catastrophe_part.four

[and we're still going... ]

for those of you just joining us, the title of this post specifies part four. so... go read the first 3 if you want to get caught up. for everyone else, im not re-capping, so lets dig into the meat & potatoes.

at this point the house was drying-out pretty well.

i'd been in fairly frequent contact with greg, who was more than happy to keep me apprised of the situation. however, i was having no luck finding a roofer that would put on the torched-down modified roof, and i was getting frustrated.

then saturday i get a phone call from ryan - not happy again. great, now what?

apparently he'd stopped by to check on the progress of the house dry-out [during yet another rain storm... this has got to be one of the wettest seasons on record in cincy, its just been non-stop.] only to find that the new tarp was billowing up and water was once again getting into the house. are you freaking kidding me.... obviously he wants me to get something done. and now.

so we hung up and i gave the roofer a call... and got his voicemail. what kind of a roofer doesnt take calls on a saturday? frustrating... so i leave him a voicemail and let him know that the tarp is coming up and i need him out there asap to get it fixed. and... he doesnt call back...

in fact, its not till monday that i finally hear back from him and hes not happy either. he says he'll have his guys go out and look at it, but ensures me that they installed it properly and theres no way it should be blowing up.

the next morning i finally get some news on whats happening with the tarp. the roofer calls me back and lets me know that he sent guys out monday and as it turns out the tarp was in fact blowing up on one of the front corners of the house. the bad news, is that from what he tells me the tarp was obviously tampered with. [what??]

the tarp was brand new when they installed it and they used a series of 2x4 nailers on top of the tarp all around the edge to pin it down uniformly so that it wouldnt tear out around a nail. well that makes sense to me, so what the hell happened?? apparently someone got out there and removed the nailer boards in the corner area and when they put them back they somehow did so wrong [im still lost on how the hell you can do that wrong!] and the roofers guys could obviously see new nail holes in a different place than where they had them originally and somehow this accounted for it blowing up in that corner. [again. im still lost. if they nailed it back down in the same manner as before, even in a slightly different place, then how exactly did it come up?? and while we're on the subject, who the hell was tampering with the freaking tarp? whats the point in that??]

anyway, hes pissed and informs me that i will be billed for them having to go back out and fix it after someone else messed it up. great. whatever, the insurance company said they'd handle the temporary roof repairs, so im not worried about it. at this point anyway...

since i have him on the phone, i take the opportunity to discuss the situation with the estimate for the repairs. i tell him what the insurance agent told me and discussed what money they were going to provide and what they were and werent going to pay for and asked if we could negotiate on his estimate at all. to which he replied flat-out, that its their company policy not to come down on their prices, period. [wtf??] seriously?? who has a company policy like that?? i tried to reason with him, i tried to make him understand that there was no more money, i tried to get him to help me out at all, and he just was not willing to budge. instead, he started to tell me that the insurance company is screwing me over and that theres no way in hell i'd find anyone to do that roof for cheaper than what hes quoting me if they do it right, yada yada yada.... great. im truly screwed here.

so eventually, after hes been chewing on my ear for a while, he decides hes done and lets me get off the phone. and now, i dont know what to do. i dont have an extra $7000 just laying around to put into this stupid house[nor would i want to if i did!], hes not willing to budge on his price, and the insurance company isnt willing to give me another dime. so... now what??

well, at this point my old buddy greg just happens to give me a call to update me on the dry-out. mmm-kay... what else could go wrong?

well, luckily, on greg's end. not much, lol! considering hes already all but gutted my house, what bad news could he have? "we've decided to bulldoze the whole thing and start over"?? ;]

apparently the house isnt/wasnt drying out as fast as they'd hoped, so its probably going to take another week. additionally, there are some places that the walls just arent drying out and they were hoping they would. one wall in particular is the one between the kitchen and dining room and theyre pretty sure theyre going to have to open that one up to get it to dry out, if not tear it out all-together. but other than that, everything is going well and they're very optimistic about the process being completed sooner rather than later.

well this is good news to me. something actually getting done, i cant wait! so again, while having him on the phone already, i take the opportunity to discuss with greg the situation with the roof and ask if he thinks he'd be able to help me out. and greg of course says he'd be glad to and will have his guy come look at the roof as soon as he can to put together an estimate on it for me.

not long after i hang up with him, i get a call from the estimator from rainbow, rob - whod id spoken with a little before when i gave the interior work to rainbow, and who is also always happy to speak with me - who wants to briefly discuss the roof. so i give him the whole story and tell him whats going on with the insurance company, etc. he says no problem and they'll get something to me as soon as possible.

/*/ now to clarify on a few things mentioned in the previous section.

1. tearing out walls. i dont know about you in particular, but when my mother heard this specifc little factoid she was very concerned about the structure of the house, and understandably at that. so for any of you out there that had the same initial thought, let me put your mind to ease briefly.

our house is over 100 years old and is essentially a long skinny rectangle in shape. the way it was built is through exterior structural brick walls [that are nearly a foot and a half thick] with timber floor joists that span from one wall to the other along the narrower width. this is traditional construction for that time period, and is perfectly legitimate and structurally sound if done properly. this is also why if you've ever been in a really old neighborhood, you may have noticed that nearly every house was less that 25 feet wide and was long and skinny from front to back. this accounts for the basic material limitations that they had to work with 100 years ago. and responded to the same type of construction that we have here, where the exterior walls support the entire house and the floor/ceiling joists span directly across the house from one side to the other. what this does is put all of the load of the house on the exterior walls, which is then taken straight down to the foundations [typically stacked stone in these 100 year old houses] and then again into the earth. this basically means that every wall on the interior of the house is typically a non-structural wall unless there were some kind of modifications made after the house was originally built. you can further verify that this is the case by simply going into the basement. if none of the interior walls go down to the basement floor [which most of the time they dont in these old houses] then they obviously arent being structurally supported by the ground directly, i.e., not structural. [well, not structural in the sense that theyre not holding up the entire house and you could have some serious issues if you removed one.]

2. secondly, i hadnt mentioned this before but its important to understand how these estimates are being made in this process. in the case of your typical contractor [the first one we were working with for instance] they do a walk through, inspect the condition of things, decide what they will or wont have to repair or replace, and then they do some quick multiplication assuming certain percentages or dollars per square foot, or ratios of man hours/material. its about as simple as that. if you ask them for an itemized breakdown theyll then typically do a little more work/research and give you some estimates on material pricing/square foot or linear foot depending on the material and potentially the number of guys they plan to have working for roughly how many hours. at this point however, once theyve had to give you more specific numbers, you'll probably see an additional item pop-up that says something along the lines of "any additional or unexpected work to be hourly cost plus labor." this means that if the job takes any longer than they originally estimated or anything gets more complicated than they originally thought, its going to cost you a lot more because theyre going to bill you hourly[and depending on the company or type of work, they'll typically bill 20-40 dollars an hour per worker]. just something to keep in mind.

contrary to that, insurance companies do things completely different. when they do a walk through/inspection/assessment, they take measurements and notes on materials the very first time [and hopefully pictures as well] of anything that is damaged and they simply plug in their numbers and materials into a program that spits out all the reports they need [which are your estimates]. this program essentially contains a database of the going rate of labor [either a national average or based on a given region], the costs of all different kinds of materials [same as before] and the quantities. the program then calculates everything and spits out an itemized list of what each piece will cost all broken down and tabulates the total cost.

its actually a neat little tool that certainly gets you very specific numbers very quickly. the only downside is that these numbers are typically a little low. mostly because any contractor youre going to find to work with is going to beef up their labor costs, material costs, time, etc. to increase their profit a little and make the job worth-while to them. they're certainly not going to walk away without making any money, but they're also not going to tell you where and how their profit is being factored in to their estimate, so more than likely the contractors estimate is almost always going to be higher [if not much, much higher] than the numbers being calculated by this program.

luckily for us, rainbow international is a company that specializes in working on disaster claims and working with insurance companies, so theyve made it their business practice to use all of the same methods and programs that the insurance companies use to calculate their estimates, so rainbows are typically near identical to the insurance company youre working with [yes, each insurance provider uses a different program and calculates things slightly different]. so... the estimates for the work that rainbow does, are almost always completely covered by the insurance company.

