Good News!

Our contractor just informed us that the building next to us - a shell - is condemned and Habitat for Humanity will build a similar looking building in its place!! It has a beautiful facade and was probably an amazing house, but it fell on some serious hard times.

Great Grant Opportunity for Newburgh Art Community

New National Arts Initiative Invites Letters of Inquiry for Art-Centered Community Development Projects

Deadline: November 15, 2011 (Letters of Inquiry)

Eleven private philanthropies have joined with the National Endowment for the Arts and a number of federal agencies to establish ArtPlace, a nationwide initiative to drive community revitalization with a new investment model that puts the arts at the center of economic development.

ArtPlace will periodically awards grants to organizations doing groundbreaking work in creative placemaking in communities across the United States. The project recently announced its first round of grants, awarding a total of $11.5 million to thirty-four projects in cities from Honolulu to Miami.

Each project supported by ArtPlace was selected for developing a new model of helping communities thrive by strategically integrating artists and arts organizations into key local efforts in transportation, housing, community development, job creation, and other areas. The program will provide a similar level of support in 2012.

ArtPlace is inviting Letters of Inquiry for its second round of funding from partnerships involving arts organizations, artists, designers, and local and national organizations working to produce a transformative impact on community vibrancy. The initiative seeks to provide seed grants for entrepreneurial projects that already enjoy strong local buy-in, that integrate with a community’s economic development and community revitalization strategy, and that have the potential to attract additional private and public support.

Award amounts are decided on a case-by-case basis. In the grant program's first year, grants ranged from $63,100 to $1 million. The average grant was $349,784 and the median grant was $275,000.

ArtPlace Request for Letters of Inquiry

Apple-Pumpkin Picking

It's been a year since we moved to Newburgh! We went apple/pumpking picking this weekend, just like last October, except this time we had Elliot with us. Requisite baby in pumpkin patch pictures:

Rough Plumbing Finished!

I can't believe how awful these photos are, but I guess you'll get the idea. We just passed the first plumbing inspection!

I have no idea what I'm looking at, but apparently it's up to City of Newburgh plumbing code. And we received the Rehabilitation Grant from the City of Newburgh, finally. It was contingent on the boilers being installed and working, which I guess they are.



These last photos are the PVC pipes running from the second floor bathroom. The old houses have joists evenly spaced and don't leave much room to run waste pipes, etc. You'll see a lot of cut joists from previous plumbers trying to work the situation. We decided to sister up the joists, but that leaves the original problem of how to run the plumbing. Originally, we were going to build a pedestal for the toilet so that the pipe could snake over the joist and be close to the back wall, where we wanted it.

Now, instead of the toilet being on a pedestal, the pipes are placed so that the toilet is further away from the wall. Our contractor is building a knee-wall to make up for the space behind the toilet, and on the plus side we get to have some built-in shelves and recessed medicine cabinet.

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.