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 By Ariane Wiltse
Every now and then, a story in the local press forces me to reevaluate my decision to move back to New Orleans and buy a house in the Lower 9th Ward. Sometimes the story that jolts me from my idyllic rebuilding spirit focuses on leaks in levees and the recycled newspaper found to be stuffed inside of them. Other times it’s stories about the condition of the swamps to the south and west of the city, stories that describe how the land out there is literally falling into open water, and in doing so is allowing the Gulf of Mexico to creep closer and closer to our fragile city.
But today, I’m not fretting over the potential environmental disaster lurking behind the next hurricane. Today, it’s the city’s rampant violence that makes me question my decision not only to move back here after the storm but to sprout roots.
One recent morning, around 2 a.m., a man in my neighborhood was found dead in his home. He had been shot in the head. The man lived a few blocks away from the house I’m restoring, the trailer I’m living in and me.
Although the police have released the barest of details, it appears that the man was murdered in either a drug deal gone wrong or for some retaliatory reason. Typical tit-for-tat street justice meets the cheapness of human life.
My neighbor is merely the city’s most recent murder victim. By the time the summer finally draws to an end, dozens of other people will be dead. In a city long known for its incessant and often random violence, summertime is the scariest time of year. It’s the time when murders become so common that the city guarantees itself the morbid distinction of becoming the nation’s murder capital for yet another year. I call this time of year the killing season. The killings are a fact of life down here or, better put, a cycle of death.
After two of my friends were murdered last year in separate incidents, and my car was surrounded by drug dealers on a sunny Saturday afternoon –- three blocks from my house -- I decided to get involved in anti-crime efforts. I started asking questions at my weekly neighborhood association meetings, and the next thing I knew, I was co-chair of the crime committee. Ask questions? Get the responsibility. It was that simple and unpopular of a job.
Since then, the other co-chair and I teamed up with local grassroots organizations and launched a petition to keep the Louisiana National Guard in New Orleans. Former Gov. Kathleen Blanco deployed the guard in June 2006 after five teenagers were found gunned down. During the last two years, however, the economic strain of paying, feeding and housing the nearly 300 soldiers stationed here has become extremely unpopular in the rest of the state, placing political pressure on current Gov. Bobby Jindal to pull the guard out of New Orleans.
But for some of New Orleans’ most vulnerable residents, true pioneers rebuilding in a post-apocalyptic atmosphere littered with block after block of abandoned houses, the guard provides their only protection. Dressed in fatigues and riding in military Humvees, the soldiers patrol the areas of the city that took the most water and therefore have been the slowest to recover -- neighborhoods such as eastern New Orleans, Gentilly, Lakeview and the Lower 9th Ward. These patrols allow the undermanned and overworked police force to focus their patrols in the more populated areas of the city. Without the guard patrols in the sparsely populated areas, either the New Orleans Police Department would be forced to pull officers from administrative and intelligence departments, effectively bringing investigations to a halt, or large tracts of the city would be left to fend for themselves.
Sensing the post-Katrina political tide in Baton Rouge was shifting, and not in New Orleans’ favor, Jeffery and I, along with volunteers from Citizens for 1 Greater New Orleans, collected nearly 5,000 signatures asking the governor to keep the guard in the city. Mayor Ray Nagin, Supt. of Police Warren Riley and City Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis endorsed our efforts and made personal requests to the governor.
A few weeks ago, Jindal announced that the guard will stay through the end of 2008. It’s a temporary success that helps me and a lot of other people working hard to rebuild our homes and community rest easier, for now.
But it doesn’t quiet the cacophony of second-guessing in my head. That still comes in loud and clear.
(Photos: Kathy Price-Robinson)
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Patti here. I'm helping my friend and fellow nurse Joni spruce up her kitchen. (See the project so far).
 Well, we got some tile up over the weekend. Whew, it was a lot of work. With this, as with everything else, there was quite a learning curve. We were extremely careful to plan the placement, have all of our supplies ready and be versed on the instructions before we started (Photo 1).
We cut out a template for placement to make sure we had everything right, then applied the thinset (a thin mortar) with a trowel with one side having quarter-inch notches in it.
We put the thinset on with the flat side of the trowel, then ran back through it with the notched side of the tool, then back over one more time with the flat side of the tool. The reason for the smoothing is that we have some semi-transparent tiles that would show the trowel lines had we not knocked them down.