3. in addition to that, if the company youre working with happens to be approved as a "preferred service provider" [or 'psp' - this may be a slightly different term depending on the situation, but it will mean essentially the same thing] with your insurance company, then this whole process gets even simpler. it basically means that your insurance company trusts them, and basically stops asking questions and everything gets that much smoother. i wish id known about this preferred service provider business up front, it would have saved a LOT of headaches. it's my advice to always find a preferred service provider when dealing with insurance claims [this goes for vehicle too, been there, done that] it just makes the entire process so much easier on you. i havent discovered yet if theres a publicly available list of who these preferred service providers are for your insurance company, but if there is one, its definitely worth getting your hands on at the beginning of the process, instead of stumbling into later. /*/

a few days later i got an email laying out the estimate for the roof, which was well under the other guys $13,000 and i immediately faxed over to state farm.

however, after faxing it, i looked over it more closely and discovered that there'd been a little confusion in our phone conversation and they hadnt estimated for the torch-down modified roof, and they hadnt accounted for removal of the existing. after calling them back i discovered that their guys had only looked at one place on the roof briefly to establish the existing condition, and that wherever they checked the condition, they only found two layers of membrane [probably because the rest was blown off in that corner, lol!] and they were planning to just go over it. i explained that the entire existing had to be removed before hand and that i needed to see numbers for torch-down mod. if they could get them and he assured me he'd get new estimates out asap.

[meanwhile...]

on the insurance side of things, the dry-out process is taking longer than they expected and my mobile rep is now having to become mobile again. bye, ryan... this time around however, because of the type of claim, and the situation we're in, they decided to hand the case off to a local regional office to handle the remainder of the claim. [enter agents 4, 5, & 6] over the course of the next week i spoke with 3 different people who were at the local office and were passing my case around to get it in the hands of the right person to deal with the type of claim i had. [apparently communication is a little off from one branch of the insurance company to the other..] but eventually we got it settled and we have a very nice girl working on the case now with an actual phone number i can call her on if i ever need to, and shes been working closely and quickly with rainbow to get this all expedited and get the work started to put things back together.

monday morning i got the two new estimates, and while they were now higher to accommodate the cost of removal, they were still $4,000 less than the other guys, and since they were itemized and calculated the same way the insurance company would, i was hoping it would give us a little leverage to get it completely covered. sent those off to the insurance company immediately as well, and at this point we're all but caught up to real-time.

the most recent update after all that came the middle of last week.

1. dry-out is complete. woohoo!

2. walk-throughs with new insurance agents have been completed and estimates are being put together.

3. rainbow had been approved as a preferred service provider and the roof estimate has also been approved.

4. work is scheduled to begin on the replacement of the roof this week.

5. an estimate for the interior work has been started [although it's being split up into different parts for different kinds of work] for the interior and we should be getting numbers this week for flooring and then for the rest [hopefully!]

stay tuned, and i'll update again when i know more.

everyone have a great week!

ju-ju-just.dance.dance.

wow... so its been almost 2 weeks. my bad. so much for blogging more often...

okay, lets get to the recent events. well, as recent as the time table is from your perspective anyway.

[last.week]

not a whole lot happened to report about during the remainder of the week but there is a little.

im foggy on what day it was, but nearer the end of the week than the beginning, karen found a couch on craigslist that she just fell in love with. so far we've had kind of a love/hate relationship with the 3 piece set we got off craigslist some months ago - in that we love having furniture, but its huge, bulky, heavy, and not really in line with our style or the style we're going for in our rooms... at all. but it is comfortable, and it was affordable, and well, its furnishing - so the rooms arent exactly empty anymore. however, theyre a lot closer to overstuffed with these monstrous pieces... but i digress. so karen found this couch that she just fell in love with. it was waaay more in line [okay, ill say it, perfectly in line.] with our style and the feel we were going for in the parlor, and it was listed for super cheap, so karen talked me in to going and picking it up after work one day. well lucky for us no one grabbed it first and she struck a deal with the woman selling it [who was quite friendly by the way, we liked her.] and actually got it for 5 bucks cheaper than she was listing it. anyway, we got there to get this thing and it was even more perfect in person - its gorgeous. so anyway, we brought it home [so much lighter than the other ones!!!!!] and got it into the parlor and instantly, we loved it. it just works with the room. its kind of an orangey-salmon color and dont ask me why, but it really ties the colors in the room together a lot better than the cream [or dingy brown slip cover] color of the couch we have now.

so tied to that, i insisted that if she got a new couch she had to get rid of the old one - theres just not enough room for them to live in harmony. she agreed and posted it on craigslist. since then weve had a couple of people come by and look at it, but so far we still have it... the weather hasnt been helpful, i'll say that much. its been raining a lot lately and no one wants to move a couch in the rain [myself included.] but tomorrow [saturday] is supposed to be a beautiful day out and saturdays are the best day for craigslist, so hopefully we can get rid of it this weekend.

other than that... theres nothing too noteworthy about last week that i can remember.

[last.weekend]

well i believe ive posted at some point in the past that we had a few problems with our electrical when it came time to do the inspection. it wasnt that we did stuff wrong, just that there were more code requirements than we knew about that we were going to have to meet, and there was more wrong that the inspector discovered during his inspection. anyway, when it was all said and done we had a nice list of things we still needed to do and the more major of those things being that we needed to replace our main service line and meter - of which i am no where near qualified to take on with my fairly limited "expertise" [ha!]. so the bottom line was that we were going to have to hire an electrician for at least part of what we still had left to do and i was dreading having to do that.

from my limited understanding of the profession, electricians are expensive. and as i started to make phone calls to get estimates or quotes or someone to even come out to look at it, i found this limited understanding to be quite true indeed. i was getting numbers anywhere from 1000 to 2000 bucks to do the work, a lot of them didnt bother going out to look - they could handle it whatever it ended up being and if it was more than what i described on the phone they could give me a price once they were working on it [ha, right!] - or charged a fee to come out and look at stuff before theyd even give you a quote... all of these things were not making me very happy, or to be more honest were frastrating the hell out of me.

so last week i started asking around the office [after failing on my own accord] if anyone knew a good electrician or even a fair one that was affordable. luckily, i hit the jackpot. one of the architects at my office has a good friend thats an electrician and passed on my information to him. soon enough he called me and arranged to go out and have a look [for free, woohoo!] at the situation while karen was at home. he did so and she discussed with him to some degree the problem and the list of other things we had to do, and he went on his merry way. well we didnt hear anything back immediately, but on friday of last week the architect told me that the guy had lost my number and so i gave it to her and he called me pretty shortly after. so we discussed what he saw, and cleared up exactly what i wanted him to do, and he gave me a quote for the work... and it was WAY cheaper than any of the other idiots id talked to! well it turned out hed had a cancellation saturday morning and so we scheduled for that time - problem solved!

so saturday morning came and he arrived right on time and got to work. before hed gotten there i had been working away myself for almost an hour. the stove[range] line that was in the house when we bought it was actually service cable, and during the inspection the inspector decided it was oversized and needed to be replaced with a smaller and different kind of wire but also informed me that the one there would be sufficient to replace the service line outside. so kind of bittersweet in that it would have to be replaced, but awesome that we already had the materials for the electrician. [which helped save me some money!] so anwyay, before they got there i was busy unhooking the line from the circuit breaker, the stove, and starting to pull it out of the floor joists. luckily when dad was here we'd disconnected the stove line that was going to the second floor [part of the old multi-family situation] and the wire going to that one was the right kind and there was enough of it to run as the replacement line. so anyway, the electrian and one of his guys got there while i was in the middle of pulling the service wire out of the joists and took over for me while i got started running the replacement line for the stove.

i wasnt entirely sure what all they did for the first couple of hours while i was busy down in the basment doing my own thing, but around noon i started checking up on things with them and theyd made huge progress! theyd already installed a new meter base and were prepping the replacement service line to go in. and well, before i knew it they were doing those things as well. at about 1:15 they were completely finished installing the new service line and we had power up and running with no problems!

and if that all wasnt enough, the guy was really nice and walked me through the entire list from the inspector and talked me through the ohio code stuff that my dad and i didnt know before, and showed me how i needed to complete everything to get approved in the final inspection. he gave me all kinds of tips and said that if i ever had any problems or questions or anything to feel free to give him a call and hed be glad to help. so yeah, thats a great contact if i ever have more electrical stuff going on, and in the end it only cost us $400! thats pretty drastically different from $2000 in my book! [checkbook that is...]

anyway, the rest of the day saturday we spent going to homedepot to get the supplies i was going to need to work on some of the other electrical stuff and then i actually did some of that as well. karen worked on school stuff trying to get ready for classes to start up on monday and grilled hamburgers for dinner. [yeah, they were the frozen kind this time so we had much less difficulty, haha, they tasted awesome though!]

