Housing (and a few other things)

Another school year has begun and with it another Building Trades House has started. This year's house will be on West Vine Street adjacent to the house that they built last year.

The foundation at the corner of Merritt and Milton that was mentioned in a post on August 12 now has a house on it. The sign in front gives credit to Autumn Builders. This seems to be smaller than they like to build.

I have enjoyed watching the remodeling of a house on West Washington. A picture at the start of the renovation was shown in a June 27th post. Below are three more showing what the house looked like as the renovation proceeded. The workers removed the old paint from the clapboards with sanders.

The trim was painted white. Some of that paint also got onto the sanded clapboards.

I like the look of the house with its new porch and a coat of yellow paint. Since the dumpster looks full, there must have been equally large changes inside the house.

The new garage on the Owen Parker house is nearing completion. I talked to the owner at the county fair and he told me that the roof tiles were found in a Chicago salvage yard. They do not quite match the color of the tiles on the house, but that is because they were exposed to Chicago pollution for sixty or eighty years. If enough effort is made to clean them, they do match perfectly. Also, the bricks had to be special ordered from a brick kiln that could duplicate the bricks that were used in the house. When the project is finished, it will be hard to tell that the garage is an addition.

As for Owen Parker, he does not seem to have done much in Rensselaer. He apparently sold the family farm and used the money to build this house.

Though it is not a house, I want to show the new addition on the north side of Castongia's. The picture below is a few weeks old. If you see the building now, it is very hard to tell that there was any addition made to the building.

On August 17 the Rensselaer Republican had an article on Castongia's 25th anniversary in Rensselaer and DeMotte. The Castongia Deere dealership started in Morocco in 1938. When the son of the founder was approaching retirement in 1984, the Deere Company told him that they would not allow him to transfer ownership of the business; Deere did not want a Morocco location. However, Deere did help the family buy the Rensselaer and DeMotte dealership of Bob Butler, and that is how Castongia's came to Rensselaer.

Also of note in the Rensselaer Republican was an article on August 30 reporting on the County Council meeting of Tuesday, August 27. (I have wanted to attend some of these meetings, but they conflict with an obligation I have that seems to fall on the same dates at the Council meetings.) In July the Council had heard what the public thought about the Local Option Income Tax, and at its August meeting it voted to lower the county income tax from 3.114 percent to 2.964. I have on occasion expressed my disapproval of the income/property tax mix used in the county, one of few times I blatantly editorialize on the this blog.