No New Support. Yet!

New York's North Country Regional Economic Development Council (NCREDC) issued its report and recommendations for funding during Round V of the Consolidated Funding Application process.  Schroon Lake is lucky to have a hotel included among the priority projects but the Inn on Schroon Lake was not.

There is still an Upstate Revitalization Initiative contest among the northern economic development councils and it is possible that the Inn will be included in that list.  We will see what happens over the next couple of months.  Keep your fingers crossed!  

Wrote a post. Dog jumped on chair. Post gone.  At least Word saves automatically.

June 2015:  We leave Rockville (MD) at 5 am so we can open the Lake House during the day.  Water and electricity both work – check.  Doc checks the pipes, water heater.  Since when is replacing a heating element an annual requirement?  After a trip to Curtis Lumber, Doc installs the new element. 

Ready to turn on the water.  Seconds later, I hear “WATER WATER!”  WTF? Where? What do you want me to do? I run to the bathroom and find it exploding out of a pipe at eye level! There wasn’t supposed to be any water in that pipe to the third floor. How do we turn it off?  Finally just turn everything off again, but not until the bathroom gets its own shower.  Back to Curtis.  Doc cuts and seals the pipe below the leak.  Bathroom is dry enough to try again.  Finally, water IN the pipes and places where it belongs! Mostly.  We haven’t been able to use the “kitchen” sink or front bathroom since Doc found out where the pipes were draining!

July 4^th:  Seagle Colony young artists are in the Town of Schroon parade and stop here for dinner before singing before the fireworks.  This is the third year they are able to hang out by the lake, relax, and the first year my daughter is here to join them.  Naomi is their contemporary, knows nothing about opera or the business of singing, but was able to make some new friends. 

July 2015:  Another grant application has been submitted through New York State’s Consolidated Funding Application (CFA) process.  The Inn had to be redesigned to make the numbers work and really needs a significant investment from the state.  The Inn needs investors but since I have a securities license, I can’t talk to anyone about investing.  Luckily, I have some great friends who have no such restriction. 

August 2^nd:  A great weekend in Schroon comes to an end as Naomi and I have to head back to Rockville.  She leaves for Denver for two weeks of training for her new job before moving to Chicago.  So it’s her goodbye to Schroon for at least a year and she really made it count!  After Saturday night’s performance of Into the Woods, she parties with the young artists and admits to having a great time.  They are refreshingly different from her Hopkins friends and I’m delighted to see her having so much fun in Schroon and with Seagle folks.

September 2015:  I’ve been feeling paralyzed because I don’t want to start renovating the Lake House without a plan.  Until we know that we have received a significant grant to build the Inn, we don’t know what the optimum configuration is for the Lake House.  We are going to preserve the outside of the Lake House but there is no front door.  We need to have an interior staircase (for fire safety reasons) but where should it be built?  The top floor is a very cute space.  It has two tiny windows, facing north and south, so no view! For the top floor to be used, it needs a second method of egress.  How? 

Inside, it’s as if the building was not on the lake.  Plumbing is installed on “view” walls – facing the lake.  Rooms have five, or more, doors! There should be more windows. The deck is a bit too narrow for a table and chairs and you have to walk sideways by one of the staircases to get by.  The railing height is too low.  It used to be that children weren’t allowed to stay in the Lake House because of the railing.  What’s the best way to fix it?  Place a second “invisible” railing above the existing one? Or redesign the balustrades to be higher so the building looks almost the same as it does now? 

The ceiling height of the lowest floor is all of 7’6”.  Some of the Seagle Colony young artists from 2015 wouldn’t even be able to walk around it without bending over!  The water heater is in a semi-excavated space with the stone foundation for what was likely the originally constructed “cottage.”  It screams “private dining room and wine cellar” to me.  A deck and/or patio can be added on the north side if we want to have a decent size restaurant. Should we?

We are SO ready to replace the plumbing.  The water pipes need to be buried below the frost level.  The sewer pipe needs to be buried and the contents pumped up to the street.  So we can’t work on that until we know what the load of the building will be. When the pipes are buried, they need to come up under the building.  Where?  Until we know how the inside will be renovated, we don’t know where the water should come in.  Since we will have to dig under the house to install the water and sewer, we should fully excavate the basement so we can have all the utilities there.  It feels like a game of “Whac-a-mole” where you try to figure out one thing and two more things need to be figured out first.

So what’s happening?  I have asked for a firm that specializes in historic preservation to help me work through the many options.  It probably makes sense to apply for historic designation status because the tax credits are so significant.  I’ll write some more when I get some realistic ideas from professionals.

Thanks for reading! And feel free to contact me at jpitkin@umich.edu with suggestions, questions…