sunday we went to church, the grocery store, and the gas station as usual and then it started raining again and the day got very grey and dreary and gross and... we basically said screw it, got in warm-comfies and snuggled up infront of the tv. =]

[this.week]

well nothing too exciting has gone on during the week. karen has been going to all her classes and started her new job on campus so shes getting adjusted to all of those. and then wednesday night i took off the door to the balcony on the second floor and replaced it with a sheet of plywood because karen needed the door for her studio project this semester and it was a piece of crap anyway. [and again, heavy!] we took that up to her studio along with a nice load of supplies and such.

ummm.... lets see... what else.....

haha, alright ive tortured amanda enough i guess. ;]

well over the weekend our dear friend amanda [whom ive mentioned on a few occasions past] moved back to cincinnati after being awol for the last few months. [well, really shed just moved to cleveland temporarily for an internship, but you say potato...] and on mondy night she decided to have people over to celebrate being back home in the nati - and we were invited. so after work we went to amandas and had a long night of friends, food, lots of laughter and stories and lively conversations about various topics. we had a great time, and a little wine, and by the time we ended up leaving it was damn near midnight, lol! [oh and did i mention there was a puppy? haha, that alone was tons of entertainment throughout the night! it was amanda's roommate - who is also very cool - caity's new puppy, a cocker spaniel mix - mom youd have loved it! - and it was pretty stinkin cute. "pay-trick" and i played with it for probably the first solid hour, haha!] anyway, we had a total blast [thanks manda!] and a rough morning the next day after not nearly enough beauty sleep ;]

and while we're on the subject of amanda, we're also going out with her and a group tonight for wine tasting again! i know i mentioned this sometime past, the wine tasting at whole-foods. anyway, its starting up again for the spring and tonight is the first night, so karen and i are pretty excited about that. im sure itll be as much fun as it was last time around. =]

alright... so... with that, i think youre pretty caught up on the past. as for the near future... ummm...

[this.weekend]

well as i said its going to be gorgeous outside tomorrow so im sure we'll try and get some house work done if we can.

i know karen has lots of homework to work on this weekend and shes planning on doing a lot of that, so it might throw a wrench in our house stuff.

i am definitely hoping we get rid of that stupid couch this weekend.

theres still bookshelf stuff left to be completed, so i might work on that some.

the electrical is still around, so i might work on that some more.

we need to replace the door out to the balcony at some point, we might attempt that this weekend.

church on sunday and the normal sunday routine.

oh, and a new development -

yesterday i got a flyer [flier?] at work about an architecture competition in cincinnati through the usgbc [http://www.usgbc.org]. well, actually its national, but starts at a local level and cincinnati is one of the locations. anwyay, after reading all the information about this competition i started to think it was pretty cool and i might actually want to do it. i talked to karen about it, but she is too busy with school stuff to work on it at all... but its a pretty big competition project and i kind of wanted to team up with someone. so i emailed my buddy mike from grad school who just happens to live here in cincy as well [see the post about the new years eve wedding for more on mike...] to see if he was interested. well as it turns out, he got pretty excited about the competition and thought we could come up with a pretty cool entry so we decided to do it! so yeah, thats pretty cool. that will definitely take up some of my spare time over the next 14 weeks [the deadline] but hopefully we'll have a cool entry to show for it. [i know we'll have fun, haha!] so anwyay, this weekend at some point we're planning to meet about that and start brainstorming, visit the site, etc. so... eventually i may have another update on that, stay tuned.

um, i think thats about it that i know of. hope youve all been well and have plans of your own for the upcoming weekend! miss and love you all!

goin.round

so when last we left off, we'd just received a not so positive result on our electrical inspection. 

well a few days later we got the official report on what still needs to be fixed, and after having discussed it somewhat with dad, theres a lot i can do myself it would seem, some clarification needed on some things, and still some that i am not able to do - mainly, the new service line. no thank you. so thats kind of where we are on that. in limbo for the moment. im sure ill get around to doing a lot of it sometime in the semi-near future, but i dont know for sure. work is kinda an issue when it comes to devoting myself completely to the electrical thing. and since we know what we do have is safe and its all working, its hard to convince myself that this is something of great importance, but meh, whatever. i think it all has to be done by the end of march, so im sure itll get done sooner rather than later. moving on...

well thursday, as i mentioned in the last post, we were having an inspector out to check out the new joists, columns, and footings in the basement so that we could finally and once and for all get the certificate of occupancy situation completely sewn up. so around lunch time i headed home on thursday and waited for the inspector to show up. well around 12:15 i hadnt seen or heard anything from him, and i had to be back at work in half an hour, so i made a phone call and he assured me he was on his way, just running late. okay... well about 10 minutes late, sure enough i hear noise outside and see this big old' cowboy striding up my front porch and knocking on my door. for those of you back home in texas, you know those cowboy santa clause images you see all over the place around christmas time, that is exactly what this guy looked like. long curly white hair, and full beard, round body, and then cowboy jeans, boots, hat, and to top it off - a biker style red white and blue patriotic leather jacket. haha, this guy was awesome. and he talked with that slow southern drawl to boot. anyway, just from the looks of the guy  i knew we were going to be just fine, so we meandered down to the basement as i tried to charge his memory of the situation, and he tried to recall everything, and we walked around and i pointed out all the work wed had done and explained all the details of what he was looking at, and he just kept nodding and sayin yep. 10 minutes later he was on his way out, shook my hand and with that he assured me everything looked good to him, and we were fine to get our certificate of occupancy. so, i guess that means we're good on that! oh, just a small side note, he damn near fell off the porch when he leaned on one of our rickety old railings and it gave under his weight. luckily the house next door is only 3 ft off the porch and he was able to put his hand out and save himself the 2 foot tumble to the ground. and luckily for us, he chuckled and said hes seen that happen more than once in these old houses as i assured him we were going to be fixing the railing very soon. anyway, so he was satisfied with that response and went on his jolly way.

late last week, the roofers pulled down all their ladders and ladder jacks from the side of the house, so i called up my contractor to get the details. it turns out that the people next door needed access to that side of the house, and so they obliged. but at the same time, he said they were pretty much finished anyway. theres one window that still needs a little attention and they didnt finish all the painting, but he needs to discuss some rotted wood issues they discovered with me before we go any further with the painting anyhow. basically theve found some of the fascia boards are rotted out and he didnt want to waste our money painting them if we were just going to replace them, however he never intended to replace them in the original scope of work either so he didnt tear into them, because who knows what the wood looks like behind them. and if you start tearing in and find more rotted wood, its just a big can of worms at that point, you know? so we're going to have to look at where he thinks the damaged stuff is at some point in the near future, and then decide where, and if, we want to go from there. 

so i mentioned the people next door. well, for those of you that may or may not remember from blogs past, the house to the east of our house, has been vacant since well before we moved in, but we'd heard from the neighbors across the street that an urban renewal development company thats been buying up property in our neighborhood owned it. well wed never seen anything being done to the place, so we werent sure what was going on with it as far as rehabbing or whatever, but last week, i think it was wednesday there suddenly appeared a dumpster in the front yard when we got home from work, and it was obvious someone had started demo. well, since then, theyve been out there working on that house every day and have pulled off all this terribly tacky asphalt shingle brick pattern crap that was on the sides of the house, tore down the porch, and have started thoroughly gutting the inside of this little house. karen and i are very excited that this is going on, and its a lot of fun to watch their progress everyday. even though theyre still in the demo phase, this eyesore of a dwelling is looking exponentially better everyday. =]

this weekend karen and i were both sick. she was getting over it, and i was only just catching it from her, so between the two of us being sickly we didnt get a whole lot done around the house. we dont know what it is we had/have [im still sick and feeling pretty out of it at work right now...] but its something thats definitely goin round her office. she said at least 4 or 5 people in her section alone were out last week sick, so it was bound to catch her and then i as well. so anyway, ive got it now, and shes feeling mostly better, and im seriously considering going home at lunch. 

