As of Oct. 4, 2018, we are officially the new residents of 830 N Avery Street! Your House Corp has been working toward this for some time, with more than one speedbump along the way, but we now own a newer property with 15 bedrooms, a grad-student suite, 4 floors, a basketball court, and a large enough deck to comfortably accommodate the entire chapter. Best of all: the property allows for a better financial model than 611 (all those bedrooms). The undergraduates will move into the new house this Spring, and 611 W. Adams will be sold - most likely to a younger fraternity.
Now, we need to get 830 N Avery move-in ready. To that end, we are calling on all alumni to give your time and money in the following ways:
As of April 1, 2018, the mortgage for 611 W. Adams has been paid in full! After making monthly payments for nearly 30 years, we can finally reinvest that money back into our own house. House Corp will meet in Macomb after Initiation on Saturday, April 14, to discuss how this will impact our continued renovations (if at all).
Alumni brothers Zo Evans and Andrew Schulze, with financial support from Randall Evans and other alumni, carried out a variety of renovations in the chapter house while the undergrads were on break in the last week of December. They painted rooms 1 and 2, installed new carpet and a new ceiling fan in room 2, installed new curtains and rods downstairs, and performed numerous other needed tasks.
You may remember that House Corp recently sought to purchase a new chapter house (actually, two of them), and had set up a fund and collected donations toward that goal. The short story is that the deal fell through.
We first attempted to buy the former Delta Sigma Phi house on Avery Street. The deal seemed too good to be true and, as it turned out, it was. Although we met their asking price and submitted a steep good-faith payment, the DSP house corporation rejected our offer. It seems to us that they were simply collecting offers in order to leverage their own alumni into buying the house, on the hope that their fraternity would be allowed to return to the campus in a few years. Our good-faith payment was returned.
The long-hyped project to install fire-suppression sprinklers in the chapter house is complete. The installation, which was conducted in two phases over the last four years, cost $35,000 and was completed more than a year ahead of the deadline. Although the project exceeded our estimates by $3,000 (partly due to the passing of years between our estimation and the actual installation), that overage was reduced from what it could have been by partnering with the other fraternities and sororities at WIU to collectively negotiate with FE Moran.
