One of my favorite things about summer is that I can walk around our yard and gather a bouquet of wildflowers. This little bouquet includes a few day lilies, some fern fronds and some other leaves and branches. And even though the upstairs bathroom is in a state of disrepair, having this little container of flowers by the sink helps me forget all about that.
Buying a house that’s just over 250 miles from your primary home means that you’re going to rack up a lot of miles on the odometer. We were, of course, quite aware of this when we bought our house. And yet it wasn’t until we actually saw the numbers ticking by on the odometer and scheduling more frequent oil changes that it really started to sink in for us.
We bought our 2007 Toyota Prius from friends who were moving to New York. That was in early 2013 and the car had about 60,000 miles on it. We hit 100k really quickly! One of the expenses we hadn’t considered when we bought the house was the contributions to the new car fund.
Here’s to you, Pepper Prius! May you be strong and powerful for another 100,000 miles!
We spend so much time thinking about and working on This American House that it’s easy to forget how much work we put into our city apartment. Fortunately, little things like a house call on Curbed are there to remind us that that work was not in vain.
We opened up the apartment to Nick Fochtman, a super talented interiors photographer, about a month ago and then played the waiting game until the post went live on Curbed. Nick did an amazing job in making the apartment seem much larger than it actually is. On the day of the photo shoot I left him alone in the apartment to do his work. I took a walk around the neighborhood for about an hour and then returned to find him just finishing up. I had no idea how the apartment would look through his lens. That it looks so incredibly stylish and spacious is quite a delight!
I think the title of the post – How One Couple Rode Out the Recession and Transformed Their Rogers Park Home – perfectly encapsulates the point I was trying to make in my answers to the Q&A. While it has been very tempting over the years to follow the lead of many of our neighbors and let our apartment go into foreclosure, we’re ultimately very happy that we’ve stuck it out. The value of the apartment is still nowhere near what we paid for it in 2007 but we’re still proud to call it home. I’m proud of all the projects I’ve completed that have come together to make the apartment feel comfortable yet handsome. And, most importantly, had we let the apartment go into foreclosure we wouldn’t have been able to get a mortgage for This American House.
One funny thing about this house call is that just one month later the apartment looks totally different. About a week after we had Nick over for the photo shoot I got the itch to redecorate. Such is life with me – our homes are in a constant state of evolution. I’ve rearranged some furniture and started working on a project that is going to transform the mantel into something a little more useful. Stay tuned for more details on those projects soon.
Meanwhile, take a tour of our apartment on Curbed and let us know what you think!
Last weekend, when much of the Midwest was covered by Winter Storm Linus, The Mister was at the house and I was hunkered down in the apartment in the city. As the snow piled up in both locations, we were able to recognize the vastly different experiences between small town life and big city existence.
At our house we are responsible for shoveling our own driveway and sidewalk when it snows. We haven’t yet upgraded to a snowblower so we’re still shoveling by hand. Or, at least, we try to. It seems we never get the chance to do our own shoveling because a friendly neighbor with a snowblower will show up and do it before we can. That’s small town life for you. It’s a neighborly existence where folks pitch in to help one another.
Meanwhile, back in the city, it’s every man for himself. Since we live in an apartment building, we’re not responsible for snow removal on the sidewalks. There’s a landscaping service that shows up after the snow stops falling and clears the path. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we don’t have off-street parking at our apartment. That means that our cars, along with everyone else’s, are parallel parked on the street. And when a street full of cars is covered with 20+ inches of snow, it’s one big mess.
For one thing, when the plows make their way down the side streets, they create a great wall of snow that often completely blocks the cars where they’re parked. When that happens, you’re not only digging your car out of the snow, you also have to shovel the wall of snow out of the way.
Now, if you don’t know anything about Chicago, and if you’ve never been here during a big snowstorm, you may not know about the phenomenon known as dibs. Put simply, dibs is the practice of cleaning out a parking spot for your car and then marking your territory so that your spot will still be there when you return. To someone who lives in a small town, this probably seems absurd. I mean, if everyone worked together to clear all of the parking spots on the street, then dibs wouldn’t even be necessary, right?
Oh if only that was the case! Instead, on any given block you’ll see a few cleared spots where responsible car owners have done their work. And then there will be a bunch of cars that have never been cleaned of their snow. Those cars will probably remain in that condition until the snow melts. And as the piles of snow get pushed around and about, parking becomes a real issue. If you don’t get stuck on one of the snow humps, you’re lucky.
And so the concept of dibs comes into play. Last Monday I spent almost an hour clearing my car of snow. I used a snow shovel to clear the humps of frozen slush from around my car, being sure to push the snow to the curb rather than the middle of the street. While I appreciate the concept of dibs, I have yet to embrace the practice myself. As I drove away from my nice, clean parking spot Tuesday morning, I knew that I would never see it again. And I was right. When I got back home Tuesday night, the spot has already been taken. I was forced to drive around and around until I found a spot where my car almost fit.
That’s city life for you. It’s every man for himself here in the city. And that’s exactly why we’re working toward full time life at the house in the future.
Images: This American House
Have you heard about the John Van Bergen-designed James Irving Residence? It’s a house on the move … literally! This architecturally significant house (Van Bergen worked in Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio) is being relocated from the Wilmette, Illinois site where it was built in 1928 to a new plot of land in nearby Evanston. They must’ve run out of milk on the way because the house is currently parked in the parking lot of a grocery store!
After a developer purchased the house and expressed intent to demolish it and build a new structure on the site, Christopher Enck purchased the Prairie Style structure and arranged its move. To make the move, which occurred over a three day period beginning last Friday, the house has been split into three sections.
Apparently the house’s new site isn’t quite ready and so in the meantime it’s hanging out in the parking lot of an empty grocery store. The three sections of the house, with the exposed ends covered in big plastic tarps, sit on massive trailers in the parking lot of the former Dominick’s store on Green Bay Road in Evanston.
Isn’t it amazing that you can uproot a house from its foundation and relocate it? I mean, we usually think of houses as these immovable structures (at least we HOPE they’re immovable) so it boggles the mind to see that one can be cut up, lifted and carried away.
Well of course The Mister just had to drive past the house and snap some photos. He was surprised to see that the house is really just sitting there in the parking lot, no fence surrounding it or guard protecting it.
Does this mean that we can pick up This American House and move it back to the city? Um, yeah, probably not.
More about the Irving House move:
Images: This American House