but anyway, we did get a little bit done this weekend. in the office, the light had stopped working as soon as my parents had left town and it had been a bit of a mystery as to why. id taken the thing apart at some point to check the wiring and it all looked good, the switch as well, and wed tested at least 3 different working bulbs in the thing, so we werent sure what was going on. it had worked fine before theyd left, and my dad had checked it right before they left, so it should be working. well anyway, last weekend when wed gone to lowes wed gotten some new track lighting to go in the office [we wanted spots for art work in there anyway] and this weekend i decided to put it up. so i took down the fan/light that was there, inspected all the wiring once again, and installed the new track lighting. it actually went up very easily now that i know what im doing, and i had no problems at all really - well, save dropping screws every 5 minutes, but thats neither here nor there, and im happy to report it is fully functional and wife is quite happy to now be able to use her office after work. shes spent half the weekend in there organizing her school papers and getting ready for the next trimester to begin. 

other than that, kared did some sewing projects and i spent a lot of time fiddling with my computer, but we didnt really get a whole lot else accomplished. we went for a walk on sunday, the weather was once again gorgeous this weekend, and grilled hot-dogs - quite superbly this time around, yes, i am the grill master.... nah, thast not ture at all..] but the dogs were quite tasty. umm... yeah, thats it, i think.

so now im at work and feeling more light headed by the second and finding it quite impossible to concentrate on much of anything [including this...] right now, and im not sure how much longer im going to make it. hope you all have a good week.

happy belated pi day to everyone! [that was saturday] hope you had some, pi! ;]

current.events

so i know its been a while since i last posted, and i do sincerely apologize. however, i really just dont have much to report. i dont know what it is, but karen and i just dont seem to have gotten into anything exciting recently. i think life is catching up to us a little and we've just been pretty exhausted every day. 

this weekend we did get a little accomplished, but nothing extraordinary. 

on saturday i removed the two old mailboxes that were on the front porch - from when the house was a multi-family - and put up a new one by the front door. i put a new door closer on the storm door at the front door because the old one was, well, useless.  karen painted our house numbers on the house in nice gigantic numbers, so that was fun - she enjoyed herself. we attempted to grill burgers [did i mention the weather was GORGEOUS out on saturday? hence the outdoor projects] however, we did not succeed. im not sure what happened exactly [i dont know how to grill burgers possibly? hmm....] but they pretty much crumbled on the grill, which neglected to heat up appropriately for about an hour... weird, and we ended up having overcooked and non-sloppy sloppy-joes instead. so yeah, basically cooked ground beef on a bun. the meat was seasoned quite well though, blah. um, other than that we got started on bookshelves on saturday. i marked up the walls for all the nailers and we started measuring and cutting them. 

sunday we went to church in the morning and then did our usual round of shopping - lowes/the depot and biggs[grocery store]. then i got a haircut - it was that time again [and i got it for free! woohoo 11th cut!] after that we spent the remainder of the day measuring and cutting the rest of the nailers for the bookshelves and measuring all and cutting a couple of the shelves themselves. we also started staining everything with this oops stain we'd bought at the depot only god knows when that had a tealish stain color on the lid, but turns out was grey. meh, whatever. we're going to go with it for now, and if we dont like it, we can always do something else instead. in the end we got one shelf mostly up on the wall, it just needs its face trim - which we have to re-cut because i didnt think to measure the actual opening, just the board itself, and guess what, our walls arent straight - whodathunk?

so um, yeah, thats all there is to report on projects i guess. the only other recent event of any substance is that yesterday i had an inspector out to inspect all the electrical that dad and i had done. and as it turns out there are a few problems with our work. im not going to go into any lengthy description right now, but its suffice to say that theyre going to send us a detailed letter spelling out all the things we need to fix, and then from the sound of what he mentioned to me when he was there, we're going to have to end up getting an electrician out to do most of it. and before you think im copping out, the biggest issue that needed to be fixed was that we needed a whole new service line installed in the house [ours is chewed to hell outside, exposed wiring and such, its in bad shape] and i am in no way remotely qualified to do something like that. 

so yeah, that was kind of a bummer after all the hard work we'd put in.

tomorrow ive got another inspector coming out to hopefully approve our new columns and joists. wish us luck, i dont think i can handle any more problems at this point. the electrical is kind of stressing me out. 

alright, thats all ive got. 

hope you all have a nice week. =]

when.the.circus.comes.to.town [ch.2]

well as promised, i will get right into the highlights of the circus' visit to town - although, since yesterday i started to really think hard about the timeline of events, and things started coming back to me a little and i might be able to lay it out slightly more linear than if id tried to in the last post.

projects.

[wednesday]

as i mentioned in the last blog, wednesday was the day my parents arrived, and one of the first things we did was head to the depot [oh this was only the first of many, many, many - too numerous to count - trips to the depot over the duration of their trip. basically, if we didnt go at least once a day - usually more like 2 to 3 times a day - to lowes or the depot, then the day just wasnt over yet...] and pick up a few fasteners for me to repair the dining room table. this is the same table i mentioned many moons ago [i find it necessary at times to allude in a light hearted manor to my native american heritage, feel free to ignore it altogether, but it makes me happy] in another blog that wed acquired via craigslist. its kind of a 50's diner style vintage thing with chrome framing and a blue vinyl top/leaf and came with 4 matching chairs, also chrome frame, but with green vinyl cushioning.

anyway, the legs on this thing had slowly been getting more and more loose as time progressed, and tuesday night [the night before the circus arrived] they all but completely gave out on us. we were in the middle of dinner when the table shook, then all four legs splayed out like those old cartoons with the dog chasing the cat out onto the frozen lake, and the table fell about 2 feet. luckily nothing came off the table, but at that point id had enough. id tried several times to fix this stupid thing by tightening its bolts, but the problem was that the bolts were rusted solid, and the original brackets for this table had somewhere along the line been replaced with some roughly cut wood shims... not exactly the original design intent. 

so anyway, when we got back from the depot wednesday night, i finally fixed the stupid legs with a few electrical conduit brackets and that was that. we flipped it over just as karen was getting home and it was good as gold - we havent had a problem with it since! =] other than that, like i mentioned in the last post, we procured the necessary permits from the i.b.i. and were ready to get going on the electrical whenever the time came. [definitely a great accomplishment!]

[thursday]

well karen and i were both back to work as usual on thursday so we missed out on all the fun that took place back at the house, but the general highlights of the day were as follows:

[1]the security company came by to repair the security system. recently we'd had a small number of false alarms and since we were still under warranty with the system, they sent out a guy to check the whole thing out and as it turned out, replace a bad sensor and a few batteries. since then we've had no further incidents - im sure the police are pleased. 

[2]kimber decided to take upon herself  the task of cleaning our basement. its much like any other basement in that its very dusty, dirty, and cobwebby [yeah, i made that up]. well by the end of the day shed swept up and vacuumed somewhere around 100lbs of dirt and debris from our basement into a giant trashcan - which proved to be something of an issue when it came to moving said trashcan... - and the basement had had a significant transformation! she did a great job, and we were very pleased. 

[3]mom had taken on the task of cleaning out the office and the closet on the second floor and getting the rooms prepped and ready for painting. additionally, shed gone through most of the house doing general organizing, cleaning, vacuuming, and some minor prepping to the various rooms we were planning to eventually tackle during their stay. 

[4]dad had spent his day going about tracing out a number of wires in the basement and trying to figure out what was going where, what was feeding what, where and how things were linked together, and starting to devise a plan of action to correct the numerous issues he was uncovering [yes, on top of the ones we were already well aware of].

[additionally] 

well, im not sure when this actually happened in the whole time-line scheme of things, but i figured id go ahead and give you the details now, as it will eventually be relevant to the rest of the story. i cant remember now if i mentioned it or not - i think i did - but just before my parents were scheduled to make their visit we decided to see if we could get the certificate of occupancy. as such, we discussed all the necessary permits and issues with our friendly city inspector, and we even ended up building a railing for the stairway up to the "penthouse" [as we're now referring to the attic suite - thanks mom.] and around the stair opening in the same. well im not sure if i got in to depth on how the inspection went, but we did pass - sorta.... 

he approved us in that the house was indeed a habitable domain, and as such we were legally allowed to occupy it [instead of continuing our stint as illegal squatters on our own property], however this was a conditional situation. during the inspection of the basement he found 3 places that he deemed "structural problems" in that there was "significant or considerable" termite damage to some of our floor joists from a previous infestation in the house. [as youll recall, we had a termite guy out earlier in the blog posts and he assured us there was no active infestation of any kind.] so in essence, we were given occupancy under the condition that sometime in the near future we would repair the structural defects and return the house to a safe environment. 

well the kicker was the way in which he was wanting this done. he wanted us to cut out all the bad wood in the floor joists, replace them with good wood. furthermore, where the new met the old we would need to add at minimum a 6x6 wood column to take the majority of the load off the new segment. if that wasnt enough, the new column was going to need to be placed within a new concrete footing that was basically an 18" cube, with 12" below the floor of our basement, and 6" above the floor which would also be the 6" the column should be set in.

