Summaries

Longtime Swamplot readers know where the action is: in our comments! A few from the this past week:

• Neighborhood Guessing Game Over: In Tandem
  From marmer: “Maybe the original owner had a clunker prewar auto with no reverse gear.”
• Coming Soon: Late Night Rice Military Action
  From Bob: “Wait– Sex in cars!? ::calls realtor:: ‘Yes, a condo across from Coco Loco. That’s right. With a good street view. Huh? No, price is no object.’”
• Las Vegas to Houston: What Are the Odds?
  From Mike: “For the most part, home values in Houston will be steady. Some of the newer product and developments will see a slight discount as builders try to unload inventory, but the same builders are still slowly building – but 4 homes at a time in a development instead of 20. Selling your house in Vegas will likely be a bigger issue for you. The market was hyperinflated there and saturated with speculation and investment buys. A lot of those purchases are now in foreclosure and will undermine the price of anyone trying to put their house on the market. The estimates I have seen don’t have home values recovering in places like Vegas and California for 5 years.”
• A Collection of Sticks: Costco Apartment Construction Collapse
  From mt: “Construction accidents and defects are more prevalent than one might think. It is mostly related to the ‘lowest common denominator’ approach to construction that most buildings receive. The most exciting accident that I have witnessed on a project was for another major multi-family developer here in town where there was a fire at the bottom of a parking garage, which led to a secondary explosion of a pick-up truck. The fire doors were not fully active yet and the smoke damage was tremendous.”
• Daily Demolition Report: Lost Shepherd
  From Larissa Lindsay: “. . . the building at Union and Henderson that lost it’s roof during Hurricane Ike, and suffered some structural damage is also expected to be coming down in the near future. We had hoped the owner would stabilize it a number of years ago since it is a former store and built almost to the lot line. Once it s demoed, the set back kicks in and they will loose a fair amount of the lot since it is on a corner.”

Again, some terrific comments on Swamplot this week! Take a tour of Houston’s real estate landscape with these:

• Willowbrook House of a Thousand Blessings
  From Miz Brooke Smith: “Yikes. I’d like to make the current owners sit in the Rothko Chapel for 30 minutes and see if they explode.”
  From Carol: “They’ve got a crucifix over one toilet and not one but two Virgin Marys over the other. Perhaps they have intestinal issues and they’re looking for a little help.”
• Making Room for a Strip Center on Heights Blvd.
  From kjb434: “The heights is part of the original suburbs. It was planned by developers that came in and clear cut a forest. Then filled in natural streams with not only dirt, but land fill (trash). Then they laid out streets in a generic pattern and put up spec homes that mostly looked the same (for some reason they are historic now).”
• Park Memorial: Just Sitting There
  From Brad: “The contract has been signed and the price (which I cannot tell) is OK. Some folks will make a bit, some will lose a bit. The assessment to band-aid fix the place was $50K EACH. That is the state of disrepair at PM. I know, I owned one.”
• 17 Problems with Royce Builders: Lavish Spending, Loose Keys, Roaming Rats
  From surviving: “i see the john speer home is up for sale, doesn’t that say just about everything that needs to be said? royce was a great company and i was always treated fair. i look forward to finding another place to work that i can have just as much fun as i did at royce.”
• Neighborhood Guessing Game: Office Managers
  From margo: “I want to smell it! I want to own it!!”
  From Laura: “All I know is that when they do sell it, there needs to be a blender madness cocktail happy hour, complete with fondue and a bowl on the counter for everyone’s keys. This house isn’t in Houston, it’s in my dreams!”
  From marmer: “Thank goodness it doesn’t hurt to be wrong, or I’d be in the hospital by now.”

Y’all have ways with words. Here’s some of what you’ve been saying in the Swamplot comments sections this week:

• Ninfa’s Just Means Restaurant
  From kjb434: “If it wasn’t for the crappy franchises, I would have never know about the original restaurant on Navigation.”
• Neighborhood Guessing Game: Open to the Fire
  From movocelot: “I’ve been looking at The Neighborhood Guessing Game long enough to know that if it looks like archetypal Woodland Heights home, it isn’t.”
  From Laura: “Wow and wow with all the wood. That weird Swiffer woman in the commercials would love this place!”
• Solving the Bare Walls Problem
  From Scott Bodenheimer: “Penises are beautiful but that bedspread is hideous.”

Without the brilliant comments of our readers, Swamplot would be . . . uh, comment-free! So much better that we get stuff like this, no?

• Turnberry Tower: Turning Away?
  From Howard Hughes: “If they don’t kill it, their heirs will.”
• Daily Demolition Report: Hewitt Down
  From Zippy_Slug: “I used to live down the street from that house on Crocker.. I don’t really think they need to tear it down.. Just push it over.”
• Big and Green
  From RWB: “I want my green 9,000 sq. foot house to have a garage big enough for my hybrid Hummer, my biofuel Winnebago, and my solar-powered Sherman tank.”
• Neighborhood Guessing Game: Entry Bridge
  From marmer: “. . . just to be clear: ‘vomitus’ means either the material vomited or the act of vomiting. It is not an adjective, and there is no such word as ‘vomitous,’ however tempting it may be. It was used colorfully but incorrectly as an adjective by Westley in his final speech to Prince Humperdinck in The Princess Bride. I don’t know of a simple one-word adjective meaning ‘makes me want to throw up’ except perhaps ’emetic.’”