We placed the first sheet of tile up and had to finesse it into place, which created a lot of thinset oozing through the seams. We didn't quite know this as we had to leave the paper coating on for about 20 minutes (2). We then soaked the paper with water and removed it, much like removing wallpaper.
It was a mess underneath. We moved on to the rest of the wall (3), which is behind and above the stove, in the same fashion. We noticed the tiles slipping down the wall so the margins were no longer matching to the sheet already up!
We tried to hold the sheets of tile in place, which, I can tell you, was not effective. To keep tiles from slipping down the wall, I nailed a trim piece (which Joni had from the cabinet we had removed previously) directly under the tile (4), and I then hammered nails under the tiles themselves through the paper backing, to take some of the weight of the top tiles off the bottom tiles. The problem is that the thinset was moving down all along, even though the tiles stayed in place.
Now I'm not sure if this is a common problem or if the mix was too thin. I do believe we applied it too thick, except that is hard to assess in that the thinset on the top areas was very thin and beautiful and on the bottom very heavy and messy (5 and 6).
Joni worked on the project for about nine hours Saturday and was so wound up and frustrated that she was unable to sleep. I got a very distressed call Sunday that she was just done! She wanted to hire out the rest no matter what the cost, and she thought we wouldn't be able to salvage what was already up, thus wasting $300 in tile.
I assured her the best I could and went over to her house Sunday evening to take a look. By that time, she had discovered that if she applied water to the surface of the tiles, she was able to chip and rub the excess thinset off (7).
I helped her for about an hour and got it almost entirely done. It's vital to get the grout lines clear of all white thinset so that it doesn't show against the darker grout. Joni feels much better about it now.
I think it looks beautiful and that we have the most difficult area by far done. The rest of the job is only five tiles high, just above the counter, which isn't much weight and the tile will have the counter to rest on. Also, we need a few spacers so there is a grout line at the junction where the tile meets the top of the counter. But this is for Joni to decide.
It may be that when I get home from camping this week, the tile job will be done.
I think we've done pretty well for a couple of novices on a tight budget which, by the way, I think we'll still be pretty close to, unless Joni hires out the rest. I think it would be nice to finish ourselves so that we know we can do it, but as I said, that's totally her call.
It looks so good with the chocolate-colored wall above the cabinets (8 and 9). It looks like it was totally meant to be that way. I love it and am still having fun. Go figure.
And here are comments from the star of the show, Joni:
It was blood, sweat and tears over this little area behind my stove. As Patti explained, all the thinset settled to the bottom of the wall and the wood trim kept it there behind the tiles. I was attempting to remove the hardening thinset between the tiles for the grout lines (as recommended) once that was removed.
To make sure the tiles were flat against the wall, and not floating on various thicknesses of thinset, I used a 2-by-4 to gently tap the tiles flat and even. Then, thinset would ooze out between the tiles and I would have to start over again. I'm glad I spent the time to make sure all the tiles were flat against the wall and the nails (about 40 of them) kept the tiles in place. The spaces between the tiles are very close. Fortunately, with the type of tile it is, it looks great.
It turned out beautiful and I love it! I feel good about the job we did. I am getting bids on the remaining backsplash and will let you know what I decide. I love my kitchen and Patti has been great. My kitchen has a great vibe!
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 Ariane Wiltse is restoring a Katrina-damaged 1870s home in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, and she is sharing her journey with us. Here's her latest installment:
The Altar
In the front room of my house, the room I tell visitors will one day serve as my library, sits a wood-burning fireplace with an Arts & Crafts-engraved slate face. It's quite fancy. A real eye-catcher, that fireplace. So much so that I figured it for just the right spot to place an altar.
I hadn't planned on putting an altar on my fireplace mantel, although no one in New Orleans would question my judgment. It's a fairly natural thing to do here. But I'm not from New Orleans. Michigan by birth. Virginia from there on out. And up North, people don't put altars on their fireplace mantels; they put fancy candles and knickknacks, family photos in fine silver frames, and during the Christmas season they cover 'em in all manner of evergreens. This doesn't leave much space for the dead and gone.
I don't know if the people who were living in my house when the Storm struck are dead. But I do know that they are gone. Gone so far and for so long that the neighbors don't know where to find them. We've tried. They don't return calls to their pre-Katrina phone numbers. City Hall says they still live at my house, but they don't come around anymore.
The banker has no answers. Foreclosures have a way of dehumanizing people, treating them as if they never existed. Even Google can't locate them. It's as if they disappeared.