so.... considering i dont have a saw to cut concrete, nor did we have the time to tackle all of that additional mess on top of the electrical issues and whatever other problems we would run into while the folks were here, karen and i decided to have our contractor do the joist stuff in addition to the roof he was still working on. 

and so... until i have a little more time and a jog in the memory, we'll leave this tbc...

little.victories

1.30.09|friday

well when last we spoke of current events it was friday afternoon and if memory serves, we were discussing the new windows, the inspections|permits situation, and my parents had just informed us of their impending visit. for those of you who actively read the comments as well, you already know that i mentioned in one that amanda was coming to town friday night, that was the basis of our evening's activities.

so after work karen and i called up amanda and we arranged our schedules for the evening and planned what we were going to do. amanda had some meeting to attend when she first arrived in cincy and we werent going to meet|eat till after 8pm, so karen and i decided to make our first stop dinner [seeing as we were famished post-travieller] and after a short debate on what sounded good we ended up at deweys for a nice big salad and a nice big pizza. it was delish as always and after dinner we headed home for a little hard work. 

we got back at the house around 6:30 and the place was a disaster so we spent the next hour and 45 minutes cleaning any and every-thing from one room to the next. just general tidying up, straightening, putting things away, organizing, and where necessary some good old fashioned cleaning of floors, surfaces, etc. at 8 amanda notified us that she and pay-trick [thats patrick in "amanda speak" - her boy... well, im really not sure what they are technically...] were at hideaway [another local northside restaurant that has some pretty delicious food and a funky-eclectic atmosphere that karen and i find pleasing and humorous. they also have the most awesome appetizer called creamer potatoes with special hideaway sauce - if you ever venture to hideaway you HAVE to try them... mm-mmm, delectable!] and were ready for our arrival. so we finished what we were doing, bundled up for the cold [high teens to low twenties i believe] and drove the 4 blocks to meet them, lol! [it was cooold!] soon after we arrived a few more of amanda's friends from cincy joined us as well and the 6 of us waited for a table and had a few laughs. eventually we were seated and had more robust conversation and some of the fore-mentioned creamer-potatoes, and eventually main courses [i was still full from deweys so i abstained from a main course, haha]. we had a good time hanging out and having dinner and eventually it was time to hit the road so we said our goodbyes and then amanda and pay-trick followed us over to the house so that they could be the first of our friends to see the new place! how exciting!

well for the next couple of hours we gave them the tour and then enjoyed more conversation and laughs [not to mention a little wine and some of my mother-in-law's AWESOME fudge! which we all thoroughly enjoyed! thanks mom!] before they ultimately said their goodbyes and headed home for the night. it was a ton of fun getting to have a social life for a night and we loved being able to finally entertain at the house - even if it was only for a short while and the place was a disaster, lol!

1.31.09|saturday

saturday morning we slept in a little, but eventually were pulled from our warm cozy bedding by our desire for sustenance. i was the first down and got coffe started and then decided to make some of my famous breakfast burrito concoction that i can only refer to as "breakfast mix-up." i wont divulge my secret recipe, but i will say its always a pleasing meal for karen and i and will surely fill you up! for us it made a quite satisfying brunch [as it was nearly noon by the time we finished] after which we decided to relax on the dining room sofa for a while and watch some west wing. [i LOVE west wing!]

i honestly cant say how long we vegged out, but at some point we decided it was time to get something accomplished for the day and the first thing we did was unpack and put away a bunch of boxes that were still in the dining room. satisfied with that project and ready for the next, we decided to move all the furniture away from the walls and get started prepping the dining room for painting. it was the next room in line and we were anxious to get the ghastly sponge-painted catastrophy that was our dining room out of sight and out of mind. so for the next few hours we cleaned, taped, and plastered the walls on 2/3rds of the room. [we've decided that the only way we can really do these rooms and live in the house at the same time is to do half a room at a time until completion and move all the furniture from one side to the other, but still have it in somewhat of a useable arrangement. such was the case with the dining room as well.]

eventually karen decided to call it a night [without telling me, lol, i thought she'd just gone upstairs to use the restroom or something] and i did a second run-through of plastering before assisting a neighbor in freeing her car from the snow and then eventually a nice-hot-shower and bed. [karen had passed out pretty quickly, so she didnt even notice my absence until i made my way upstairs and woke her, lol!]

2.1.09|super-bowl.sunday

haha, super-bowl sunday indeed... 

karen and i had decided the night before that we were going to get up early sunday morning and get one coat of paint on the dining room before church so that by the time we returned it would be ready for the second coat. well as arranged, we got up early and did some painting and were really excited about the new color. its kind of a sagey-olive-green [although it reminds me more of what i consider to be army green than anything else] and after the first coat we were quite pleased as we headed upstairs to get ready for church. the paint went on very well and thr room looked a trillion times better after one-wet-coat. [that sponge paint was horrific!!]

well, as it often seems to happen, we finished getting ready for church at about 10:05. church usually starts at 10am [although this weekend for super-bowl sunday they were starting at 10:15am. regardless...] it was obvious we werent going to make it to the 10am service, so we resigned ourselves to doing a once over of all the shopping lists before treating ourselves to a breakfast at ihop before attempting the later service. 

well i dont mind telling you we were very pleased to discover that ihop had all you could eat pancakes! hahaha! i enjoyed the hell out of some pancakes and was quite proud of myself for putting away 3 plates of them =] however, in light of the all-you-can-eat situation, the plates they brought you were about 2/3rds the norm. at any rate, we were nicely filled to the gills by the time we waddled out of ihop, however it was only 11:30 and the next service wasnt starting for another 45 minutes. at this point we decided to make the quickest shopping trip on our list, a quick run to walmart for some lightbulbs and license plate covers [we finally got our license plates for the new truck last week!]

well... haha... things never quite go as planned. we got to walmart after 15 minutes of traffic [which was pathetic because it was only across the freakin bridge from ihop! where did all these people come from?? and where were they going??] but were sure we could get our few items and still make it on time. so we went in and found the lightbulb section just where we'd left it the last time we'd been there, however this is where we ran into a slight problem. we were getting lightbulbs because we had some cupons from our energy company that were going to expire soon and we wanted to take advantage of them before that happened. however the cupons were very specific about which lightbulbs [all cfl's of course! woohoo!] each cupon was for. well you wouldnt think that would be too much of a problem except that the specific packaging was shown on the cupon and the packaging of the lightbulbs in the store had changed since the things were issued. i wasnt sure if it was going to be a problem or not, but looked for the ones pictured for a while. 

to make matters worse, haha, while i was being anal retentive, karen got distracted by the adjacent fabric section and wandered off. it was an awesome find though, all the walmarts in denver, and im pretty sure texas as well, have stopped selling fabric and i assumed that it was a nationwide thing. recently karen and i have been looking for fabric to redo the new couches and chairs with, and joanns was a disappointment to say the least... whooo-expensive!

well we found all kinds of cool fabric and eventually i even found a sales associate [who was totally clueless about the lightbulbs anyway, so i just said screw it...] and got the closest thing i could find - oh and we also found some license plate covers, haha. anyway, by the time we checked out we looked at the clock and it was 12:30pm... so much for church. meh, they were doing some super-bowl sunday special thing anyway, and i was hardly interested in what that would turn out to be. i didnt mind missing it and we got to continue our sunday shopping anyway. 

after walmart we went next door to the depot [february had finally arrived!] to get a few things on our list - it was actually quite short considering how long it had been, 4 or 5 items total i think? followed by a quick trip to home emporium to pick up one specific item [more to come on that at a later date however], then next door to lowes for an additional supporting item to the one at home emporium, then finally next door again to bigg's to do our grocery shopping for the week. [whew!] after all of that we finally got home just before 4pm and were pretty tired, lol! well after unloading and putting away everything we decided to get to work, and jumped right in to the second coat of paint. it went on very smooth and we were really loving the color - it had only gotten better as it had greated us when we got home - fully dried and to its real color!

well after that coat of paint we were hungry again [although i dont know how!] and had a snack|supper and watched some more west wing [yeah!] and just relaxed for a while. however, around 6:30pm i was motivated again and we decided to tackle another project - re-covering the dining room sofa. 

well, after discussing our approach and testing some fabric and batting options, we searched the house for karens staple gun only to discover that it was pretty dinky and was NOT going to get the job done. we were both pretty revved up at this point so we made the decision to make a trip back to the depot to get a real staple gun and various staples and brads and such, and then continue the project. it was a very quick trip - we stayed focused: get in. get out. get home. - and before long we were stretching fabric and experimenting with the sofa. im not sure how long we played with that but we got half the sofa re-covered and so far we're really happy with it! i dont have pictures yet, im going to wait till we're finished with the transformation, but im really hoping it turns out well! =] after that i talked to my mom and brother for a little bit before bed and then karen and i passed out exhausted from our weekend.

yeah, we totally forgot about the super-bowl in the midst of all the projects, but then again neither of us were all that interested in it anyway - i didnt even know who was playing - nor did we have tv to watch anyhow. oh-well. 

