The First Grant: porch, four front windows, dormer repair, sign restoration, and painting

One of the reasons to get a historic designation is because then you can get funding.  So part one for us was to write a grant proposal for the entire porch.  In Boulder County, projects are eligible for a series of $10,000 matching grants, which means you will personally pay for half of a series of $20,000 projects to get your building restored.  For Boulder County, you can find the forms at http://www.bouldercounty.org/lu/hpab/index.htm.  Our completed form is also in the resources section. Feel free to cut and paste.   For us it took a weekend to write the grant, 2 months to get approved, and then another three years to the building permit process.  Why three years?  Well, one reason was that pesky underlying ground issue and the second challenge was finding a person or company who could actually do and do it right.  And then there’s always the weather. In Eldora, we get about two and a half months of acceptable building weather. In terms of funding, the way works is you pay all costs up front and then the county reimburses at the end. That is after a report is given and county inspection is scheduled; oh yes, and the mandatory 60 day waiting period, which can be longer if your employee identification number isn’t on the proposal originally (which happened to us!), then you’ll get paid, generally three months after you’ve completed that specific project.

How we got started/the beginning of the project

We bought this gorgeous and historic bed and breakfast October 13, 1986.  In 1995, we applied for the building to become a Boulder County Landmark and the following year we applied and made it into the National Register of Historic Places.  It took another 10 years for us to be ready to restore it.  To prepare for this day, we applied for and received a $10,000 grant from the Colorado State Historic Fund in 2001 to conduct an historic structure assessment (in the resources section).  As part of the assessment every potential issue with the building was documented in order of priority.  You can’t get a state historic fund grant without this assessment.  Of the many high priority issues, we chose the front porch to work on first, as not only did it face the street, but also it was downright dangerous.  Our first big lesson came when we realized that the Boulder County Landmark listing included the entire building, but not the land.  Without the land, we could not get a building permit. Oddly, the assessment missed this pesky detail. That meant we had to reopen the national register nomination and the Boulder County Landmark to include the three vacated streets that make up a significant portion of the land that the building sits on.  You cannot get a building permit or be eligible for government tax credits (more on that later) if you do not own the underlying ground. If you have a project you are thinking about or are in the middle of, be absolutely certain you’ll run into an issue similar to this; don’t let it get the best of you, consider it an opportunity.  It’s just a process.