Remodeled Guest Room and Revisited Blog

This morning I received an email from Scott Setzepfandt, a great-grandson of Gustav and Marie, the originally family in our home.It was so nice to hear that he was pleased were moving the house along. That reminded me I hadn't posted any pictures of our guest room yet. We've already had three groups of guests but we hope we've not exhausted the possibilities yet. Here's a photo.

July 4 and Bunting

Ron took a few nice photos of our house decked out in bunting for the holiday. Not only did he take the picture, he located and purchased the bunting and hung it up.

Bellevue Iowa Heritage Days Parade

Yesterday we attend our second Bellevue Heritage Days parade. Great crowd, huge mob of tractors, plenty of great old cars, but sadly, very few horses. We really appreciate you, Bellevue Horseman's Club, for your contributions and your efforts. We hope one day the horses, buggies and wagons will make a strong comeback to this wonderful community event. In this photo, our boat, parked in our yard, is in the foreground. Tractors, using our street as a staging area, are behind it.

Home remodeling Sunday off

We are officially on strike today. Ron worked the last several days on piecing together an authentic baseboard and molding for our kitchen. Spent a lot of time slithering around on his stomach, and running up and down the basement stairs to measure twice, cut once, and not spew sawdust into the living space. Lord love him. Goofing off today, then back at it tomorrow. Marty Jess will probably come help again this week, finishing the exterior wood-rot problem. Still contemplating ideas for the upper balcony and ground level porch. Our original ideas for improving those spaces would have cost us more than we could comfortably spend. Back to the drawing board. Anybody want to paint a huge, looming house? The other news is that the bats in the belfy seem to have thinned out this year. By golly, it helps when the mamas breed someplace in the bluffs instead of the attic!

House Restoration: Exterior

I just noticed I'm blogging in slow motion, both here and on my Power Tourist blog. Note to self: one blog is plenty. Meantime, Ron and I are getting lots accomplished here at the Setzepfandt House. This is the Summer of the Exterior. Case in point, the exterior siding of the kitchen bay window has long been rather mushy. We enlisted the aid of Marty Jess who came over yesterday to work with Ron on ripping out the old rotted wood. We're awaiting some replacement lumber--you might be surprised how many sorts of shapes, sizes and species go into a simple area under a window. We hope to round most of the things up and get the repair completed by early next week.