2.2.09|monday

well, thats today. and youd think that it being only lunch time i wouldnt have much to report, however i do have two victories to add to this update! this morning on the way in to work we stopped off at the city building & inspections office and officially obtained our permit for the wall! woohoo!! so now that we have all our permits in order, i just need to schedule a couple of inspections and hopefully we can get the certificate of occupancy soon !

secondly, about 2 hours ago i got a phone call, and i was shocked to find that it was the window people calling. theyd already ordered the correct sized remaining window, it was being fabricated this week, and would be ready for installation this weekend! so we're getting the last window installed saturday morning! woohoo again!!!

i love little victories! =]

this week is starting off pretty good so far, but now, ive got to get back to work. hope you all have a great week too! ill try to keep you updated on any more progress we make on the house this week - although i certainly cant promise anything, lol!

cheers! [and go... steelers?? where my cowboys at??]

win-ders!

[oh yeah, love that texan twang!]

so obviously the big topic of yesterday was the new windows. so heres a "small" update on yesterday...

when i last left you the guys were working on the windows and id gotten my truck stuck after dropping karen off at work and id discovered my own little ice-wonderland.

well after i finished blogging the guys were all but finished with the upstairs and had moved downstairs. so i went up to take some pictures, but much to my dismay, all of the pictures were turning out like crap. it was so bright outside, especially with the sun reflecting off all the snow, that everything was crazy back-lit and silhouetted. and the flash only seemed to make matters worse. so i resigned myself to waiting till dark out to get the rest of the pictures.

not long after id gotten back downstairs there was a knock at the door [which was hard to hear on account of the hammering and drilling] and one of the installers hollered at me that there was a guy at the door. confused, i went to answer and a nice gentleman greeted me and asked if i needed a plumbing inspection. hot damn! id totally forgotten to call them that morning in all the excitement of the windows, luckily id attempted to schedule in advance and here he was! im not sure if ive mentioned this part before, so ill take a quick side-step to fill you in.

[inspections]

well as karen and i decided to get the windows put in we also decided it was time to go about getting home owners insurance if at all possible. so last week id made a phone call to our insurance agent and discussed the matter with him, and he seemed happy to work with us, but there was no way of getting around that thorn thats been in our side from day one... you guessed it, the certificate of occupancy. we'd been trying to get all the work done necessary to get the c.o.o. [lol!] but at this point we'd really been putting off contacting the city building inspections office because well... we hadnt exactly done everything legit and we were afraid it was going to bite us in the ass. now before you think poorly of me, we didnt really know either way how it was going to go, so it wasnt like we were attempting to be shady. let me explain... the wall for starters, well when we hired the masons out to do the wall we discussed getting a permit and they told us that the only reason we'd need a permit is in case the inspector was out while they were working and wanted to see it. since we were getting it done as a weekend job and it wasnt going to take more than that weekend [and the inspectors dont normally just drive around on the weekends looking for people out doing masonry work] we shouldnt have anything to worry about. now i specifically asked him if there was going to be an issue with the c.o.o. and he said as far as he knew there wouldnt be, as long as the work was done correctly they shouldnt care one way or the other about a permit. second was the plumber. when we hired the plumber we discussed permits yet again. after our discussion he formed me that most likely we would need 1 to 2 permits depending on the situation, but he was going to see if he could get around them by doing things a little differently but he'd let me know. i told him that it was fine with me, but that if he needed to pull one, go for it, i didnt mind paying for it... and thats the last i heard about it. so getting back to last week [and now that we're clear that i did ask my contractors up front about permits] after talking to the insurance agent i had no choice but to call my guy at the city building office. dont get me wrong hes a really nice guy [as many of you will remember from when i previously spoke about him in regards to us having the house barricaded oh so many eons ago...] and totally willing to work with me, i was just dreading the conversation because i didnt know how it was going to go. 

well sure enough i get him on the phone and the first thing he does is pull up our file on the computer and i hear "well, weve got a problem. im not showing any permits here." ef. so i discussed with him the situation and after talking through everything and being the nice guy he is, he said he had no problem working with me to get the permits and get the certificate of occupancy afterward. so he gave me the number of the inspectors office and told me to call my contractors and to call him back when i got my ducks in a row. all ill say is that im damn lucky, apparently there were some pretty nice fines i could have incurred, but he said this sort of thing happens all the time and as long as he can see that im trying to work with him, he'll let all that stuff slide and we'll get it done. [did i mention NICE guy?!] 

well after that conversation i called my contractors up and discussed the options with them. the mason was clueless... he didnt really know anything about permits and said he'd try to help me out if there was no other option, but he didnt know how much help hed be... great. the plumber was more helpful, he said that from our conversation he felt like i didnt want him to pull a permit, and apparently there was some miscommunication. but it was no big deal to him, hed get a permit pulled and call an inspector and let me know. well that was good news [and a segue to the inspector showing up] so i still had an issue with the masonry permit and wasnt sure what to do there and went ahead and called the inspectors office to ask them. well again i talked to a really nice guy, he gave me all the info i needed and it turns out i can pull the permit for the masonry work myself, so theres no problem at all. all i have to do is go down to their office and fill out the paperwork and we're good to go on that one, theyll schedule an inspection of the work, and unless they have a problem with what they see, we should be in business for getting the c.o.o.

so fast forward to this week, monday. we get home after work and i find a notice that the plumbing inspector had been by and that i need to call his office. well crap, the plumber never told me he scheduled a time for him to come out, so obviously he couldnt get in to see anything. well i called him up and discussed the issue and thats when we attempted to schedule for thursday morning. [i say attempted because he said he couldnt guarantee any appointments and this was obviously before the winter storm disaster blew through town...]

[fast forward to the present]

so when i saw him at the house i was elated! i welcomed him in and he got right to it. we went down into the basement, i showed him the hot water heater [the permit in question was for a new hot water heater - in you get a new one, you need a permit. so just keep that in mind if youre thinking about getting one. also, if you do any work related tot he main waterline - you need a permit. somehow my plumber got around that one i guess...] he went through his check list quickly and 5 minutes later he wrote out a form, put a sticker on my hot water heater and told me to have a nice day. that was it. we got our permit. pretty damn painless, lol! so now i just have to get around to pulling that permit for the masonry and schedule that inspector and we'll really be in good shape, eh? 

anyway, after the inspector left it was nearing 11:30 and the window guys were making some progress so i decided i better see about getting my truck un-stuck so i could get to work later. i went out and did some rocking for a while, forward, reverse, repeat. it moved a little here and there, then eventually i finally got a little traction and moved laterally about 10 ft, at which point i was stuck again and getting ever closer to that snow pile with the chewy toyota center [yummy... heh]. well at this point i was now half in middle of the road, half on the side of the road turned nearly perpendicular to the curb and not moving. i started the process over again, when my favorite neighbors come out to investigate, haha. theyd heard me working at it [ive got a v8 engine, lol, its not quite when it revs... although just the 2wd obviously, heh] and decided to see if they could help. and not long after they showed up, the window guys had stopped working and come to lend a hand as well. so tracy jumped in the front seat [the smallest and lightest of us all] and the rest of us got in back and started pushing and she tried to go forward. at first we made no progress, so we told her to try and reverse a little so she could get some momentum. and it worked! she backed up a little, then we all pushed as she got about 6 inches of momentum, and thats all it took! she finally was able to get it over the snowbank and onto the street! so that was a small victory. =] we got sahara out and parked in a much better location and then i went back in to watch the window guys install the remaining windows and help resolve any problems that may arise.

