Power Makes 'Em Go

It's been ten days since drywall has gone up in our house.  You'd think I would have been so excited about that that I would have reported it on this very blog, but to make a football analogy, it was like kicking a field goal near the end of the game when you're down by three touchdowns: too little too late.  Not that I don't want the drywall to go up-- it was highly important, because it was in the kitchen, and it was required for the final cabinet measure to happen--but I really wanted it to go up everywhere.

Yep, the drywall went up in exactly one room: the kitchen.  It only went up there because the contractors knew about the cabinet guys waiting around for them, and about the deadline we approached and blew by for the cabinets to be manufactured.  It went up by hand, and the rest of the drywall did not go up at all, because there was still no power in the house.  You see, drywalling is a very power-intensive endeavor, or so I am told.  Putting drywall up by hand may be what the Amish do-- they of prolific hand-hung sheetrock-- but it just doesn't fit into the schedule of modern-day contractors... nor does it fit into the budget of modern-day homeowners.  So it went up, and last week the cabinet guy came out and made a final measure.  And what do you know, the original measure-- done by the same guy-- was off.

Drywall in the kitchen:
Once the cabinets are installed,
it will be cut down to size.

Kitchen drywall (Range wall to left, Fridge wall to right)

Abby was there, and luckily the measure wasn't that far off.  It could be remedied by changing the two nine-inch floor cabinets flanking the range into two four-inch drawer cabinets that will probably end up being filled with crap.  It could be remedied either by getting rid of our built-in trash-can cabinet (never!) or by getting rid of a random nine-inch cabinet we had put into the plan as filler (bingo!).  And it could be remedied by moving the sink just enough off-center from the window it will be next to to probably guarantee that Abby will be staring at it ruefully for the next few decades.  (Yes, she who lusts after asymmetry was not amused that the sink would be several inches to the side of center.)  But after all of that, the cabinets will still go in.  She'll drop by Home Depot tomorrow to sign off on the final design, they'll go into production, and we'll wash our hands of the whole kitchen until they magically appear on our walls in a month or so-- hopefully more month than so.

But still, no power.  A week went by and I again got angry, as I tend to do now whenever I think of this house and all of the things that are going to be "wrong" with it (versus the perfect house in my head) once it's completed.  I made an enumerated list on Monday morning and sent it off to the contractors, fuming.  Several hours later, I got a phone call and Mark was good enough to go, one by one, down the list.  Okay, he left off a few of my bullets, but he did mention one gigantor thing: we "went hot" that morning.

POWER.

The electricity was on.  He said he had a load of drywall already ordered from Home Depot, ready for delivery on Tuesday.  If, for some reason, that delivery would have to be pushed off until Wednesday, he had trucks ready to go bring 50-60 pieces of drywall from Home Depot on Tuesday so they could get hanging.  POWER.  Drywalling would start Tuesday.  As in yesterday.  And the reason I'm still writing this as future tense is because I have no idea whether it actually did start Tuesday.  Why would I?  I mean, it's only the thing we've been waiting for for three months or so.  You'd think-- I dunno-- that we'd be getting pictures or phone calls or emails or a text message or something from them telling us the thing we've been pestering them about the most, and that they've supposedly been waiting on the most, was happening.  But, you know,  when they got power on Monday morning, they didn't tell me that either; they happened to note it when going down a list of that morning's grievances.  Don't they get it yet?  This is good news!  Tell me about it, damn it!

Isaac being a brooding model
in front of the insulation
in his bedroom

So, besides the power and drywall, there were several other items of note.  No, the plumbing had not yet gone in for the refrigerator (for the ice dispenser), but it would go in before Lola's bedroom ceiling was up, since that's where the pipe would be located.  No, he didn't realize my bedroom closet had no light, and he would check on that; but yes, the lights are now in in all the other closets.  (Can't remember whether there was lighting in the room we're calling the "library," which is the entrance to the balcony. Hmm...)  Yes, the light switch has been moved in the downstairs bathroom to accommodate the movement of the door to one side, which in turn would accommodate the division of the bathroom like we want; no, the door frame itself has not yet been moved.  No, the concrete pad for the HVAC unit outside has not been poured, but we actually might not need concrete at all; rather, there's this one-piece product that can just be laid on the dirt that the HVAC guy might prefer.  Yes, the ginormous HVAC unit did overhang the newly-built platform for it, but the platform has since been extended and is complete.  (Yes, this program recognizes "ginormous" as a correct spelling, but not "HVAC.")  Yes, the insulation is finished.  Yes, they meant to wait until near the end of construction to complete the porch, because they don't want lots of foot traffic on it right away; I had thought they were just waiting to install the HVAC unit since it was so, well, ginormous.  Yes, they have already spoken with the fireplace guy, and were set to send him the necessary specs.  No, not all the windows are done, because they're having "pricing issues" with some out-of-state window manufacturer (in Wisconsin I think), but yes, the windows in the dining room and the laundry room have been rehabbed and installed.  Yes, the kitchen ceiling has been scraped and sanded.