Seeing as I can't find them to return the items they left behind, I decided to show my respects by placing their smallest belongings on the fireplace mantel. It seemed only right. I couldn't bring myself to throw away the common remnants of past lives. So I put them on display to remind myself and any visitors that a family once lived here, a family which likely lost all they had in the flood.
I catalogued the items I found. They include:
• A Zippo lighter
• A CD of the movie "The Wedding Singer"
• A 2-lb. hand weight
• Several large, primary-colored Legos, the kind used by toddlers
• A stick of women's concealer, just like the one I use to hide dark circles under my eyes
• A black barber's comb
• A plastic figurine of the cowboy from the Disney movie "Toy Story"
• A bottle of peach-flavored Cisco, the same "liquid crack" we used to drink in high school once we'd graduated from Boone's Farm wine coolers
• A 9mm bullet
• Little girl hair ties with large red balls on the tips used to hold ponytails in place
• A sugar dish made in Japan
• A tarnished silver spoon
• A prescription bottle of Orphenadrine, used to treat the painful muscle spasms so common with Parkinson's disease
• A rusted set of keys
• A boomerang
• A form letter from a class-action lawsuit for "clients who sustained a stroke, heart attack, or any other cardiovascular or heart-related injury while, or soon after, taking Bextra or its generic equivalent, Valdecoxib"
• A plastic green tiger
• Two spools of thread, one blue, the other pink
• A Hibernia bank card
• A pitchfork-looking utensil used for barbecuing
• A golf ball
• Comedy & tragedy masks, just like the kind my aunt used to give me every Christmas when I was a little girl
I pulled down bigger, perhaps, more significant items from the attic. There was furniture, all kinds of wall treatments, a cream-colored and beaded mother-of-the-bride wedding dress, reams of upholstery fabric and boxes. Boxes and more boxes. Overstuffed with paperwork and family photos, Christmas ornaments and toys. I had to put those boxes out for the trash.
A woman can only look at Easy-Bake Ovens and remote-control race cars for so long. Soon enough they begin to they make her crazy wondering what happened to the children to whom they belonged. Maybe one day they'll pass by for a visit and tell me.
See the story so far
(Photo: Ariane Wiltse)
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 I recently interviewed Nicolas P. Retsinas, the director of Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies and lecturer at Harvard Business School. Nicholas noted a possible upside in the current real estate market in that houses may be viewed once again as places to anchor and raise families rather than primarily as profit centers. He wrote a thought-provoking essay that appeared in Working Knowledge, a publication of Harvard Business School, and he gave me permission to reprint it here:
A house divided: investment or shelter?
By Nicolas P. Retsinas
Dictionaries are not static. Some words go unused for so long that lexicographers dub them archaic. Definitions also gravitate to that catch-bin.
The plummeting housing market has forced a reevaluation, not just of the financial value of a home, but of its meaning. Once just a place for a family to live and take root, the home in recent times has been elevated to Investment Opportunity, a place where you stayed for awhile, made a lot of money, then moved on to the next home-investment.
Is the definition of home about to change once again?
Family sanctuary
When immigrants crowded into this country, they yearned for shelter, a sanctuary in a new land. That shelter could be a tenement, a farmstead, a ramshackle cottage. For families, home had a connotation of safety and stability.
Banks did not lend with 30-year amortizing mortgages, but with five-year loans and a balloon payment at the term's end. A family needed to amass a 50 percent down payment; few Americans could. So homeownership was neither a plausible individual aspiration nor a policy prescription. The word home had no investment connotations.
Read on »
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 Today's Guest Blogger is Colleen, a stay-at-home mom from Lake Forest, who finally gave in to my pleading for Guest Bloggers. (Was it the praying cat that put her over the edge?)
Here's her story:
When we bought our Lake Forest townhouse, everything was perfect except the kitchen.
It was beige laminate everywhere (applied over the original 1979 faux-wood particleboard cabinets and the countertop), and the sink cabinet had so much water damage that we couldn't keep a cabinet door bolted in place; the screws would rip out. There was a pass-through window from the kitchen to the dining room, but it was blocked by cabinets that hung down, so I would have to bend over to converse with my family and guests while I was in the kitchen.
So after almost four years of beige, we put together a tight budget and figured out what we could do.
