Our second New Year

We have marked our second round of "the holidays" here in the Setzepfandt House in Bellevue. No fireplace to cuddle around but a twinkling Christmas tree, a warm sofa and a snuggly dog make up for it. Last year we didn't have enough of the house in place to really decorate.

This year we did a little better. Next year, look out!

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.

Renovation: Painting and Decorating

We've accomplished quite a bit on the house since my last post, but those accomplishments have been of the tedious, difficulty to document variety. Much of Ron's time has been spent scraping away old paint slopped onto woodwork by previous residents, and drywall mud slopped as a result of our renovation. Al Theilen and J.R. painted our dining room and parlor ceilings, moving the room painting sequence along. Since then, we've installed our dining room ceiling fan and started to paint the walls, only to find that the paint, which looked like it had been mixed to the correct formula when we were at the store, in fact is an odd shade of purple. As I write this blog post, Ron is at the hardware store (hopefully) getting the right smidge of the right color added to the two cans of paint we bought. It is good to be married to an artist. Here are several photos of progress that I haven't posted yet. The guest bathroom, hallway art, a dining room window with curtain