Archive for June, 2008

This Old House and the Shaw Neighborhood

27 June 08

Hey everybody, look! I am famous. This Old House blog used one of my photos of the Shaw neighborhood. They misspelled my name but they got the Circa Properties part right.

The Shaw Neighborhood was selected as one of the best places in the Midwest to buy an old home for the quality of architecture and the values in the neighborhood. Click here to view an MLS link of all currently available homes as well as all the homes that have sold in the area over the past year.

Here are few “fixer-uppers” I picked from the list of active properties. These homes are listed between 65-80K and need a good amount of work. But they have loads of potential for anyone who is capable of doing the work.

My very first house was in the Shaw Neighborhood. It is pictured below. It is the stone two-family in the middle. The people who owned it before me bought it for about 50K, they lived there for about 10 years and did a tremendous amount of work, then they sold it to me and my business partner for 162,000. The single family on the corner was purchased for 315K and the one on the other side has a replacement value of 600K which means that to rebuild it the way it stands would cost at least $600,000. My feeling is that it would probably cost more because houses today just are not built the same as they were 100 years ago. So, I think This Old House got it right when they said the Shaw Neighborhood is one of the best place to buy an old house!

Corner of Russell and Spring

Google Maps Adds St. Louis Street View

11 June 08

Google has finally added Saint Louis to the list of cities with ‘Street View’ functionality. I’m glad to see so much of the city has been covered already, with more to come! This is a great way to quickly explore a few properties you may be interested in and the surrounding streets.

Check it out here

Carbon Footprint of STL is 4x Larger than NYC

5 June 08

I just read this article on St Louis Beacon. Among the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the country, St. Louis ranks 7th from the bottom. According to the report released by the Brookings Institute causes contributing to our high emissions include “low residential density, reluctance to use public transit, coal-based electricity generation and energy-inefficient homes.”

One of the more shocking revelations was that residential energy use was a larger contributor to our poor status than transportation emissions. “Between 2000 and 2005, the region’s residential energy footprint rose 16.4 percent at a time when the typical metropolitan area experienced a slight decline.

Although we have new builders in town like Sage and EcoUrban who are demonstrating that new construction can be extremely energy efficient, it is going to take a greater effort on the part of individual home owners to increase the energy efficiency of their homes with new windows, more insulation and more efficient systems. In one of the homes that I visited last week I saw a Bosch tankless water heater. When that home needed a new water heater, the owner made a better choice rather than replacing it with a newer model of less efficient design.

10 Simple Changes for a More Energy Efficient Home

Use CFL lightbulbs

Insulate your attic, walls and pipes

Install a digital thermostat

Install a low-flow shower head

Buy a jacket for your traditional water heater

Use a reflective paint on your flat roof

Weatherstrip doors and windows

Use Power Strips for all electronics and turn them off at night

Use a manual or battery powered lawn mower

Hang dry clothes rather than using your dryer

The next time you are thinking home improvement or repair check out Home Eco on Macklind. They have everything from insulation to solar panels and they often offer how to workshops.