We knew we would be keeping the shape and layout intact, since the kitchen worked well — it was just ugly and old and damaged. We wanted Ikea cabinets, but they come in only so many sizes and we couldn't make them work in our dimensions. We got quotes from big-box stores, but the prices were high enough to threaten the budget.
So we went to Chino Cabinets, which made and installed my parents' and uncles' cabinets, and it quoted us a very competitive price of about $5,000 for custom paint-grade maple cabinets.
I should note that the quote was for unfinished wood. They have finishers they recommend, but we did it ourselves. The only problem we had was our own fault for not being crystal clear enough about a change we ordered. Continue reading . . .
Read on »
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 Today's Guest Blogger is Veronica Britton on behalf of the city of Los Angeles Stormwater Program:
Did you know this: In Los Angeles County, about 100 million gallons of water and debris flow through the storm drain system each dry day. One hundred million gallons would fill the Rose Bowl 1.2 times! On rainy days, this daily flow can increase to 10 billion gallons.
So what does this have to do with you and your remodeling projects? Of course, completing DIY home projects certainly brings a sense of accomplishment and pride in your hard work. However, while you are working to improve the appearance and efficiency of your home, you may also be unintentionally contributing to environmental damage.
It is important to remember that when you undertake any home project, you can potentially allow toxic chemicals to flow into the storm drain system and eventually into the ocean (see photos). On a large scale, this pollution affects public health, closes beaches and harms aquatic life and their habitats.
The pollutants — including paint, motor oil, pesticides and fertilizers — are picked up as water from rainstorms, hoses and sprinklers drains from streets and lawns into 34,000 curb inlets, or catch basins, throughout the city of Los Angeles. From there, this "toxic soup" flows through a massive system of pipes and open channels straight to the beaches and ocean untreated.
It is the responsibility of every homeowner and avid DIYer to follow these best management practices in order to control and further prevent toxic substances from polluting communities, beaches and water bodies.
Click here to see tips for preventing stormwater pollution during: light construction, painting, paint removal and landcaping and gardening.
Read on »
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 Well, yes, as a matter of fact, you can become a Pardon Our Dust Guest Blogger.
And we've seen some amazing Guest Blogs lately, including:
• Peggy's impressive efforts to restore her vintage Burbank cottage
• Brent's plans for his Hawthorne kitchen remodel
• How Jeannie got new floors for her Cambria cottage
• The warming up of David's Downtown L.A. loft
• Tips for preventing stormwater pollution during remodeling
Here are the reasons you might want to become a Guest Blogger:
* You want to show off a recent remodeling project
• Maybe you want advice on an upcoming project
• Perhaps you have a strong opinion about a remodeling topic
• Or, it's possible you have a design challenge you need help with
And not to worry, we do all the formatting, editing and photo captions on our end, so how easy is that?
To become a Guest Blogger, email your story (400 words or less, or a couple of good-sized paragraphs), a list of costs, and a few before and after photos (if applicable) to me at podblog@aol.com, and I'll get back with you soon.
(Photo: iStockPhoto)
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 Today's Guest Blogger is Jeannie Matulis, an attorney and a friend of mine who achieved her dream of owning a cottage by the sea. Her carpeted floors, though, were not dreamy, and I asked her to blog about how she found a solution:
When I bought my house in Cambria six years ago, I was thrilled with the curb appeal of the charming cottage near the ocean, the fresh sea breezes and a yard filled with native shrubs and flowers. The inside needed work, including fresh wallpaper and paint in every room, but the house had great features, including a fireplace, a skylight and French doors leading out to the patio.
I did not do anything with the floors. The sellers had installed new carpet when they had placed the house on the market and it looked fine. I later realized it was the cheapest and crummiest carpet money could buy, but by then I was fully entrenched, my furniture was in, and I had gone on with my life.
Eventually, however, I realized that when arriving home from a business trip, I would get depressed walking into my house. The curb appeal and fresh air would give way to a dank, dreary, funky smell that exuded from my carpet.
Oh, I would have it professionally cleaned from time to time, and I invested in my own carpet cleaning contraption that I used regularly, but I could not keep up with the ground-in dirt, the cat fur and my own clumsy tendency to occasionally spill things. My carpet had become a “positive ion generator” that no gizmo from Sharper Image could match.
I finally decided to do something drastic. I had always loved wood floors, and I decided to make the investment. I was on a budget, though, and had some tough decisions to make. I could get less-expensive supplies from a warehouse and get my own contractor.
