Termite Inspection and Dining Room Progress

We had our annual termite inspection yeasterday and it went well. No activity, sprayed for other bugs (spiders, crickets, ants, etc) and it was all under $100! When we were under the house last fall we found evidence of previous termite damage in one area. It wasn't anything really bad as far as termite damage goes, but we were curious as to how long ago it had happened so when I made the appointment I asked them. They had no idea and said that there was no record of it in the account history so it had to be before the account became active. So the next obvious question was...What year would that have been? 1946! Our house has had continuous termite inspections since 1946 with no record of activity and the person I talked to said that it was one of their oldest accounts! He also said that since there is no record that it had to have happened before 1946 so it's really nothing to worry about. That makes me feel better.

The dining room is still slowly coming along. A lot of ceiling tiles have been removed from the house and most of the nails are out. Bought patching plaster today to fill the nail holes so I'll be starting on that soon. Hopefully next week. Still have to wait for James to sand the glue off the wall before I can really do anything with that wall. New deadline to have it all done is Christmas since I have to work Thanksgiving Day.

The Kitchen

Since I have never showed the kitchen I figured why not do it today.
I would love to do something with this side of the kitchen but really can't
This is the main area. It needs a lot of work. The "island" is actually a microwave cart serving a new purpose. And all the stuff on the top of the cabinet is a vintage glass collection. Everything from McDonald's and Coke glasses to alcohol bottles and vases. And I love the glass backsplash.
This cabinet will eventually be torn out. All it usually does is serve as a catch all for junk, but we need the storage space so it can't go anywhere yet. I need that little orange stool to reach the top shelf of the cabinets.
This cabinet is the only one original to the house and is most likely the only cabinet that was built with the house. I found out that there were originally pass throughs to the dining room.

Here's the plans for this room:

Tear out the base cabinet where the sink is because its rotting from water damage and have a custom cabinet made

Refinish the upper cabinets. They were made by Mr. Yochum in our garage and are amazing. They are very well made, I just don't like the finish or the pulls.

Tear out that little cabinet and maybe install shelving

Find an island

Tear out the floor and retore the hardwood. Its linoleum with some kind of subfloor with hardwood underneath. The linoleum is stained, cracking and peeling up in some places.

Paint, new curtains, refinish window frames, refinish lower cabinet, put pass throughs back in, remove wallpaper

Add more outlets. There is a power strip, one for the refrigerator and Pet Safe, and one for the microwave. Its enough (the power strip has 6 plug ins), but not in the right places.

Teach the cats to stay out of cabinets and off the counter, stove, refrigerator

A Mystery Solved!!

I posted about this a while back. We had no idea what it was used for, except a shed, but thought it had to have some other purpose. Well, after talking to the PO's family we solved the mystery. It was a smokehouse! She said they would smoke meat in there...sausage and things like that. This was a fully functioning farm so this isn't really a surprise. In fact I'm surprised we hadn't thought of that. Our house is on a highway and she said that people would stop every once in a while to tell them the building was on fire and they would explain that it was supposed to have smoke coming from it! Also found out the building is made of white poplar.

I also learned that the outhouse was located close to the far end of this building about where the clothesline is at. Just realized you can't see the clothesline because of the big tree in the way...trust me, its there. I've had people tell me that if you can locate and excavate the outhouse or "privy" that you can learn a lot about the the property all the way back to when the hole was fist dug. I'm sorry, but it was in use till the 50's so I don't see us digging it up any time soon. But it is nice to know where it was.

Returned the card to its family

I can't remember if I have posted about this before or not, but our house was an estate sale. The previous owners were Leo and Cecelia Yochum. We bought the house from their children. One of their daughters and her husband lives 2 houses down from us and said if we ever have any questions, to ask and they would try to help. I took the playing card over there a couple of days ago (we thought it would be best to return it to the family...we figured it would mean more for them to have it than it would be for us to put it in a scrap book) and I had a great chat with them. I learned a lot about our house, and they are so nice. I told them we are restoring the dining room and found the card under the carpet and linoleum and they said it had to have been there for many years. The room was redone in the 60's. Her husband said that he remembers installing the drop ceiling and paneling and it was done to help with heating. They also said that the room had always been used as a living room, never a dining room, but it was meant to be a dining room. Before they renovated, the wall that is shared with the kitchen had cabinets that opened through on both sides (you could open the cabinets in both rooms and see through) They are going to try to find a picture of it so we might be able to replicate it again. I hope they can, or maybe we can figure it out when we remove the paneling from that wall. I would love to have that again. I learned a ton about our house, so much that I won't post it all at one time because it would be way too long. But it'll be coming. I also showed them the blog in case they are ever curious about something we're doing.

And a special note to the family...if you ever see any dates or anything that are wrong please feel free to leave a comment so I can correct it. Or you can comment on anything else. We are trying to keep things as acurate as possible, but mistakes do happen.

