Welcome to Franceth Manor!

When I have actually seen a project through from start to finish, I may start a blog for the house. In the meantime, I thought I'd show you a little of what has been sucking up all my time lately, and eating all our stuff, like the CD of Bellefontaine pictures and Francis's iPod. It's like House of Leaves, or maybe we have a ghost. Or maybe we just have a storage room full of stuff we need to dig through.



The full name of the house is Franceth Manor Featuring Roy! and His Damn Cats. Roy is our roommate. The cats are Marcellus and Miss V.



The Historical Society calls this Hammel House because it was built by Michael Hammel around 1890, but the previous owners lived there for 80 years and had gave it their own name. We intend to stay for a long time, so of course we had to do the same. This is an old neighborhood, though, so for the time being we are "the kids who bought Margo's house."



Come inside and see the highlight reel! These are the things that we wanted badly enough to take on a lifetime of weekend projects.



Above: The living room fireplace mantel. The fireplace itself is encased in wood paneling. Below: almost every door still has this stained glass transom.





The dining room, with a bread warmer built into the radiator, box beam ceilings, converted gas fixture chandelier, and inset area rug, was the number one selling point. This room is incredible, or will be when we get a new rug and unpack the boxes. And Francis lets me get the mounted elk head for my Viking Lodge vision.





Above: the fireplace in our bedroom. This is painted stone, and I know there is a name for this technique and can't for the life of me recall what it is.



How awesome is this staircase? And this is just the FRONT stairs. There are back stairs, too.



Last but not least, the view. Just beyond the trees is the Mississippi River, and you can see it if you stand in the street. Thank you so, so much to Christopher Thiemet of Circa Properties for sending us all the pictures from the listing website for our "before" photos. Credit for all photos other than the cats goes to Circa. Remember Sugarloaf Mound? That was a Circa listing, too. They get all the best stuff.

Cave Vineyard

We visited Cave Vineyard for my birthday a couple months ago. Is that some lovely country or what? Almost seems a shame that we are going to sit in a cave, but it was hot and humid as hell the day we were there. We couldn't believe people were sitting on the patio instead of going down to the cave. For fall, though, I would probably pick the pavilion and fire pit.





Now, here's the part where I confess that I don't like wine, but I do enjoy wineries. No one else in our party was much of a wine drinker, either, and one of the downsides to Cave Vineyard is that they don't sell any other adult beverages besides wine, and they don't allow outside alcohol. I generally pick wineries that do one or the other, but, this one has a cave, so we had to check it out. One thing we did really like was that the employees in the shop pack your snacks in a carrying basket and include plates & knives.



Here's the road to the cave. It's a pretty big hill, but anyone of reasonable physical fitness could walk it. It only takes about 5-10 minutes and there are benches along the way if you want to rest. They also have a golf cart that shuttles people back and forth.





The cave has a fountain! Up here at the front is also where you can find towels for drying off tables, because live caves are drippy. The cave is much bigger than I expected, with room for lots of tables and chairs and a "stage" kind of area for musicians (acoustic, thank goodness). Note the umbrella.



It's not easy to get pictures in a cave with both natural and artificial light. This is why the food picture is going to be washed out with flash, but we can't skip the snacks.



Unfortunately the heart shaped cheese looks the worst and it's the thing I want to talk about the most. This was my introduction to Baetje Farms, a Ste Genevieve farm that makes the best goat cheese of all time. On the cooler up top, the goat cheese has a sign by it with all the information you can find on the "Our Story" page of the Baetje Farms website, including that the goats drink herbal tea. We laughed about this at the time, but now every time I introduce someone to Baetje goat cheese, I say, "Isn't it amazing? The goats drink herbal tea." You can find it at several farmers markets, stores, and restaurants in St Louis, including Soulard Market (where I buy coeur de la creme every other week), Farmhaus, Niche, and Wine & Cheese Place.

Cave Vineyard is located at 21124 Cave Road in Ste Genevieve, MO, about an hour south of St Louis, and is open daily year round. If you know of any other wineries in the area that are great for any weather, I'd love to hear about them!

Atlantic City's Steel Pier

We closed on our house a couple weeks ago and finally got all moved in this past week. The house was built in either 1883 or 1890 and is in the Carondelet neighborhood of south St Louis, just a couple blocks from the Mississippi River. We call it Franceth Manor, and if we ever get around to doing a blog about the renovations, I'll be sure to link to it here.



This blog deserves my attention first, so while I work on sorting two months of pictures (the adventures never stopped, just the time to write about them), I thought I'd share some pictures from Atlantic City. We were there in May for the Yellow Ribbon Program, and if I could have a moment with any Reserve/Guard families out there going through reintegration: this is a fantastic program and worth your time. Don't blow it off. We joked that it was a free vacation, but it really is a worthwhile program and we learned a lot.



Even though you have to get up early for classes, you have enough free time to explore whatever city you're in. We spent about 5 hours on the Boardwalk on Saturday night, including a visit to Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum, which really doesn't translate into pictures. I love the ones from Steel Pier at night, though, so I figured I'd share them while I work on some meatier blogs.



A bit of history, because I always like for you to learn something when you come here: Steel Pier has been around in one form or another since 1898. There have been several fires that have changed the length, and the current concrete pier dates to 1993. Steel Pier was once famous for it's diving horse show, which you may remember from the movie Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken. You can read more about the history of Steel Pier on their website.









I promise I won't stay away for such a long time again! I hope to have a blog up about our private tour of Bellefontaine Cemetery up in the next couple weeks if I can wade through all the pictures this week.