"A coastal town in the Samar province of the central Philippines that was wiped out by Typhoon Haiyan is shown in this Nov. 11 photo. The typhoon, which packed 150 mph winds and 20-foot waves, swept through the archipelago Nov. 8, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake."This coastal town was effectively built on a sandbar, with virtually zero setback from the ordinary high water level.
In his decade of working construction and home remodeling, David Gonzalez always dreamed of finding some hidden treasure in the demolition work. He’d even put dollar bills in new walls for folks to unearth in the future.So he chalks up to karma the 1938 Action Comics #1 book he found amid old newspapers used to insulate a wall of a fixer-upper he was gutting in Elbow Lake, Minn. The old comic book, from June 1938, features a new character named Superman lifting a car on its cover...
The comic could have been worth more had it not been for a heated argument with one of his in-laws... When his wife’s aunt grabbed the comic book amid all the excitement of the discovery, he grabbed it back and tore the back cover. Experts downgraded the comic book’s condition to a 1.5 on a 10-point scale...Still, it’s going for more than 10 times what Gonzalez paid for the abandoned house in Elbow Lake.. He and his wife went to the Grant County courthouse and researched the owner, who told them a neighboring restaurant had offered $10,000 to buy it. They planned to demolish the house and put in a parking lot. “So I offered $100 more and got it for $10,100,” he said.
The contest was conducted to promote ingenuity and innovation in outhouse design; the 10,000 Euro prize was awarded to an entry that adapted the many knotholes in spruce as light sources and ventilation sources while preserving necessary privacy.
Minneapolis can now add the credential of having one of the top urban forests. The City of Lakes is home to an abundance of varied parkland — a park every six blocks — including those designed for off-road cycling and those for hiking, canoeing and swimming. Minneapolis’ tree canopy of 31 percent is only 6.5 percent shy of its potential canopy of 37.5 percent based on geographic information system (GIS) analysis and modeling. Minneapolis was actually one of the first cities to use the U.S. Forest Service’s iTree assessment tool to determine the benefits of its urban forest. Today, it’s estimated that the city’s urban forest has a structural value of $756 million and also reduces energy use by $216,000 per year.The photo shows Minnehaha Creek above the falls, by zuluadams, via Stuff about Minneapolis.
Text and image from my favorite home-repair/DIY blog in the StarTribune, which also has two videos illustrating the physics of plumbing vents. Only homeowners will find this of interest.Plumbing vents prevent traps from being siphoned. They also prevent back-pressure on traps, but today the focus is on siphoning. You may have heard that plumbing fixtures will drain faster when they're vented properly, and I know I've said this myself, but it's not necessarily true. The common, improper analogy is to talk about dumping a soda bottle upside down. You watch the water glug out while air replaces it, and this makes it drain super slow. Once you put a hole in the other side, the water drains out very quickly. This analogy doesn't hold water because the top side of every plumbing fixture is wide open. The top of a toilet is open...
Every plumbing fixture has a trap, which prevents sewer gas from coming in to the home. When a lot of water drains through a plumbing fixture, it can be enough water to create a siphon effect, which has the potential to pull water right out of the plumbing trap...
When water is siphoned through the drain, the water in the trap gets siphoned. This can lead to sewer gas coming in to the home. In short, plumbing vents are there to help prevent sewer gas from coming in to the home.
It's been a very, very long time since a big house with a sweeping front porch at 2104 Kenwood Parkway in south Minneapolis was prominently featured in the opening credits of the 1970s sitcom, the Mary Tyler Moore show, but some of you out there might remember.From a story in the StarTribune, via Stuff about Minneapolis.
That house is now on the market for $2.895 million and is listed with the Barry Berg Group/Coldwell Banker Burnet. The lengthy listing makes no mention of the home's fame (there was a time when the house was simply known as the "Mary Tyler Moore house," and the interior today bears little resemblance to the stage set where MTM's friend, Rhoda, had an apartment on the turreted third floor. That turret is still there in all its Victorian glory, but the 1900's-era house has been significantly renovated and is now a single-family house with 9,500 square-feet, including seven bedrooms and nine bathrooms.
In its heyday, this seemingly luxurious estate in Gretna, Neb., was described as the "finest mansion in all of Sarpy County." But soon it will be burned to the ground, set on fire room-by-room as part of firefighter training for the Gretna Volunteer Fire Department...Backstory at Omaha.com, via AolRealEstate.
Burst washing machine hoses have to be one of the most common causes of catastrophic water damage in homes. When I find rubber hoses used to connect the washing machine, I often mention to my clients that it's a good idea to replace them...After reading that, I realized that the hoses to our washer are twelve years old. I shuddered to realize what would have happened had a hose burst when we were out of the house. It would be the equivalent of taking a garden hose and leaving it on in the house.
Every time a washing machine shuts off the water, a shockwave is sent through the water pipes... As rubber ages, it loses its flexibility. After being subjected to water hammer over and over for many years, the rubber washing machine hose is eventually going to fail, and it's going to be one heck of a mess...