An interesting trip to the Zoo (long post, sorry no pics)

This is the first chance I've had to post since Friday. I actually learned some more things about our house over the weekend from someone who rented it before we bought it. The girl works with James and we saw them at the Zoo saturday night The Zoo is actually Kazoo's...a bar/club locally known as the zoo because people can get a little wild there...lots of fights, drunk people acting crazy, people can dance in a cage or a balcony and its always entertaining. Not really our thing though so we don't go there much. Anyway, we saw this girl there and while she didn't really want to talk about the time that she lived here, she did and we learned a lot.

Like my header says, we've had some strange things happen here. Starting the day we closed. I came in at night to start cleaning (it didn't need much, mainly dusting) and the house was cracking and popping and made some weird sounds. When James got off work he brought a friend over here and they asked how it's been going. I told them the house is settling and they both laughed! They both agreed the house is done settling and have no idea what I heard.

Next, we had lived here for a few weeks and James went to play paintball, leaving me here by myself. I was in bed and I heard a very distinct, deep manly voice say "there's some one at the door" I sat straight up in bed. Our dog was going nuts running from the bedroom to the front door (which we don't use) I looked at him and sayed "is there some one there Cledus" he yipped and took off for the soor again. I got up...no one there! No one in the drive, outside at a neighbors and no cars on the road.

Then James and I were asleep in bed and I heard a woman talking. James rolled over and told me to shut up. I said you heard that? he said yeah, now stop talking and go back to sleep. I wasn't talking, there was no one else here and the t.v. and radios were all off.

The stereo in the dining room has come on all by its self on stations that we don't listen to.

The other night when I started tearing up the carpet I wanted to listen to 89.1 on the radio. It wouldn't come in so I was listening to 91.1 I had to keep unpluging the radio and moving it to move the carpet. Every single time I turned it back on it was on 89.1! I set it back to 91.1, unplug, move, plug it back in, and its on 89.1 again!

Well, the girl that used to live here sayed that they heard things too. The t.v. and radio would turn off and on by themselves, and she saw Mrs. Yochum when she was doing laundry one day! She said they used the dining room as a living room. It has a window that looks out at the dryer. She said she was taking clothes out of the dryer and looked up at that window and saw a little old lady with white hair sitting in a chair! Luckily we haven't had anything like that happen...that would freak me out!

Now on to the house stuff. I asked her if some one had kicked a door in. She started laughing and sayed "yeah, the back door, did they replace it?" I said "no, the dining room" she said "uh, no the dining room door was fine...wait, what does the door look like?" I told her its white on one side and stained on the other, she started laughing again and said that they swithched the doors. The dining room and the back door have been switched, but at least they left us with all the original doors. She said that her brother and her both kicked the door...and then her new boyfriend said he did too!

We also have big faded squares in the center of every room. We thought from area rugs, and never mentioned it to her. She brought it up though. She said that when they moved in there were big squares of linoleum blocks in every room. She said they were beautiful, perfect squares complete with padding underneath! She told us she came home from work one day and her boyfriend had ripped evry one up, but the front bedroom! I can't belive that! She told us she cried for 2 days because they were either original to the house, or had been there for many, many years because they were real linoleum like they don't make any more. I wanted to cry when she told us! Then it sank in that she said it was still in the front bedroom, I told her that its not there any more. Apparently the Yochum family decided to rip it up too to make the house look whole. She about cried. I gotta find out if she has any pictures of it.

We also got explanations for the cracked formica on the bathroom walls ("using the bathroom and a fist came flying above my head") the Southern Comfort bottles ("he drank a lot") and the blood on the carpet (no explanation...knew about it, but didn't want to talk about it) She also said she had a mold problem and used bleach on the plaster on a daily basis...I don't know much about plaster but I think it doesn't mix well with bleach so we may have more problems down the road. She also told us her rent was only $400 a month...If you figure it up we over payed but I'm ok with that. It appraised for way more than what we paid.

Thats all I got for now...going to go clean out the shed to see if I can find anything to put in the yard sale.

A little history about our house

I just realized that I have never really posted much about the history of our house. So here goes. The first owners were Joseph F. and Elizabeth Marter. Our house is shown on an 1880 plat map as a survey for J.F. Marter. All land at that time was either survey or donation. A member of the Marter family e-mailed me a picture of the house from about 1850. It looks nothing like the house does today. Well, a little maybe. The courthouse has a building permit on file from 1890. We believe this was when the house we currently live in was built. Joseph Marter passed away in 1936 and left the house to his wife. She then moved into Vincennes and kept the house (empty as far as any one seems to know) until 1941. It was then sold to Leo and Cecelia Yochum. Leo passed away in 1993 and Cecelia remained in this house. She was very well know for playing cards and was a devout Catholic. She left the property to her children and they rented it out for a while before putting it on the market. We looked made the appointment to look at the house on 6/6/6, and actually looked at it on 6/7/6. (I refused to look at it on 6/6/6...I'm a little superstitious) We made our offer on June 7, 2006 and it was accepted a few days later. After finding a lot of problems that had to be fixed before closing, we were finally able to close October 13, 2006. Yes, that was Friday the 13th. An omen? We sure hope not. I'll post more about the previous owners as I find out things. Not much is known about the Marter family because they pretty much left this area after Elizabeth passed away. However, one of the Yochum children lives 2 houses down from us, so I should be able to find out plenty about them and anything that they did to the house while they had it.

