Resolution 6218 - Laserfiche WebLink

It had been empty in the intervening years. Ruth Precht used the upstairs as an office. She had a new boiler system put in so it always stayed heated. Over the years, a lot of people in town tried to buy that building,but Ruth would usually use the excuse that she was going to will it to somebody, or it needed to be used for the arts, or something like that. Once she passed away and we bought it from the estate, the Precht girls told me that she really used those as excuses; she just didn't ever want to let go of it. We were lucky to get the building. In about August 2007 we started construction of the inside of the building and painted the outside trim. Our architectural office is on the main floor. Part of the basement is ours and part is rented to a toy maker. The second floor used to be used as part of the Precht's housing and the upper floor was their bedrooms. Those floors have been changed into tenant spaces. One tenant is an insurance company that is going to move in shortly; the other is an attorney. The very upper floor is the only one we have no leased out yet. As you can see from these slides, the landscaping was really overgrown. It was an area where transients would hang out. Between the columns on the porch there was glass, and right behind the bushes there was wood. When we moved in we removed the glass. We needed to put a handicapped ramp and did that as carefully as we could. The wrought iron railing is the same detail as the existing wrought railing at the back of the building where our parking lot is. These are photos of the building as it was when we bought it and photos of the same spaces after our renovations. The building had a boiler system and radiators when we bought it,but that was inefficient when spaces were subdivided. We removed that system and put in a new gas system for every tenant space. One of the upstairs bathrooms has been changed into an ADA accessible bathroom,using the same tile as that downstairs. The fixtures have a similar look to older styles. This photo is the inside of our conference room looking out toward the lobby. It had a 1960s look, and we remodeled it to mimic the detailing in the rest of the building. In the space that used to be a living room on the second floor, there used to be a narrow stairway that went to the third floor, which we removed. This living room space was remodeled into what is now an attorney's office using the same trim as has been used throughout. There were two stained glass windows on the south side of the first floor. We removed these windows to allow more light into this space,but we retained the windows. The lamps you see in this area we found stored in the building. We had them rewired and reused them on the first floor. There is an area in the northwest corner of the area that was originally a chapel. We created a matching space in the southwest corner of the area for our bookkeeper and moved two windows from the northwest corner area to the new area to match exactly. The porte-cochere on the south side of the exterior is where people used to drive up to the mortuary. We have plans to build a second conference room in this area with new divided light windows which will be installed between the columns. The project is permitted and the windows have been built and are stored in the basement of the building. We have removed the drive-through in this area. 2