It's been a while...but I'm back!

I'm back!!!

After an auspicious start to this blog -- and to my enthusiastic, albeit tentative, projects in and around the house -- I all but abandoned the whole thing over the summer.

Why?

Well, three days after spending $700 and 15 days in a row building a garden -- marking and digging a 25' X 12' kidney-shaped space, filling it in and raising it with 100+ 40 lb. bags of topsoil, amending the topsoil with 20 bags of peat, and planting a couple dozen perennials of varying sizes and types -- I got a hastily-organized, poorly-written report purporting to be from a local developer interested in buying all the houses on the block for redevelopment into a shopping/office/condo mega-complex.

So here I am, a first-time homeowner living in my dream house, having just completed my first substantial project done completely on my own...and someone wants to bulldoze my piece of the American Dream, along with my whole neighborhood, for condos and shopping.

• Never mind there's already condos across the street, and offices/shopping across the major thoroughfare a block away.

• Never mind there's a huge upscale riverfront condo development being built less than a mile downstream from where I live.

• Never mind there's another shopping/office/condo triad planned for the major thoroughfare three blocks away (which crosses the other major thoroughfare).

So there I was, reading a report offering me twice the value of my house, a lengthy (and free of charge) move-out period after closing, additional payments "for my trouble," and relocation assistance -- and my response was to cry, and then fret for weeks, over the seemingly-impossible task of finding a place that could offer even 10 percent of what we get from living in the house that we know and love as Camp Muncie. But I held out hope that few, if any, of our neighbors would agree to sign their homes -- and our entire riverfront neighborhood -- away to big business.

By the way, big business here in Indianapolis doesn't get much bigger than Simon and its ever-increasing collection of malls and lifestyle centers across the country. And as one of my neighbors said, if Mel Simon wants our land, he'll get it.

So we spent our summer looking at real estate listings, driving past houses we liked, and finding out what we could from the neighbors on the block, and from the people living in the condos across the street. Simon, along with the developers they were working with, were wooing the people in the condos much more seriously -- instead of a haphazardly-presented description stuffed into our mailboxes by a kid just out of college, the people in the condos got organized reports, a few meetings with developers' representatives, and regular letters on official letterhead. They also got official contracts, and word had it that a number of them had signed.

Meanwhile, the Indianapolis Business Journal published a story about Simon's plans and residents' reactions, focusing on an 80-something woman who has lived in her condo since it was built in the early '80s saying she wouldn't sell for less than $2 million. By the way, there wouldn't be any eminent domain -- if Simon didn't get everyone in the condos, they wouldn't extend their pursuit to those of us living along the river, and would actually abandon the project.

Fast-forward 4 1/2 months. This story has a happy ending!

The IBJ's real estate writer posted in his blog the other day that Simon has indeed dropped its bid to buy the condos...and, in turn, its pursuit of my American Dream..."for now." I'm sure Simon will be back at some point, and if not Simon then someone else. But at least for the foreseeable future, Camp Muncie and the other cottages in our neighborhood are no longer endangered.

Now, it's back to work. I've added to the garden, painted my home office, and made plans for painting the inside of the rest of the house. We'll also finish painting the trim and gutters outside, now that it's cooler. I do have pictures of the garden and my office, which I'll post sometime in the next few days.

It's great to be back!