This is our house!

The person I contacted on ancestry.com is a descendent! Joseph Marter, who built our house, is her great grandfather. And she sent me this picture! This is our house in the 1800's! I can't believe this! Thats Joseph and Elizabeth Marter, some of their children, and some livestock.

And...thats our kitchen and dining room! How great is that?!

Yesterday we knew really nothing about our house...today we know a little bit more, and have a picture of it and the family that built it!

A little update on the history

I think I've found a descendant of the family that built our house! I'm so excited about this! I found them on ancestry.com and emailed them today. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they'll be able to help me out. If not then I'm back where I started...which is nowhere, for lack of more colorful words :) And thank you again to the people over at www.houseblogs.net for the advice on how to date foundations. I'm going to start working on that next week when I'm off work.

Vincennes Railroad Project...ranting

I received a card in the mail today from the T.R.A.I.N. Committee. This is the project that might take our home away from us :( and it pisses me off. I'm ranting cause I'm upset, so sorry if its a litle hard to follow. Vincennes is known for its train problem. Its ridiculous the amount of trains and tracks that run through the city. This problem can very easily be fixed by putting 2 overpasses up in town. One on Hart St and one on 6th st, these are the 2 busiest streets in town. When there is a train there is no way to get through town with out going way out of your way to use highway 41. That would be too easy though, the county solution is to move the tracks out of town. Taking away farm land and hundreds of homes. This is insane. Our home is in one of the proposed corridors. We bought our house in October 2006. We received the first notice of this in January 2007. This notice was telling us to expect a servey request in the mail sometime in the next 2 years and that we will receive a new notice if our house is chosen...WTF? They also said at a recent meeting that everyone needs to calm down because they will give us a very adequate 90 days to relocate. Once again...WTF? It took us 4 months to close on this house, not to mention the year that it took us to find it and the 2 months it took to pack and move. Thats a bit more than 90 days. Plus there will be hundreds or families all looking for housing at the same time.

If you'd like to check this out the website for this disaster is www.vincennesrailroad.com

The address that shows our house is: http://vincennesrailroad.com/Maps/Quads/Fritchton/Fritchton%20Quad.pdf

We are in the yellow corridor. On state road 61. From what people are saying they have eliminated the purple corridor because it would be too close to SK School. And I believe the green (that may not be the right color) has been eliminated because they would have to pay out billions of dollars to relocate everyone because most of the homes in that area are new construction and the values are from approx. $500,000 and up to millions (the rich folk area...lol)

I will try to post more on this as I find out about it, but they are only telling us what they want, when they want to. Its been about 6 months from the last notice to this one.

A little history...

I call this blog "our mystery house" for many reasons. Our house is a big mystery to us. There have been things happen for no reason, we have no idea when it was built, we don't know when it was remodeled in the past, but there are many things that don't fit the house at all. Check this out...a little mystery and a little history:

mystery: Our dogs won't go in to the barn. They'll go everywhere, but not into the barn.

history: The house was built by Joseph Marter and transferred by will to his wife Elizabeth in 1936

mystery: Elizabeth never resided in the house after her husbands death, she sold it immediatly and moved to Prarie St. in Vincennes.

history: Elizabeth Marter sold the residence and 50 acres of land to the Yochum family. We are the first owners not to own the entire 50 acre survey plat. We only have about 2 acres.

mystery: When the house was built. The realtor said 1910. Courthouse says 1890. 1880 plat maps show a residence where our house currently sits. Weird, huh?

history: The house was built with no bathroom! Where the bathroom is was a porch. This is evident by the porch ceiling, the siding under the formica wall (thats right, formica, like counter tops), and there was no power the wiring looks like an afterthought. And the toilet is dated 1960, which is the vibe you get in the bathroom.

mystery: The tool shed. I thought the tool shed was cute. It looks really, really, old. older than the house. It has 2 rooms and the larger room has a wooden "counter" than spans front to back (about 7 feet) and the building is about 15 feet long and about 15 feet from the house. This is a mystery because we think it may not be a tool shed. If the house was built in the 1800's then it might be a small summer kitchen. I don't know enough about these to know how to tell if it could be or not. I any one has any idea how to tell, please tell me how beacuse I have no clue.