Newly-scraped kitchen ceiling

And yes, one week ago today, I moved my family into my basement because my renters needed a place to live.  This despite the two mortgages I'm paying on two different full homes.  I have to ask permission to use the washer and dryer upstairs; this despite the fact I now own two washers and two dryers.  I have to wash my dishes by hand; this despite the fact I now own two dishwashers.  I have to cook my food on an "Americana" range with electric coils with tinfoil underlay; this despite the fact I now own two ranges with ceramic cooktops.  The list goes on, but it's nothing but frustrating.  The basement itself isn't bad at all, which is really nice considering I've had renters down here for 4+ years.  It's not even terrible with the kids, who love the idea of having "sleepovers" every day.  (They're sharing a bed.)  It's just, you know, not what I had imagined.

Tomorrow, as I said, Abby goes to Home Depot up in Aspen Hill to finalize the cabinet order.  She asked me whether I would be okay if she made some small last-minute edits, such as correcting the fact that we no longer want an in-cabinet microwave, without me.  I told her I expected nothing less than her leaving that store completely, utterly, devastatingly done with the cabinets.  On the way home, I expect she will drop by the house.  What I don't expect is the drywall to be near completion, even though it would be Day Three of installation-- an installation I was told would take 2-3 days.

Newly-extended HVAC platform

Maybe just because I want to have a pleasant surprise?  Maybe because I've finally become cynical towards not just this process but this entire genre of processes?  Who knows?  I just know that the Power Wheels commercials from when I was little told me "Power Makes 'Em Go," and I hope that my contractors take a page out of the handbook from those overly expensive motorized vehicles for kids.  After all, it's nearly Christmas.

A Dozen Days and Who Cares

Here we are, twelve days before the expiration of our loan.  Our lender's hot and bothered, I'm freaked out, and our contractors seem not to bat an eye.  These guys are really nice, but either they know something I really, REALLY don't, or they're just assuming once the shit hits the fan, we'll just all be wearing Teflon slickers.  Twelve days.

So where do we stand?  Well, we went to the house yesterday and, yes, there was slight progress.  The HVAC system has been delivered and placed on its perch, although I don't know whether it's been connected, because it hangs decisively over the overhang that was supposedly purpose-built for its bulk.  And bulk is the right word-- this thing's enormous.  But it's in, and so is all of the wiring.  While we were there, the electrician stopped by to do some final tweaks.  Never met the guy before, and his lack of a front tooth immediately put me on edge.  I don't know whether he sensed this, but he explained without being asked that he had cracked it last week, and was freaking out about how much money he was about to plunk down for a new one.  Okay, so that can happen to anyone.  Other than that, he seemed like a cool guy, and had no qualms about making a couple of slight modifications we asked for.  First off, he said if we had no problem with the light switch in the downstairs bathroom being a bit higher than code required, he'd have no problem moving it over so we could have that door moved like we wanted.  Check!  Then he said he had no problem going back and installing the wiring for the light fixture that'll hang over the dining-room table, which involves getting way the heck up to the top of the great room's ceiling and tacking a wire that matches the ceiling to the back of one of the rafters.  Check!  Finally, he said he had no problem adding a second switch so that we could turn that fixture on independently of the track lighting that'll otherwise light up the great room ceiling.  Check!  This shouldn't be a big deal, but these are things we have asked our contractors about, only to receive reticent "I'll sees" in response.  (To the contractors' defense, it's not them doing the work, just them passing the request on to the subcontractors, but still, the electrician took it all in stride.  Let's just hope that stride isn't the same stride that the plumber took when, months ago, he said it wouldn't be a problem to move the upstairs toilet by six inches and then followed up by doing nothing, causing our shower to be six inches shallower than I wanted.  But who's counting?)

Our HVAC system as it sits ponderously over the upstairs bathroom.

The electric wiring is done, so that means our final inspection before the walls can be closed is scheduled.  Don't know when it will be, but hopefully before the end of this week so everything can get going in earnest.  First comes insulation, then drywall, then EVERYTHING ELSE.  Waiting waiting waiting...

