Getting ready for Demo

The workers bees are busy getting the house ready to demolish the 1950's addition. Removing shutters, electric equipment, crap form the garage left over from previous owners, light fixtures...anything reusable or sellable. Dozers should be on the job soon.

Now Come the Decisions

Coral Stone or marble, 8 foot wide garage door or 9 foot, curved sidewalk or straight, where to put the arbor. This is the fun stuff.

Hallelujah!

After over 6 months of wrangling, disappointments, frustration, and unexpected twists and turns, we received approval this morning by the St. Pete City Council for our remodel request for our home in Granada Estates. They overturned the denial we received from the CPC (which was actual a vote of 3 to 2 in our favor..but they needed 4 votes to approve...sigh.) The vote in our favor was 8 - 0. We were doing a happy dance outside City Hall afterwards. I cried...happy tears. Thanks to Wayne and Jimmy for showing up and speaking our behalf (as they have in our other two prior hearings). Thanks to our attorney Don Mastry who did a great job. And thanks to our architect John and his wife Susan for their REALLY devoted work on our behalf and being such supportive friends. AFter our big win, the three of us went to the Sports Authority and I bought a Tampa Bay Rays hat and t-shirt (celebrating THEIR victory in winning the American League East Championship). And then we went to La Cabana de mi Tio...for my favorite carnitas tacos and gorditos anywhere!!! A great day.

Status Report

I haven’t blogged here for a while because I’ve had very little good to say as we have slogged through a very frustrating permitting process at the City. We still don’t have permits and have filed an appeal with the City Council (after hiring an attorney). We go to City Council on October 2nd. Hopefully, I will have a positive and celebratory entry on the 3rd.

However frustrating we have continued to make plans for the house. Last week, we had a wonderful afternoon with Geri Willingham, a stained glass artist, who is designing a series of windows and transoms for the our “soon-to-be-permitted-we-hope” house in St. Pete. I can’t tell you how excited I am about the designs…when I get the photos of the sketches I’ll post a few. They are filled with images native or common to Florida…bird of paradise, sea grapes, gardenias, orange blossoms, egrets, herons, osprey, and turtles (you know we have to turtles for Jerry) even a roseate spoonbill. Those of you who know my love of birding can just imagine how “happy as a clam at high tide” I am. Just think how much happier I’ll be if we actually get permits and build the addition where we plan to install the stained glass!

Small Victories

Heard from John yesterday and the banana tree, umbrella (schefflera) tree, and "purple" bush that we transplanted are all doing well. All have significant new growth....yeah! AND the crape myrtle are astonishingly sprouting a lot of new growth...astonishing since a big wind toppled them over for 2 days about a month after transplant...I'm still not sure what shape they'll end up since we had to "lop their top"...but I figure if they make it I'll invest in a good arborist to work a little magic.

Make that 80,000 gallons

that would be 10 pools worth of water...where is it supposedly going (see previous post), coming from, why aren't we seeing anything? have sent pool guy to shut off auto fill and have sent my contractor to search under and in the house and cabana for evidence of leakage. I hate long distance micromanagement!

16,000 gallons!!!

Got a note from the St. Pete utility department saying that we used 16,000 gallons of water last month and thought we should figure out why. Well...its a mystery that must be explained either by 1) a defective meter 2)a misread by the meter reader or 3) someone is stealing our water. to put this in perspective our pool only holds about 10,000 gallons of water. And in a normal month of no one living at the house we use about 3200 gallons of water (primarily from water evaporation from the pool and the odd toilet flush here and there when we visit the house to check it out) . So here is the mystery...1) no one is living in the house 2) all but one toilet is shut off and we checked the other one it is NOT running 3) our irrigation is from an onsite well (and we only are allowed to water once a week anyway) 4) we had the pool and equipment checked today...no major leaks...only one tiny one we've had for months that can't use more than a couple of gallons a day 5) there are no marshy areas around the house 6) there is no water under the house 7) there is no "surprise" water in our neighbors yards. so you tell me...misread, defective meter, or someone drove a water truck up to our house in the middle of the night and stole 2 trucks worth of water. hmmmm.