A busy Wednesday...

This Wednesday began like any other here... up around 5:20 and working on the taxes for a few hours before waking Xan...



At 8 am we read aloud for half-an-hour on the couch in the coffee house
At 8:30 am we met with Caryl Fallert who has offered her space for the potluck that we are having for Mark and Terry Smith (wildravens.net) who are visiting/shopping the Artist relocation program
At 9:00 am we met with our banker, Larry Rudolph, and we signed the papers for our loan!
At 10:30 am we were at City Hall with the 'before and after' drawings for David Flowers and he gave us permission to begin demolition!!!


At 11:15 we began demolition on our new house...

Now we wait...

Xan is cutting in the hole for the new Deadbolt lock that we've added in the front door... handily using her chisel and hammer!

This is one of the last things that we can do before the building permit clears City Hall... we aren't supposed to do anything that resembles demolition until the plans are reviewed and we are given a 'green light'.











This is April at the Permit Desk in City Hall, and here I am watching her do her magic with the reams of papers and walkie talkies and wall-mounted scheduling charts and phones... We are being told that our project is so small and, because we are not changing the outside of the building (especially the side that faces the street) we should have very little impact on the system in general.

We are being told that we can expect things in the middle of next week...

Now we wait.

Waiting involves revising floor plans (based on 'discovery'- what is really under the wall covering...) and doing the taxes, and doing math for load bearing (ovens in the middle of upstairs floors), and work time tables... you know waiting!

Waiting also involves taking the old fishing gear that I stuck in the van and getting hooks and sinkers and the old sliced turkey and teaching Xan how to fish on the river!


As it turns out, we were there on the Barge with 'Shorty' and Terry and a young couple (at the far end) and aside from the miniature catfish that Terry pulled in, Xan was the only one who caught a fish!

This is a 1-1/4 pound white perch that Shorty says he'd eat if he were hungry enough... but...












We took it home and learned how to clean it and we cooked it up with all sorts of wonderful seasonings on it and decided... Shorty was right!

Tofu and Broccoli for dinner!

A Post Clean-Up walk-through

This is my first attempt to use the video on the little camera... hopefully I'll get a bit better as this progresses... actually I'm hoping that Xan wants to do this!

I goofed up and here is the other half of the walk through...

This is after we pulled out the 2 refridgerators, 3 stoves, 4 water heaters, 4 furnaces, 2 metal kitchen sinks sets (you remember the ones from the '50's with the metal cabinets?) and any other recycleable metal parts that we could no longer use.

We loaded the metals onto the giant trailer and the word went out through the magical town drum system and, by the time that DuWayne came to haul it away to the dump, four pick ups almost clean us out and put dinner on the tables of four households we won't even see! ($10-25 per appliance, depending on the weight).

You can finally see what we are starting with. Already it looks more possible...

Ready -Aim -Fire!

This is Xan on the second story porch with one of the many many bags of items to donate... we have an idea that rather than walk through the house and down the stairs 23 times we are going to launch these puppies down to the road side....
Ready, aim, Fire!

We bought the alligator super tough contractor grade bags and they made the vertical transitions without any unsightly bursting or spillage!

We dropped of 23 bags of reusable clothing and shoes from 4 households. These folks had a lot of wardrobe choices! We did not pass forward any 'junk'- there was everything from polo shirts to Hot Topic rock band tee shirts; everything from pink high heels to sturdy work boots...

As we cleaned up there were no pots and pans, no dishes, no utensils... very little of that part of the household was left behind.

I do get the impression that these folks actually 'moved' and weren't run out in the middle of the night...

Many Hands make LightWork...

This is Jimmy from Langston electric he's getting the electric layout plans and is one of the guys that I hope will expedite the process for us...
This is Xan and her friend Gretchen who was visiting from Saratoga Springs, NY for the first 6 days that we were here, taking a much needed puddle break during clean up...

This is Daniel, on loan from our contractor buddy, who, with thick gloves and a weak sense of smell, is on the clean up crew...
This is Corey, the son of some Artist friends of ours who preceded us to Paducah, who is having all sorts of legal fun here...
These bags are what the girls filled... clothes and shoes for Katrina Relief....
One of the many trailer loads that has yet to include any actual demolition... this is just what we took off the floors!

Other Peoples Lives...

As we were cleaning up in this space, picking up the residue of the lives of about a dozen different individuals, we had to deal with the things that they, for whatever reasons, thought were not worth bringing on to their next stop.

It was disgusting to look at, smell, and physically handle.

The first emotional reaction is "Who are these people?" "Who would live like this?"

But...

As I look through these things I notice that this was the home of a single mother with three kids... she had one in high school and two in the elementary school. She worked two jobs and had a parent that lived in Tennesse. She did not manage to pay all of her bills. She had her kids drawings up on the 'fridge...

I notice that this was the home of the young man who worked last for the Dish Television company... he was still trying to finish up his high school diploma... he was supporting two other people who were not working... he loved to read, (mostly fantasy and science fiction), and had a number of books on eating more healthy...

I notice that this was the home of somewhere between 4 to 6 people with no visible means of income. They ate only packaged foods and played a lot of video games... the only words they left behind that were in paper were the dunning letters of people whose goods and services they enjoyed but as yet had not paid for...

These are the lives of people, the lives of our neighbors.

When I look at these apartments, with the crappy toilets (oooh the pun, the pun!), the ceilings falling down, the broken windows and shattered ceiling fans, I realize that the people who lived here didn't create these conditions...

The Slumlord who overcharged these people for rent and collected every week is the guy to look for! He made sure that he took just enough from them so that they could make it to the next week, but nothing more. He had so little respect for the people who paid him for their homes that he wouldn't repair any of the basic services that failed in these residences...

He's the one that would rent to these people whose lives we don't see on weekly television sitcoms. Our neighbors who, like my family, are doing everything they can to allow their kids to not feel the pressure of adulthood until they are ready and find some measure of security? safety? comfort? all of these things but maybe more, maybe Home.

I'm sure I left it here, somewhere...

Where to begin? right here...
What do we have?
The building was built around 1907, it was last legally occupied about fall of 2006, it was acquired by the city and scheduled twice for demolition in the past 18 months.

Somehow, we recognize this as an opportunity.

Wanna peek inside?

Xan is the first to unlock our new door....





This is how all 3400 square feet look, more or less...
they left many things for us to treasure:
14 contractor bags worth of clothing (donated to Katrina Victims this week)
3 contractor bags of pairs of shoes (donated to Katrina Victims)
Smashed televisions, papers, smashed furniture, family photos, Cat box (complete with cat sand and well... you know...), old food both in and out of refridgerators that had been sitting warm, closed, festering for months and months...

The first job is unloading the tools from the car:

There's almost everything we need in here to build a house...


and then there's the clean out...