DEMO!!!

We finally started doing some work. It's just the first stage, demolition, but it has made a big difference in how we see our house.

This was our yard somewhere around the spring of 2010.

Here is our yard, now, with all the crap inside the house vomited out:

The floor of the extension was crappy and rotted:

Our contractor tore out the old flooring and put in the plywood subflooring:

The master bathroom before:

The master bathroom, now:

The first parlor looking into the second parlor area, separated by a wall with french doors:

The wall is gone and the two parlors are now combined:

There's a lot more getting cleaned out, but nothing too exciting. We should have the building permits soon and be able to start doing some major work.

A few belated things...

I finally uploaded pictures from my cell phone to the computer, so some of these are months old. Above is Tracer in our old apartment, enjoying life as the only small creature in our lives.

In late April, we finally excavated the old water main and replaced it. The driveway is still a pile of dirt, but the excavator promised to return and blacktop it.



Here's a photo of the fence we put up in the back about a year ago. Before that, it was an open invitation to the neighbors to use our backyard as a dumping ground.


We're finally ALMOST there with the renovation loan from Wells Fargo. If everything goes well, and it won't, we should start work in July!

Grants Grants Grants

Home Depot is giving $5,000 to community organizations that help improve the living conditions of seniors, veterans, and/or the disabled with housing repairs, weatherization and modifications.

The shoe company, Saucony, has a Run for Good program that awards up to $10,000 in cash and in-kind donations for youth running programs to encourage active and healthy lifestyles for children under 18.

KaBoom! and the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group have a program, Playful City USA, that awards grants up to $30,000 to help local governments use best practices to ensure their children have the time and space they need to play and to be active and healthy.

Banfield Charitable Trust offers non-profit organizations support for keeping pets and their people together.

The Mental Health Foundation's "It's OK to talk about it" grant initiative awards up to $10,000 to support innovative programs that address the reduction of stigma, the promotion of public awareness, and education on mental health issues for the target population of young adults. These programs must entail a peer component of young adults who have personally lived with mental illness and can share their condition and stigmatization in a candid and positive manner with peers. The grant program's goal is to improve acceptance of and access to mental health services and supports. The deadline to apply is the end of this month.

More Grants

I'm back at work after three beautiful months of disability/bonding leave. I'm seeing a few grants that might be interesting for Newburghers:

Preserve New York program offers grants to municipalities and non-profit organizations for historic structure reports, historic landscape reports, and cultural resource surveys. Typical awards are between $3,000 and $10,000.

Scotts Miracle-Gro is giving community organizations up to $1,500 in money and in-kind support for gardening and community beautification projects.

Dollar General is offering up to $5,000 in Back-to-School literacy grants to assist school libraries and media centers. They are also awarding up to $3,000 to schools, public libraries and non-profit organizations for Youth Literacy programs.

M.A.C. AIDS Fund is awarding up to $25,000 for programs that provide food and nutrition to people living with HIV or AIDS.

Women Helping Others (W.H.O.) will support grass-roots programs serving the overlooked needs of women and children with grants up to $40,000.

JustFilms, an initiative from Ford Foundation, awards grants to film, video and digital works that show courageous people confronting difficult issues and actively pursuing a more just, secure and sustainable world.

Cinereach is also funding full-length fiction and non-fiction films, with up to $50,000 per project.

Let me know if you have a particular area for which you'd like to find funding.

Community Grant for Collaborations with Police

From the Foundation Directory RFP Alerts:

Applications Invited for MetLife Foundation Community-Police Partnership Awards Program

Deadline: February 28, 2011

The MetLife Foundation and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation are partnering for the tenth year to recognize, sustain, and share the work of innovative partnerships between community groups and police to promote neighborhood safety and revitalization.

The MetLife Foundation Community-Police Partnership Awards program invites applications from partnerships that exhibit tangible accomplishments in their efforts to advance the process, outcome, and evaluation of potent police-community collaborations. Eligible applicants must be member organizations of partnerships that include, but need not be limited to, community organizations and police.

Awardees receive a monetary grant and their work will be promoted via case studies to a wide audience of practitioners, policymakers, and academics.

The program will award grants in the following two categories:

Neighborhood Revitalization Awards (six awards of $15,000 to $25,000 each): These awards celebrate exemplary collaborations between community groups and police that yield crime reduction as well as economic development outcomes such as real estate development, business attraction, and job growth.

Special Strategy Awards (five awards of $15,000 each) will be given to community and police partners who have achieved significant accomplishments in applied technology, aesthetics and greenspace improvement, diversity inclusion and integration, drug market disruption, gang prevention and youth safety, and seniors and safety.

Program information and the full Request for Proposals are available at the LISC Web site:

http://www.lisc.org/section/ourwork/national/safety/awards

Straight from the oven

The baby is here!! He was born January 4, exactly on his due date.

He's already being outfitted in the season's hottest knitwear:

Both are courtesy of my friend, Toni. She hand dyes her own yarn and uses tooth picks (or something equally small and impossible) to knit.

We've been so preoccupied with the baby that the house has been sitting idle. Eddie is still working on the State and Federal Historic Preservation Tax Credit applications, but it might not matter. Sadly, this past week he learned that the two City of Newburgh grants he applied for kind of fell through.

He had received a letter stating that his applications were approved and had verbal confirmation that the full amount he was asking for had been set aside, but now the loan committee will only award him a small portion of what he applied for, so it looks like the house won't be fixed up anytime soon and he'll be one of those vacant property landlords that we have been railing against. It's sad, but part of the reality of Newburgh, I guess. I just wish he hadn't wasted so much time on it (since April, 2010).

In the meantime, we're learning a lot about local politics and trying to enjoy Newburgh. One of the best things we've come across is this bbq restaurant, Christine's, on Broadway. The smoked ribs, fried chicken, brisket and smoked chicken are AMAZING, as well as the collard greens, baked mac 'n cheese, coleslaw, potato salad, and sweet potato fries. We've ordered take out three times in the past two weeks.

Kingston Craft Fair

One Mile Gallery Craft Fair is happening this weekend, December 11 and 12, from 12pm to 5pm. I'm trying to buy local this year, and already planned on sending Christmas cards from Thornwillow Press and peanut butter brittle from Commodore Chocolatier on Broadway. The craft fair is in Kingston, so it won't be a Newburgh-area spending spree, but some items are super cute:


(Photos via One Mile Gallery website.)