im happy to report, that there werent really any problems. haha. the only one we did face was when they first got there and they told me that theyd been sent with one window that was the wrong size. for whatever reason the fabricating guys gave them two of one window and didnt give them one that we needed, so they ended up with a duplicate of sorts. not sure what happened there, but it was no biggie. he said he got the right dimensions, hed put in the order for the right size and then in 2-3 weeks theyd be back out to install it, piece of cake! 

so at about 1pm they were on their way and i was on my way into work for the remainder of the day. i ended up staying a little later than id expected to [about 6pm] and poor karen was stranded till i could pick her up, but once we got home she seemed very happy with our new windows! the difference in the living room is just crazy with having 2 windows now that arent covered in plywood, lol! anyway, the rest of the evening was pretty laid back, we had chinese take-out and watched rocknrolla [i really liked it, very much in the tradition of snatch or lock, stock, although a bit slower... could have used a little more momentum throughout. i was a little shocked at how small jeremy piven and ludacris' roles were in the overall scheme of things, but maybe thats just me...] before turning in early. it had been a pretty exhausting day for me.

oh and one last thing, my dad called from saudi arabia this morning to tell us that he and my mom are making a trip up in a couple of weeks for a visit, so that shoud be a lot of fun. maybe we can get some of that electrical problem figured out, lol!

well, i know all you really wanted was pictures of the windows, so heres one for the site, and the rest can be found at my.pix.

cheers!

contractors.galore

so today has been a busy day... i wont bother with the topic subtitle/section business, its all about the house these days. :]

monday.

so monday morning the first thing to do on our list was to figure out this barricade situation. the woman i had talked to on saturday said we could go to the city buildings & inspections office and that they would give us the keys to the locks since we were the homeowners and we had the right to access our property. thats good news, right? lol! so apparently they were supposed to open by 7:30 and we figured wed just stop by there on the way to work, get the keys, and then one of us could meet the electric company guy we had scheduled at some point between 8 & 4 [really specific right? freakin energy companies...] out at the house to let him in. no problems right? haha, its never quite that easy.

so we get to the city office at around 7:45 and ask the receptionist to see the guy who id tried calling a few times. she sent us on our way, and after waiting upstairs for someone to fetch him, we met dave, and he was a really nice guy. he walked us through everything we were going to need to do to obtain permits, what we needed to do to get the house up to passing inspections, you name it, the guy was a wealth of great info. except the keys, lol, he forgot all about those until he was about to send us on our way and i was like oh, one last thing, could we get those keys? haha, he laughed and went and talked to a lady who came out to tell us the bad news. the contractor who was out over the weekend doing all the work still had them. so we discussed our options and we decided to swing back buy tuesday morning before work to get them and she swore shed have them for us. so... close enough. whats one more day?

so later on i ended up making a number of phone calls and talking to a variety of contractors. first, i scheduled 3 different plumbers to come out and give us an estimate. all three are local and i just found them using a google map search for the closest to our area, and these are the guys that popped up. one of them even had some ratings on google and they were encouraging, so i felt good about it. so i called all these guys up, gave them my info and scheduled them all for as soon as possible. so we ended up getting one guy for tuesday [today] between 8 & 10am, one guy for tuesday but we didnt get a time frame from the woman on the phone, and the last guy for wednesday between 12 & 4pm. additionally i contacted the new mason [the friend of the window guy] who was very happy to hear from me and said hed love to come out either tuesday or wednesday morning to check it out and we could go from there, and then i called the roofer again who promised he hadnt forgotten about me and would try to be there by wednesday to have a look, thursday at the latest. meanwhile, karen was calling the energy company to try and re-schedule them to come out on a day when we actually had access to the house, and she made that for wednesday as well [although still the really specific time frame of 8-4...]

so all in all we had a pretty successful day i thought. i felt good about how things were going, and even more so how smoothly they seemed to be going even with a few hiccups.

tuesday[today, for those of you keeping score]

so this morning we got up early and got over to the city office at 7:30 and great news, she had the keys! so we were in and out of there in no time flat, just a copy of my i.d. in case anyone wanted to dispute who had the keys, and off we went. so we're headed back to the house and karen is on the phone confirming what time the first plumber would be there, ah... 30-45 minutes. crap. now what?

 so we decided to turn around and id take karen to work [because her office is anal about starting at 8am sharp] and then id meet the morning plumber, take her the truck, and then shed meet the afternoon plumber [hopefully on her lunch break]. so, i dropped her off, turned around, and arrived at the house at the exact same time as the plumber and another truck with two guys who got out and walked towards the house as well... masons? yesss! score. so now i had not only a plumber on time, but also a mason who showed up at all, and i had the joy of juggling both to get an estimate at the same time. well it went just fine. the masons had a look around outside, the plumber did his thing in the basement and when it was all over with i had an estimate in hand from the plumber [nice guy, by the way] and the mason [also a nice guy but technologically challenged] promising to drop off an estimate at the house either wednesday or thursday. sweet. things are lookin good. 

so i took karen the truck and then went to work [only an hour late after all this, not bad at all] and did the whole work thing. right now at work im working on getting leed credits for 6 different schools we're working on, and its a good learning experience, but tedious as hell. for those of you that dont know, LEED is a certification that a building can achieve for designing and building sustainably and efficiently and is a program sponsored by the USGBC [united states green building council]. its a good thing for all new buildings to get, and is a great start in driving our nation to thinking about energy efficiency and what we can do to reduce our impact on the environment. anyway, ive been working mostly on daylighting points lately, but thats not really the point of this post. 

at about a quarter to noon i get a call, its the other plumber, he'll be at the house in about 20 minutes. so i called karen and off she went to meet him. i dont have any gory details of their exciting meeting [lol] but i know it went well, and the plumber should email us an estimate by wednesday afternoon at the latest. 

now. 

so after a long day, we're doing great i think! tomorrow weve got another plumber coming, the energy guy, and potentially a roofer. so house repairs are looking up at the moment, and hopefully they stay that way! honestly, if all wed gotten done today was gaining access to the house id have been pretty happy, but in my opinion we surpassed that by leaps and bounds! 

well, i think thats it for now. if you havent already noticed, look carefully at the blog layout and see if you can find what i changed today, lol! i know, i know... im a nerd. but i cant help it, its who i am. [and i love who i am, heh]

"catch you on the flip side yo"

[for 10 awesome pts in chris' book of awesome, email me and tell me where that quote is from. no cheating, and dont post it directly on the blog to spoil it for everyone else. and seriously, no cheating. just whatever knowledge youve got locked away in that head of yours. hint: potatoes]

post.script: lcd sound system is rocking my world as of late. lovin it. 

post.post.script: http://www.shapeofamerica.org/ [get inspired!]

sore.shoulders

hello hello all! :]

so a little update action is in order i think. 

house.

the biggie obviously is the house. thats really all our excitement these days. 

thursday - thursday after work and still bubbling with the excitement of the new house i dropped karen off at class and went straight to the house to check things out. excuse me, OUR house. hehe! well when i got there, to my surprise i found a notice in the window from the city. this wasnt the first time this had happened, you may remember the condemnation orders we found once that the sellers neglected to tell us about or do anything about, so here we go again. this time its a barricade order. great. since the door still hadnt been repaired [after we told the seller a number of times] the city had come by and found it open to trespassers and given that its also considered a safety hazard in its present condition by the city [and no one wants to get sued...], the city issued orders that the house either be secured from trespassers or else theyd barricade it themselves, the seller had 3 days to comply. um... yeah those orders had been issued long ago, i was shocked they hadnt already barricaded it. so i immediately called the numbers to find out who i needed to talk to and what i needed to do, etc. got no one. the guy im supposed to talk to is only in the office from 8-10, m-f and the rest of the time hes out in the field doing these inspections and such. fantastic. guess i'll try again tomorrow...

friday - so friday i went to the house to meet with a new window guy. [for those of you that remember, a few months ago we got initial estimates on a lot of the work we're going to have to do, i.e. the brick wall, the roof, & windows being the 3 biggest jobs] so i was supposed to meet him at 4, and i got there at roughly 3:50. i had tried calling the city again in the morning to no avail and had left a message for the guy i was supposed to talk to. i hadnt heard back, so i tried calling again while i waited for the window guy. no luck, they were gone, it was basically an answering service i got hold of. even better... what now? no clue... 

well the house was still open, luckily, so the window guy arrived at 4pm, right on time, and damn he was a fast talker. it seems a lot of these contractor, subcontractor types are. or maybe its because im in yankee country and im used to texans talking nice and slow, lol, i dont know. but i had to listen pretty intently to keep up, lol! so we walk through the house, he takes a look at all the windows, we discuss my options, and then he gets busy measuring every window in the house. 

