HOME IMPROVEMENT: HOMEOWNERS TAKE PRIDE IN UPGRADED HOMES, THANKS TO BLOCK GRANT RENOVATIONS (COMING HOME: CONTINUING SERIES)

The smell of fresh paint is still evident in Imogene Mayberry's house on South Pacific.

Mayberry's home is one of 36 being upgraded under the Locust-Maple neighborhood improvement project, a $733,500 Community Development Block Grant aimed at bring housing in the project area up to standards.

Mayberry has lived in the house for 26 years, and because of the work now being done, she doesn't plan to leave anytime soon.

Contractors replaced the wiring and plumbing in the home, repainted parts of the interior, installed a new water heater, enclosed a back porch and resided the rear of the house, repaired the wall coverings and replaced sheetrock and put in new floor coverings.

A back room "was in real bad shape," said Steven Williams, Cape Girardeau's housing assistance coordinator. "The plaster was falling off."

Mayberry paid to have a new roof and new siding put on the house four years ago. "I had to," she said.

But the interior of the house needed enough work that Mayberry qualified for assistance through the block grant.

The Locust-Maple project is putting a new face on a South Cape neighborhood as houses are made livable again.

"In the back, it looks like a whole new house," Mayberry said.

Hershel Campbell, who lives in the 900 block of Ranney, is busy putting a brick walk around his newly upgraded home.

Campbell's home needed much more structural work than Mayberry's did.

Contractors put on a new roof and roof decking, new siding, new windows, a new furnace and water heater, new plumbing and new wiring.

Because the house's exterior needed so much work, Campbell will be doing the painting and a few other things inside himself.

Without the grant, he said, "it probably would have took me 10 years to do what they did to it," he said.

The grant funding made the house, which is more than 100 years old, stable and safe, Williams said.

Campbell has lived in the house since 1984. "I was staying here, but it really wasn't up to living standards," he said.

A year and a half ago, Emma Egson moved into the house her father used to own. She lives down the street from Campbell.

Contractors are still working on the house Egson shares with her two teen-age sons.

She applied for the grant "because it was a way to do something that I couldn't afford," she said.

"The house need a roof on the back. It need a furnace. It needed new windows. It needed a lot of things," Egson said. "They've painted the whole house inside."

The bad roof meant the house leaked and some of the wall coverings were rubbing off.

"They did a good job," Egson said.

Egson works at Sodexho at Southeast Missouri State University. She plans to install new carpeting and to fix up the garage.

"I'm going to put in a driveway out here," she tells Williams. "I am. You watch."

Egson said she kept a close eye on Williams' progress at her home.

"I bugged him," she said. "He's glad to be finished with me."

The city is winding down the Locust-Maple project and waiting to start work on the Jefferson-Shawnee Park neighborhood project.

Last year, the city received a $446,500 grant to upgrade 31 houses in the project area, which is bordered by Sprigg, Shawnee Parkway (New Highway 74), Fountain and Jefferson streets.

Williams says he can't give an update on the project because there hasn't been any progress.

"We're still waiting for clearance from the State Historic Preservation Office," he said.

The South Side has some of Cape Girardeau's oldest homes, Williams said. That's why they need to be renovated. But the state wants to survey the area to see if some of the houses in the project area need to be preserved rather than renovated.

"They will designate which particular houses they consider to have some particular historic significance," he said.

The city will send in information on the designated houses, and the state "usually signs off on them individually. But right now, we're waiting on that clearance," he said.

Completing a housing grant can be a drawn-out process, Williams said. Some of the grants take a year or more to finish, and the Locust-Maple project is being done on a two-year grant cycle.

"Sometimes you have a lot of applicants. Sometimes you have smaller houses that you can get done quicker. Sometimes you have larger houses that need more work," he said. "It's just a combination of many different things."