to be a way to make these things work. I found this site which sells the little device pictured below.

These ship from Australia and cost $50 with the shipping. These are designed to plug into the phone line directly but since I have two phones, I did a little wiring magic in the basement where my phone lines converge and routed the two lines that my phones are on to this so that now they work once again and I am a happy camper!

At it Again!

Remember this from 2009?

Well, it is happening again. If you missed your chance 5 years ago, now is the time to catch up!

Gary Leitzell
For Montgomery County Commissioner
You are respectfully invited to a Pancake Breakfast at
“This Old Crack House.”

Enjoy homemade pancakes with delectable toppings.
View before/after photos of “This Old Crack House.”
Suggested donation: $15.00 per person
All proceeds and donations will go to “Friends of Gary Leitzell.”

Please RSVP or there won’t be enough pancakes for you!
(937) 253-1359 or Gary@daytonmayor.com
https://www.facebook.com/garyleitzell
twitter @GaryLeitzell

Where: 114 Volkenand Ave., Dayton, OH 45410
(Across the street from Wayne Ave. Family Video)
Time: 10:00 am – 1:00 pm
Date: Sunday September 7, 2014




www.GoGaryGo.com

Paid for by Friends of Gary Leitzell
Dan Kennedy, treasurer, 525 Heiss Ave. Dayton, OH 45403

The Samuel D. Edgar Patent

I posted years ago about Charles Edgar's patents. He invented an automatic gate, an improved hay rake and a carburetor that I haven't figured what purpose it had. When he died in 1876 the carburetor patent was the only one that was purchased by a businessman. Any way, it turns out that Charles Edgar's father had a patent issued back in 1869 for this.

I think I need to make one and display it in the house.

More Roof Antics

Way back in 2001, one of the first things I had to do was replace the shingle on the roof to the kitchen. At some point in the past a tree limb had fallen on it and for a while it must have leaked as was evident by the damage done by either carpenter ants or termites  in the boards that separated the two rooms that now make up our one long kitchen. Water used to poor down the wall when it rained.
It was the first time that I had done roofing so I shingled the dip in the center of the roof near the lowest edge above the large window. After a few years, water would pool in this dip, seep under the shingle, come through the wall and drip onto the window sill. So for several years, I'll call them the "Mayor Years", there has been an array of jars and bowls on the window sill to collect the water. The furniture in front of the window had to be pulled away because the splashing water was landing on it. Here is a picture taken this week in fact.

One of the cats has knocked the wallpaper trough off several times causing bowls and jars to break.

The wife grew tired of it and demanded that I replace the roof. Well, replacing the roof is no easy task and the rest of the roof is just fine. It is a single layer of shingle on sheathing. I told her that I would put a metal roof over the shingle. I just had to figure out how to handle the sag and the flashing around the windows. On June 25th I ordered the materials needed at menards.com and on the 16th July I picked it up to start work the next day because it wasn't going to rain for several days. The first day was spent shimming the roof with some 2X6 and 2X 4 boards and placing supports under the boards where the dip in the roof is. Here is how it looked at the end of day 1.

Here you can see the situation with the dip in the roof.

The next day I figured out how to cut and install the flashing around the window sitting down without sliding off the roof and got another several panels installed. Then it began to rain. I put another panel in place and it started to rain harder. I came in out of the rain to check weather online. Rain would last an hour. Two hours later it is still raining so I went to the grocery store to buy beer. Seemed like a good use of my time. Got home, still raining. Water pouring down from the upper roof where the downspout used to be before I removed it to work on the roof was causing pooling in the dip and water was filling the array of jars and bowls on the window sill just as they had done during the "Mayor Years." Wife would be home soon. This wasn't going to look good ..... Got on roof in pouring rain to put one more panel in place so that I could wedge in the downspout, lean it to the left and have water run down the metal into the gutter instead of into the dip and into the house! Now I was a little concerned because only half the roof was done and I had used a lot of screws to put the wood boards in place and was having visions of water damage to the part of my ceiling that was not covered by metal. After 4 hours the rain stopped. It was 9:30 PM and dark outside. It was raining the next morning, too.

On day three I put down two more panels and cut two inches off my downspout to put in place but now I had to wait for the roof to dry out before finishing. I was smart enough to creat air flow channels at the edge of the roof and perforate the edge flashing but with the amount of moisture from the rain, I was better off waiting for nature to dry out my roof. It seems to have stopped leaking though. Here was the extent of the work by day 3.

 

Once I figured out how to deal with the flashing around the windows things moved a little faster. Especially when I realized that sitting on a rubber backed mat would stop me from sliding down the roof!

 The final product looks like this. 