I've heard that a good rule of thumb is to replace rubber washing machine hoses every five years. That sounds good, but how do you remember? Another tip I've heard is to replace your washing machine hoses every leap year. Not a bad idea.
If you can connect a garden hose to a faucet, you can replace your washing machine hoses. Just use a wrench to loosen the old hoses, and give the new hoses an extra 1/4 turn with a wrench after you have them hand-tightened.I'm replacing ours this week.
"There are houses being torn down all the time," says Bill Smith, realtor and ex-mayor of Belvedere. In neighboring Tiburon, he says, a buyer not long ago paid $20 million for the home of tennis star Andre Agassi and wife Steffi Graf, then announced his plan to raze it."People tear down homes for all kinds of reasons," says Smith, including the two ascribed by Marin's Independent Journal to the Winslows: They want to improve their view, and they want to plant some bushes.
The Homestead Act, signed by Lincoln on May 20, 1862, embodied a radical promise: free land for the masses. Until then the federal government had generally sold its unoccupied property, favoring men with capital. As a result, by the 1840s big farms were consuming smaller ones, and efforts to change the system were gridlocked as Congressional debate over slavery intensified. The problem became so pressing that Representative Galusha Grow, a Pennsylvania Republican, warned in 1860 that the nation was courting “a system of land monopoly—one of the direst, deadliest curses that ever paralyzed the energies of a nation or palsied the arm of industry.”Further details at Smithsonian. Photo credit Solomon Butcher, via Cool Chicks From History, with these additional comments from NebraskaStudies.Org:
From the moment the first homesteader, Daniel Freeman, stepped foot into his local land office in 1863 to apply for 160 acres in Beatrice, Nebraska, to the day in 1979 when the last homesteader, Ken Deardorff, of Alaska, filed for a title to his 50-acre claim, four million settlers—men and women, former slaves and new immigrants—attempted it. About 1.6 million succeeded, homesteading a combined total of 270 million acres, or 10 percent of the country.
The Homestead Act of 1862 stated that any person age twenty-one and head of a family could claim land. The Act also contained the provision that widows of Union soldiers could deduct the time of service their husbands spent in the Civil War from the five-year residency requirement. So, while the phrase "head of a family" did place limitations on which women could file, many women took advantage of the Homestead Act and other laws to file claims in their own names.
Unable to sell his parents’ ocean-front timeshare for the past year, David Suder became so fed up he offered to give it away. They paid $8,000 for the Orange County, Calif. unit a decade ago, but since there are no willing buyers, and his 81-year-old mother, now a widow, can no longer afford the monthly maintenance fees, Suder says he doesn’t have a choice. The San Diego-based real estate investor is offering the unit for free in the hopes that someone will take it before his mother dies. “I don’t want to inherit it,” he says. “I want it to go away.”..Here's one reason why:
Experts say even in better times, most sellers never saw a return on their investment. “Very few timeshares increase in value,” says Alisa Stephens, executive producer at RedWeek.com. As values sink and desperation grows, the number of owners giving their timeshares away for $1 – or less — has doubled in the past year, says Brian Rogers, of Timeshare Users Group, an owner advocacy group. “There’s never been a worst time to try to sell a timeshare,” he says...
To make up for these losses, resorts have been increasing the maintenance fees on the individuals who continue to use their timeshares. Average annual maintenance costs hit an all-time high of $731 in 2010, up more than 8% from the year prior, according to the latest data from the American Resort Development Association. Experts say those costs are still rising.Personally, I wouldn't want to try to call a bottom by buying distressed timeshares. A better idea for taking advantage of the situation would be to rent a timeshare for a vacation:
Before selling at a huge loss, timeshare owners might want to consider some alternatives. Stephens suggests renting the timeshare to vacationers at a price that covers the annual maintenance fee but is cheaper than what travelers would pay to stay at a hotel.Further details at Smart Money.
But he spoke at length about the town itself, telling her all that he had seen of its speculative madness, and how it had impressed him. What did the future hold for that place and its people? They were always talking of the better life that lay ahead of them and of the greater city they would build, but to George it seemed that in all such talk there was evidence of a strange and savage hunger that drove them on, and that there was a desperate quality in it, as though what they really hungered for was ruin and death. It seemed to him that they were ruined, and that even when they laughed and shouted and smote each other on the back, the knowledge of their ruin was in them.
They had squandered fabulous sums in meaningless streets and bridges. They had torn down ancient buildings and erected new ones large enough to take care of a city of half a million people. They had levelled hills and bored through mountains, making magnificent tunnels paved with double roadways and glittering with shining tiles--tunnels which leaped out on the other side into Arcadian wilderness. They had flung away the earnings of a lifetime, and mortgaged those of a generation to come. They had ruined their city, and in doing so had ruined themselves, their children, and their children's children.