now for those of you that remember from last time we got an estimate from homedepot and it was a pretty decent one we thought. $225 per window installed, an extra charge for those on the second floor and again for the finished attic. the windows were very nice, but on all of our huge windows on the first level we were going to have to do some shimming [for lack of a better term] to get the window openings down to their maximum size. but overall we were pretty happy with the estimate they gave us. well this guy, man, what a deal. no only did all of our windows [save the two floor to ceilings in the front room that are just ridiculously large] fit within their maximum opening size [so no shimming!], the windows were even better [welded corners this time around], there was no extra charge for any windows on any upper levels, and they also had an option for a trim treatment in which they encase the window trim all the way around in a vinyl casing to protect it from the elements and save us the pain of having to paint trim every couple of years. we havent decided for sure on that, it adds 50 bucks per window, but we're definitely considering it. oh and the windows are pretty much the same price installed as home depots base price - these are $235 each with the lowE + argon insulated glass. 

so we're really happy with this guys quote. he's willing to work with us in phases if we need to and overall he was just really friendly and offered us a great deal. so we're most likely going to go with them. [thanks mom-in-law for the recommendation!] and on top of that the guy gave me the name and number of a mason friend of his who he says does great work, very dependable guy, whos currently looking for work. sweetness, another mason! so far we've only gotten one quote on that damn wall, and its a little high we think, so im definitely looking for more options. [ill be calling him later this afternoon]

saturday - saturday morning we decided to get up and go to the tile place near our apartment to see what options we were going to have to work with and start formulating some plans for the work we want to do in the bathrooms and such. after that we were headed over to the house to measure doors to see about possible replacing or at the very least new door hardware in order to secure the house and hopefully avoid the barricading. 

well the tiling place was really cool. there were so many more options than we'd expected! we'd looked at homedepot briefly when we were there for the tiling seminar and their selection was fairly limited, to say the least. but this place was like a tile paradise! they had everything you could imagine, and a lot of stuff you couldnt. we found a lot of what we were looking for there and a lot we werent looking for, lol! overall it was a very successful trip and we're definitely brainstorming about our options now. 

after the tile place we went straight to the house, although we'd spent more time than originally anticipated at the tile place, it was now 11am. yeah, you guessed it, when we got to the house we found that the city had already been there and barricaded - boarded up a window, the back door, and put a pad-lock on the front door. we were stuck. locked out. crap. 

well... i called the city, to no avail, no one works on saturday in the offices that could help me. so we were screwed till monday morning. at which point we'd have to go to the building & inspections office to see about getting a key to our house. well, we were planning to go to homedepot anyway, so instead of doing door stuff we decided to get stuff to do yard work - push brooms, rakes, yard bags, etc. 

after a few hours and trips to not only homedepot but also walmart and mejier, we finally had most of what we needed, including a haircut for chris [oh man did she ever butcher my hair... ugh...i miss you christina!!!] and a few groceries we needed as well. however, it was now about 3 oclock and we hadnt eaten since 8am, so we decided to head home for lunch. after lunch, haha, we didnt want to do anything, we were full and sleepy after all the running around, so we stayed in and watched a couple of netflix, leaving the rough stuff for tomorrow [sunday].

sunday -  so sunday morning we did our usual. a little breakfast, and then off to church for a couple of hours. after church we headed home to do a little research on some remodeling equipment we're thinking about getting [more on that at a later time] and then had lunch before heading over to the house. we got there at about 1:30pm and unloaded the truck of our newly acquired supplies, ready to do some house work!

so we started by raking in the back and then sweeping some, and uncovered that theres actually a concrete slab in the back where the back door is stretching out under the entire stair case. who knew?! it was covered in leaves and a thick layer of dirt every time we were there, so we thought it was just dirt, lol! [not to mention there were a few trees growing through some cracks in the slab, leading to our deception] next we decided to do some maintenance that our neighbors could enjoy and moved to the front and side of the house. we did more raking on the side initially and then the front yard and sidewalk in front of the house, and then came back with a push broom and finally a regular broom for detailing and got all the dirt and dust off the porch, and walks, and it looked sooo different. i thought we could always see the concrete on the side of the house but we pulled 2 trash bags full of dirt and leaves and trash out of the side and we could actually see the sidewalk for the first time! we even uncovered a drain that we never knew was there, lol! so after a few hours of raking & sweeping & bagging we had about 7 bags of crap wed picked up and the house looked great in the front. 

in the process we'd actually met a couple of our neighbors whod been out walking their dogs and noticed us working and decided to say hello. the neighbor directly across the street from us [in one of the newly built houses] was so friendly and a wealth of knowledge - she gave us at least a half a dozen names of people to get in contact with for trash, recycling, a neighborhood e-newsletter, and other various neighborhood related things. shes really nice, and seems excited to have some new neighbors. we probably talked to her for at least a half an hour and she made a few trips inside her house to get us numbers and email addresses, haha! very cool. shes very soft spoken and calm and for some reason her mannerism's and the soft spoken-ness really reminded me of jay, haha! [miss yah roomie!]

so after what had to have been a good 4 hours of the raking and sweeping, we decided to tackle the stairs in the back. they were rotting, because i assume they were never weather treated, and the whole thing was just built very shotty to begin with. we wanted to keep the top deck if possible because theres a door onto it from the house and we'd like to modify it into a nice little balcony off that door in the back. so we climbed up very, very carefully and swept off the decks and stairs to get a good look at what was underneath. after a lot of discussion we decided that the decks were in pretty decent shape, but that all the stairs were pretty rotted and would all need to be rebuilt if we decided we wanted them, but would need to come down for sure. so we started the fun part of remodeling - demolition. 

haha, and it was fun for the most part. there were a million nails in this thing [whoever built it's justification for such a terrible structural design i assume] so it was a serious pain in the ass at first. however, at some point i just decided to hell with pulling nails and started ripping up the pieces with my hands. [thank god for work gloves, im far too impatient when it comes to destruction, lol] so after so many jerks here and there with my massive muscles, *wink wink* i tore the top stairs out without too much trouble. so we chucked those down to the ground and surveyed our progress. 

we were feeling pretty good and started in on the railings on the second deck. those came off alright, with some persuasion, and we decided the 2x4's under them were actually in decent shape. on to the bottom stairs. so i took out a few nails at the top of the bottom stairs while karen made her way to the ground [these stairs were built as one "solid" element on the ground and then just hoisted into place and toe-nailed into position with a handful of nails to secure them... lord...] so then i got down on the ground and we attempted at first to de-nail a few pieces that were connected to the posts, but after i got impatient with that, i just started doing it my way. i grabbed the whole stair element and started jerking on it until pretty quickly i yanked the entire left half completely off and we lowered it to the ground for dismantling. then i jerked off the second half and we did the same. however, in the process we discovered that this thing was built even shotty-er than we had originally concluded. 

the posts went from the ground all the way up to the top, but at the ground level were encased in what appeared to be a concrete footing. having poured a number of concrete footings with dad in my life time, i just assumed that the person that did these had dug out a whole 1-2ft deep and had filled with concrete in roughly a ft diameter up to where we could see it capped off, and that they were pretty securely in the ground - probably entombed in a few hundred pounds of concrete. ha. nope. during my *ahem* careful dismantling *ahem* of the stair elements, we discovered that the posts were simply resting on top of these little concrete mounds and just appeared to be encased in them, and every time id jerk, theyd pop up and then back down. good lord... who built this thing??? so now we've decided that the whole thing is going to have to come down and be rebuilt if we want a balcony - which we do. luckily some of the wood is salvageable for re-use [mainly the 4x4 posts and some of the structural 2x4 members that were most likely treated lumber to begin with.]

so after all that we were beat. especially me after my impatient ripping destruction, lol. that thing must have weighed a few hundred pounds, but with my adrenaline going i barely noticed, haha! [man i love adrenaline] so we did a little clean-up in the back and decided to call it a night. we'd been there about 5 and a half hours, and things we're looking really good. 

the pictures probably dont do all the work justice, but trust me, the transformation was pretty unbelievable for just one days work. and now hopefully you understand the title of this post, lol! right now my back and shoulders are pretty sore after all that sweeping and deconstruction. but it was a lot of fun, and we're pretty fired up to get some more work done. 

well kiddos, thats all ive got for now. tip your waiters, and drive safely. you dont have to go home, but you cant stay here! ;]

post.script: currently listening to apocalyptica's new album, its pretty amazing!