Read on »
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 Today's Guest Blogger is Brent, who works in the aerospace industry and enjoys swinging a hammer. His Hawthorne kitchen remodel is in the planning stage:
In a chain of events that I've jokingly referred to as cascading home repairs, you start out with one task in mind and then discover that you have to do a second major task to complete your goal. However, in order to complete the second major task, you discover that you have to do a third, and so forth.
In that way, a simple kitchen remodel becomes a string of cascaded chores, each dependent upon the previous one. My home renovation friends all smile, knowing exactly what I'm talking about:
The tasks that I have to complete before I can begin on the kitchen part of the remodel are:
• Replace double-hung windows with French doors to allow access to kitchen -- DONE
• Upgrade electrical panel to allow for modern kitchen requirements
• Route gas line to new range location
• Re-wire kitchen from new panel, at least enough to preserve functionality during construction
• Disable gas and electrical in interior load-bearing wall
• Demolish load-bearing wall, replace with engineered beam (Glulam likely)
The French doors took a weekend to install with the help of a buddy who had done the task before, but the planning for that one task, including getting materials on site, took the better part of two weeks. I used salvaged doors from the Habitat for Humanity Store, so the cost was low -- for four doors I paid something like $300. (I'll use the other matched set of doors on a bedroom, but that's a story for another day.)
The end result of the window replacement was dramatically better light in the kitchen than from the windows, plus gracious and convenient outdoor access, giving me hope that my planning would pay off.
About a year ago, I had jumped the gun a bit and solicited bids from local electricians to upgrade my panel. The electrical panel currently has a grand total of four circuits, two 20-amp circuits and two 15-amp circuits, with no room for expansion.
My life being what it is, I wasn't able to act on the bids right away. That turned out to be a stroke of good luck, since I had a change of heart about where I wanted to locate the new panel. My brother, a veteran of his own remodel, advised that I should locate it on the side of the house so that if I ever wanted to extend the back of the house I wouldn't have to again relocate the panel.
Read on »
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 Today's Guest Blogger is Brent, who works in the aerospace industry and enjoys swinging a hammer. His Hawthorne kitchen remodel is in the planning stage:
"Sometimes progress slows to a crawl when you do your own remodeling, particularly if your family has to live in the house while it is being remodeled.
"Advantages of living in your remodel are cost savings, ample time to consider your mistakes (hopefully in a planning stage) and seeing how changes will affect how you live in real time. I struggle with slow progress on the remodeling front since it's a part-time gig and my paying job is fairly demanding.
"My current home remodeling focus is my kitchen, the first step into a remodel that includes everything from the property line in.
"In the summer of 2006 I was inspired to start actively planning a kitchen remodel on my mostly original 1954 single-family home of about 1,100 square feet in Hawthorne. The house had been a rental before I purchased it, and maintenance and upkeep had been quite basic as a result.
"On the plus side, I don’t have to worry about ripping out a 1970s avocado green kitchen. But I do have a very basic starting point, such as range ventilation through a hole in the ceiling!
"The kitchen is a central point of focus for my family not only because I enjoy cooking a lot but also because we do most of our homework and other projects at the kitchen table, currently planted in the middle of the small and inefficient room. With the tight space, it's a good thing that everyone is friendly when we have family over. Knowing I could gain the most from a kitchen remodel, I started there.
"My kitchen design goals, which evolved over time, are:
• Fit in the existing house footprint
• Use existing waste lines (they are in my slab, therefore difficult for me to move)
• Improve efficiency with more counter space, more cupboard space, modern appointments (like a range hood and drawers on full extension slides, for instance)
• Create room for more than one cook (counter space plus an extra sink)
• The ability to handle dinner for from two to 16
• Better traffic flow
• Better access to outdoors
"I used the free Ikea kitchen planning tool to sketch out several new designs. This led me to the conclusion that I needed a corridor-style kitchen, completely open on one end to the living room and with French doors (replacing double-hung windows) at the opposite end to the back garden.
"My new design eliminates an interior (load-bearing) wall and hallway, which allows natural traffic patterns to develop and takes away some constraints on where I put both kitchen and living room furniture — the dining room table can go partly in the kitchen and partly in the living room now, becoming an even more multiuse table. I can add leaves to the table when I have guests and expand it into the living room, ensuring everyone has enough elbow room."
Questions or comments for Brent? Please comment below.
Tomorrow: Part 2: Electrical panel must be ungraded before kitchen remodel can go forward
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By Ariane Wiltse