Already the town had passed from their possession. They no longer owned it. It was mortgaged under a debt of fifty million dollars, owned by bonding companies in the North. The very streets they walked on had been sold beneath their feet. They signed their names to papers calling for the payment of fabulous sums, and resold their land the next day to other madmen who signed away their lives with the same careless magnificence. On paper, their profits were enormous, but their "boom" was already over and they would not see it. They were staggering beneath obligations to pay which none of them could meet--and still they bought.
And when they had exhausted all their possibilities of ruin and extravagance that the town could offer, they had rushed out into the wilderness, into the lyrical immensities of wild earth where there was land enough for all men living, and they had staked off little plots and wedges in the hills as one might try to stake a picket fence out in the middle of the ocean. They had given fancy names to all these foolish enterprises--"Wild Boulders" --"Shady Acres" --"Eagle's Crest". They had set prices on these sites of forest, field, and tangled undergrowth that might have bought a mountain, and made charts and drawings showing populous communities of shops, houses, streets, roads, and clubs in regions where there was no road, no street, no house, and which could not be reached in any way save by a band of resolute pioneers armed with axes. These places were to be transformed into idyllic colonies for artists and writers and critics; and there were colonies as well for preachers, doctors, actors, dancers, golf players, and retired locomotive engineers. There were colonies for everyone, and, what is more, they sold the lots--to one another!
But under all this flash and play of great endeavour, the paucity of their designs and the starved meagreness of their lives were already apparent. The better life which they talked about resolved itself into a few sterile and baffled gestures. All they really did for themselves was to build uglier and more expensive homes, and buy new cars, and join a country club. And they did all this with a frenzied haste, because--it seemed to George--they were looking for food to feed their hunger and had not found it.
In honor of Landsat 5's 28th birthday today (March 1st) here's how the desert city of Las Vegas has gone through a massive growth spurt. The outward expansion of the city is shown in a false-color time lapse of data from all the Landsat satellites.
The large red areas are actually green space, mostly golf courses and city parks. You'll notice the images become a lot sharper around 1984, that's when new instrument designs greatly increased their sensitivity.
I'm still trying to figure out how a project launched 28 years ago captured images from 1972. NASA engineers continue to amaze me...
The purpose of a trap is to prevent foul-smelling sewer gas from coming back in to the house. The diagram [above] shows a P-trap, which can be found at sinks, showers, and bath tubs. The left side of the trap connects to the plumbing fixture, and the right side connects to the sewer. The 'sewer' side will have sewer gases present, but the water sitting in the bottom of the trap prevents the sewer gases from entering the house.Floor drains are similar... but different.
This past year 65% of home sellers received less than the assessed value of their property. That's way up from the only 12 percent of homes that sold for less than assessed value in 2000, in a major turnaround from the pattern before the housing crash...Understanding this is very important for anyone wanting to monetize their existing home or downsize from an "empty nest." A corollary is that when assessors revalue existing homes (in most communities, this is done on a rotating basis every several years), they should - in principle - lower assessed values to reflect ongoing sales, which may result in lower property taxes, even in the absence of a lowering of tax rates. I am aware of this happening in some parts of Minnesota.
"It used to be you could count on a Madison home selling for more than (its) assessed value. Those homes that didn't sell for assessed value were generally fixer-uppers or homes that belong to distressed sellers." Not so anymore, Miller notes, arguing that market value these days has "very little to do" with assesed value.
The mansion, which is 22,000-square feet and boasts eight bedrooms, has a six-car garage, a lagoon-shaped swimming pool with spa, a weight room forn Tom to train in and a wine cellar. The two wings are connected by a bridge and there's a nursery for Benjamin, a lift and a butler's room. The couple bought the land in 2008 for $11 million and had plans drawn up for the property which they then had amended as they didn't think the building was big enough...I'll defer any commentary, but I can't resist appending this related story:
Gisele came under fire from environmentalists for building the huge home but she insisted that its construction is very environmentally-savvy using solar energy, energy-saving lighting, rainwater recovery systems, waste reduction and recycling programs, energy-efficient appliances and sustainable building materials.
Tiger Woods's ex-wife has defended the decision to flatten her $12m home without ever moving in. Elin Nordegren ordered a demolition team to level the house so that she could build a new home from scratch at the Florida waterfront property...This is nice:
But her realtor has said the plan was always to flatten the home as it was in such a bad state of repairs. 'The home had fallen into disrepair, the roof needed to be replaced, the shutters were falling apart and the pool was not functioning.' Adams said the home was only worth $2m while the land with its views of the Atlantic Ocean was worth $10m.
Before ordering in demolition crews Nordegren allowed a local charity to take what they wanted from the building. Habitat for Humanity were given two weeks to take anything they wanted from the house and sell it off. Bargain hunters have been flocking to the charity's store in North Palm Beach to snap up the items.Their local Habitat for Humanity branch has a website where you can view donated items; the merchandise appears to be a step up from that carried by Goodwill and St. Vincent dePaul (but perhaps that's a reflection of the location). Some of you might want to check re branches near your own home (there's one in Madison).
