Historic Home Tour

One of the homes on the tour, built in the 1920s, now home to two young, husband-wife architects. A work in progress, but oh, what fine work they are doing.

Historic Home Tour A Success!  Here's why:
~ It rained the day before, so the neighborhood shined with fresh flowers and greenery.
~ The day of the tour, Sunday, Mother's Day, was mostly sunny, 73 degrees with a light breeze. Ideal.
~ 900 "tourists" bought tickets and became visitors to our neighborhood. 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Stop here if you wish, the rest is just what can go wrong at the last minute.
The day before the tour, the home we featured in all of our ads called to cancel their participation.  Visiting house guests had just tested positive with COVID (yes, it's still around).  Knowing we were going to have close to 1,000 people roaming our small neighborhood with one less home (the one they all wanted to see) to explore, the musician and I offered our garden as part of the tour, and then scurried to clean it up even while we were taking care of the many day before tasks.

I also put out a plea to our Board to see if they knew anyone who might open their home for the tour.  Miraculously, one of our neighbors offered up their rental house which had just been cleaned!  

700 copies of a new tour guide map had to be printed to exclude the cancelled house and include the new home and our garden.

When we went to print out the list of the  775 prepaid tourists, at midnight right after ticket orders closed, the pages would not formulate.  If we didn't have that list, we would have no way of checking people in, no way to know how many tickets they had purchased, etc. At one AM we decided to go to bed and try again in the morning. It took two more hours in the morning before we met with success.

Three of our docents cancelled the morning of the tour, two were sick and one had been in an accident.  We needed more people to serve as observers at the homes. Many many calls were made.

I could go on.................