If you like your sports action both physically strenuous and mentally stimulating, you should investigate a sport growing steadily in popularity in the Skinker-DeBaliviere area. Exciting for spectator and participant alike, it is played both indoors and out and is fast, sometimes furious, but always hardhitting. The game uses hammers, trowels, saws, wrenches, in clever combination with wood, plaster, wire, pipe, and concrete. Any, number can play. The name of the game is Rehabbing, but there are variant forms called Renovating and Remodelling.
In profile this month is Rehabbing Player-Coach Joe Mensing, probably the most experienced and knowledgeable proponent of the sport in this area.
About three years ago Joe, in partnership with Tom McPherron, bought a house on the 6000 block of McPherson Avenue. Together they stripped woodwork, exposed brick, repaired and remodeled it, and promptly sold it. Since then Joe has bought five or six houses in various stages of dereliction and performed the minor rehab miracle. During the same three years he has worked on the rehab projects of a number of other neighborhood residents. Currently he is working on a house in the 6100 block of Westminster.
The neighborhood also bears the Mensing stamp in the form of fences and remodeled kitchens; he is particularly well-known for the decks he has built to replace geriatric back porches.
One might assume that Joe was a carpenter, contractor, or engineer by trade before getting involved in rehabbing. Like many other neighborhood rehabbers, however, he drifted into it from an entirely different professional background. He recently retired from the ministry. (A few other ministers in the neighborhood have made a similar transition to rehabbing. It has been pointed out that this is not the big step it seems since the first Christian minister was a carpenter.) Joe’s involvement was spurred by “lots of pushing” from rehab boosters, but he had always been interested in recycling old houses and had already done much work in his own home on Kingsbury.
Joe does much, but not all, of the work when he takes on a house in need of help, He contracts with others for electrical, plumbing, major plastering, major heating, and floor repair work which may be necessary. The average rehabilitation still takes from three to five months, however.
Joe’s recommendations to prospective rehabbers are simple and direct; the house must be cheap and the rehabber must be willing to put it in top-notch shape in order to sell it. This can take from $6000 to $12,000 depending on the house’s condition. Because the housing market needs houses like these and property values are rising for good housing, rehabbing can be profitable, in spite of the investment one may have to make in labor and material. Joe Mensing certainly thinks so, having taken it up full time.
As if coping with post-operative houses were not enough, Joe teaches psychology at Florissant Valley and Forest Park Community Colleges. When he has time he also sculpts. Last fall those of you who attended the Dinner Theatre sponsored by Rosedale Neighborhood Association will remember Joe in the role of Lawyer Grudge, villain extraordinaire.
Our neighborhood is fortunate to be home for lots of versatile highly productive people one of the most individual of whom is Joe Mensing.
Original photograph caption
Joe Mensing. The Paper, March1975,page4. Photographer not credited.
Originally published in The Paper, March 1975.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1975_03.pdf, printed page(s) 4; PDF page(s) 4.