Unfortunately the only place you can actually see the roof is from up there!

Why I Have Been Busy Part 2

There is a woman who lived across the side alley from us who is now 93 years old. She lived in her house since she was four years old. I used to visit her every so often and often sat in her living room talking about stuff. She is as sharp as a whistle and would call me every so often if she had a question. She told me some stories about Leonard and Susan Volkenand who lived in our house from 1906 to 1955. Leonard being killed by a car while crossing the street in 1937. She remembers Polly the parrot that used to shout from the porch at her. Polly died in 1936. Last August she called me and asked if I would be interested in buying her house.

The house was built in 1900 by Leonard Volkenand. He lived there with his wife and daughter for at least 4 years before moving back into our house to take care of his father. He ended up buying our house from the father's estate in 1906. The next owner of the house was the uncle of this woman. I think the uncle moved in with his first wife as early as 1905. By 1915 or so the ex wife was living 4 houses down and the new wife was in the house. The uncle and 2nd wife adopted her after her mother got sick and died around 1925. Her older brothers were raised by her father. She was rather short and frail so it was deemed best that her aunt and uncle raised her. Besides, they had no children of their own. For the next 89 years that place was her home.

The woodwork is in absolute original condition. The original shellac on the doors and trim. Most doors have their original skeleton key. The pocket doors between two rooms work and look great. The floors are wood and the staircase is unusually wide for this style of house. The wallpaper was put up in 1940 and the very small kitchen was remodeled in 1960. The basement is full of old washing equipment and canning supplies. The date on the jars of cherries on shelves down there says 1939. There were even a few small lumps of coal in a crawl space under the front room.

The place needs some work, but nowhere near as much as the Old Crack House. Bathrooms need some up dating and there are some spots of old water damage on the walls where a chimney used to extend through the roof but has since been reduced below the roof line that I intend to repair but leave the work as an obvious repair rather than remove the wallpaper. This place is truly a walk back in time. Most of her furniture predated the wallpaper.

We bought the house in October. Since I told her we didn't mind if she didn't get all of her stuff out, well, some stuff got left behind and we have to dispose of it. Much of it some old clothing and some glassware, some books and papers. There were some interesting finds in the basement and attic that I will disclose at a later date but just to be fair, after buying the house, I gave her another $800 for stuff left behind because some of the items had a value. Including the cedar casket in the attic! Here is an old photo of the house that I was given 10 years ago.

Here is what it looks like now. White is so boring don't you think?

Why I've Been Busy Part 1

It's the end of May you say! What have I been doing for 5 months? Well, lots really. Not so much work on the Old Crack House. Though I have been purging stuff that is still in boxes from the big move 5 years ago that I haven't looked at in all this time. Kind of like Christmas all over again going through those old boxes. Comments like "Oooh, I haven't seen that in years." Or "I wondered where that got to" are often heard. I got a bunch of old stuff out of the basement as well but there is still a lot more that needs to go. So here is the real story as to why I have been busy but there is more to come that you will either be thrilled with or you will think I am crazy, but that will be explained later in part 2 or even part three of this saga.

Some of you may know that I was the Mayor of Dayton for four years. Turns out that I did a good job and no one seems mad at me. I lost in the primary last year. We have non partisan primaries for local municipal seats but it turns out that the voters did not understand that and so in a primary with an independent up against two Democrats who do you think came out to vote? That is correct, mostly Democrats. We had the lowest turnout ever so I lost. That is OK though. I only spent $2,000 of my allotted budget of $10,000 and pulled 23% of the vote. The two Democrats spent $100,000 and $264,000 with the highest spender getting about 50% of the 9900 votes. She went on to spend another $250,000 to win the general election where only 16,000 people voted and 9200 were for her. So now people are getting mad because the new administration is doing silly stuff without anticipating the unintended consequences of their actions. They are not strategic thinkers beyond their own self interests and it is obvious to many.

So, it seems that people want me to stay involved so last July I pulled petitions to run as an independent for county commission. Turns out that in Ohio, independents are held to a much higher standard than party candidates. I need to get a petition signed by 1% of the number of voters in the jurisdiction that voted in the last governors election just to get on the ballot. Party candidates need just 50 signatures. I needed 1852 valid ones. By December I had 1000 signatures. I would require around 3000 to be safe. So when the weather finally broke after a bizarre winter I had to get signatures and cajole a few others into helping me. On May 5th I turned in 2881 signatures and that was more than enough to get on the ballot in November. I was certified just last week. Now I am catching up on all the stuff that got neglected. There is a lot more to the story as to why I  have been busy but you will just have to wait. The next part is house and history related. Like I said earlier, you will be thrilled or think I am crazy.