Some of our commenters have been on a tear lately! A few reader quips from the past week:

• Daily Demolition Report: Destruction at the Place Vendome
  From Robert: “I don’t know who is killing the great apartments of Europe, but are they for hire to kill a few by me?”
• Styling the Bistro Vino Condo Tower: Low Voter Turnout
  From kjb434: “What’s wrong with the faux modern, Mediterranean, etc. designs? Why does every project have to meet some unimaginable architectural standard? If every new building or structure met this standard, then there would be truly no unique and great buildings. Having a sea of average designs only make the better ones stand out more.“
• Weekend Open House Tour: North Edgemont and Vassar Place
  From Robert: “A pretentious acquaintance bought a hideous stucco faux-chateau McMansion in that area. Of course you have to be polite & say it is nice, which of course it would be, as the centerpiece of a Florida amusement park.“
• Neighborhood Guessing Game: Off Center
  From Robert: “Toile fabric, pastel-ish pale greens, yellows, and oriental china blues. It is unmistakably the bastion of some waspy we-need-more-fiber-in-our-diet and a memo that Laura Ashley went out with the Clintons type of location.”
• Neighborhood Guessing Game Over: At a 90
  From K: “This will probably out me as a total WASP with a perverse love for all things 1980s, but I heart that entire house. I HEART IT. It looks clean — it looks like it smells clean — yet it looks inviting. I want to curl up inside of it with a book and never leave. Go ahead and mock me… :D”

Swamplot commenters rock! So we’re back with a weekly roundup of your best stuff:

• Royce Builders: Back in Business?
  From John: “The calf trick would be much cooler at staff meetings than the barking toilet was.”
• Weekend Open House Tour: Any Takers?
  From Sam Houston: “If you stop, the hurricanes win!”
• Daily Demolition Report: Oriole Flight
  From Shannon: “Forgive my newness to your blog, but they aren’t really destroying these beautiful old houses are they???”
• The Royce Home To End All Royce Homes
  From karen: “OK, I guess MEYERLAND! Oh, this wasn’t the neighborhood guessing game?”
• Inside the Messiest Apartment in Houston. Ever.
  From AptBiz: “. . . Imagine an active colony of 37 inbred cats living with an elderly woman in a one-bedroom unit. Imagine a ledge of dried feces physically adhering the bed to the side of the wall, or the layers of newspapers over feces four inches thick over the carpet floor. Imagine half-inch-long ticks crawling up the interior walls. Imagine a congealed puddle of vomit that was acidic enough to partially disolve or melt some exposed carpet.”
• Mosaic Rumor: Second Tower Going Rental?
  From Mosaic Man: “I did find out that tower two is going rental and that the developer has leased units in tower one that were NOT ow[n]ed by investors.”

So much info and action in the Swamplot comments sections! Some highlights from the past week:

• “Dude, What Gives?”: Cafe Artiste’s Disappearing Act
  From vox: “If you’re in the neighborhood you’ll notice that the new owners have finally painted over the last of the Cafe Artiste murals. We heard that the same folks who own/run Shade are opening a new, upscale restaurant there to be named ‘Sofia’. The new business should open in the next month or so.”
• Neighborhood Guessing Game: Game Room
  From Brad: “TEXtured ceiling, Longhorns and Lone Stars on the stair kickboards, horned trophies galore… lemme guess, a black 1970 Firebird in the garage to drive Sally Field across the state? This is Burt Reynold’s Smokey bachelor pad? There is even a kid’s bedroom for when Daddys L’il Girl is home for his vistation with dad.”
• Discovery Tower Discovery Green Discoveries
  From Jim: It’s kind of freaky how none of the people in the video are moving until we get to the building’s front door, where some of them are moving and others aren’t. You can almost imagine the conversation in the office upstairs: ‘Miss Reynolds, the mannequins are back.’”
• The Rumors Circling Around Royce Builders
  From GoogleMaster: “If you can’t come up with $3500 at the drop of a hat, you have no business buying a house. Wait till something important needs to be replaced, like the A/C or the roof. Or the washer, dryer, and refrigerator all decide to die in the same month. That $3500 will seem like a pittance. BTW, my house has a little bit of a lean, too, but that’s because it’s 70 years old. Perhaps you meant lien?”

Keep up the good work, Swamplotters: Lots of great lines, conversation, and info in the comments sections this past week! Here are a few standouts:

• IKEA Checkout Gets Some Sexy
  From Chris: “I particularly enjoyed the W. Gray Kroger attack because so few people seemed to pay attention. Like it was such a part of the grocery shopping experience…”
• Washington Ave.: Extending The Core?
  From Jimbo: “Hey, if they want to build the Getty on the Washington corridor I’m all for it but I don’t think the views are going to be able to compare.”
  From Nick: “Just heard from a local business owner that a large portion of this lot has been purchased for development by HHN Homes (http://www.hhnhomes.com/). This is presently not listed as an upcoming or currently available project. I would imagine that they would/will sell or lease parcels off, as its a big chunk of land, and develop whats left.”
• Neighborhood Guessing Game: Organized
  From jeremy: “It looks like the awkward love child of a recent romance between an IKEA/HGTV lovin’ young couple and their 60’s era house that their parents left them before moving to Florida.”
• Daily Demolition Report: Ciro Down?
  From Tim: “If they plan on demolishing us they might kill about 50-100 people. Anyone need a catering?”