The electric transformer box outside is still in the same state it was last week, and the bollards haven't yet gone up.  We met our neighbor, Paula, who owns the Windmill with her husband, Richard.  She has definitely had a time with a lot of her rehab as well, and it's interesting that while her stories are so different from ours, they still cause the same headaches.  In her case, it's that she had to remove an enormous tree from her property because it was growing into the house, but the law required her to plant six trees at least two inches in diameter to replace it.  Several of those trees died, so they themselves had to be replaced, which is what was happening on Tuesday.  Not to mention, the little ring of Yews the community had planted around the transformer were too close in proximity for the electric company's taste, so she was having them moved.  She's annoyed that the community property between our houses is pretty much barren, and that there are ridiculous numbers of utility pulls around our houses, and that massive branches are hanging down from the 100-foot-tall oak trees and hovering above her new roof; you know, things I'm going to think about only once I'm in my house.  This woman means business; it'll be nice to have her as a neighbor, because she'll definitely keep our asses in gear and our eyes on the prize... seeing as we do have a proclivity towards slackerdom.

Paula invited us to look inside the Windmill, and it's really neat.  Especially awesome is the view from the top and, if I may say so myself, the specific view in the direction of the Alpha Bungalow.  Couldn't help but take some snapshots.  The house itself is pretty small, and there really wouldn't be room for more than one bedroom for a couple without being severely cramped-- at least for my taste.  It would make an awesome second home / cabin / beach house, though.

The Bungalow as seen from the Windmill's balcony.
Might be my favorite pic I've taken of our place.

Back to our house, though.  Our contractor told me the reason we had failed the gas inspection last week (which we passed soon thereafter) was not for any problems related to the work, but because the gas pressure was not turned up high enough for the inspector's taste.  Now that we have passed, we don't need to be in as much of a rush to get the fireplace decisions made.  I still would like to finish everything-- don't get me wrong!-- but I want to make sure we get the fireplace right, as with all other decisions, and that's something that's not do-or-die in terms of finishing the house.  What I do know is we have the gas hookup and we're going to get those fake logs that "burn" with real fire from natural gas.  What I don't know is what's going to happen all around it, because Abby really likes the look of the stone fireplace without edging around the mouth, and is averse at this point to any sort of conventional finishing that comes with a normal gas-insert fireplace.  I, on the other hand, couldn't care less.  So it's going to be a case of "whatever Abby wants, as long as I get my gas fireplace."  Those are the kinds of decisions that can be fantastic because of ease, or terrible because of procrastination; only time will tell...

We did go to look for fireplace stuff and more this weekend when my wonderful parents agreed to watch the kids and allow Abby and me to go on a date.  Maybe I should put "date" in quotes, because it involved a trip to Lowe's and to the mall, with the only food being a stop for an Iced Mocha and McDonald's and some Wetzel's Pretzels courtesy of an expiring Entertainment Book coupon, before going to a 10pm movie... but it was definitely a date for us!  We looked at washers and dryers, and were basically told that we shouldn't buy anything until the pre-Thanksgiving sales start.  We looked at door hardware, and realized that everything is either incredibly flouncy or incredibly traditional, in the bad sense of the word.  We looked at outdoor lighting, and although we didn't find anything in the store, we did find stuff online that we both agreed on.  And on the way out of the store, we saw this wacky thermostat called Nest that learns what you like, when you're home, and what your habits are, and somehow becomes this nearly sentient being you don't have to fuss with ever.  It's only a couple hundred dollars, and since we haven't bought our thermostat yet, it could definitely be worth a shot.  

What Abby does NOT want our fireplace to resemble.
(Are these those newfangled anti-gravity "logs" or something?)

Finally, as an aside, we voted for the first time as Maryland voters.  Yeah, we're keeping all of our official residency stuff in the District, but we did switch our voter registration because I need to have me some congressional representation.  Our new polling place is Temple Emanuel in Kensington, which is a 5-minute drive, and compared to the two-hour waits in the cold experienced throughout this region, I am very happy with my 15-minute indoor line, complete with dollar fundraising donuts and ten-year-old volunteers offering large-print versions of the nine ballot referenda for people waiting to vote.  Because we had budgeted a lot of time to vote and used nearly none of it, we headed over to a lighting store in the District that had been recommended by the front-toothless electrician.  Holy moly, who does he think we are?  This store had not one normal fixture.  Everything was crazy expensive, and looked freakishly '80s modern.  We asked ourselves whether maybe our contractors think because we're spending a heck of a lot of money on a crazy house in the suburbs, maybe we're some crazy yuppies with zany Julia-Louis-Dreyfus-in-Christmas-Vacation taste.  I dunno, but I drive a Prius with 102,000 miles on it, and just bought my first new pairs of shoes in more than two years.  We're not looking for a $400 rhinestone mini-sconce for our bathroom...

Then there's this.  Left on our family room windowsill.
Come on, folks!  It's our job to defile OTHER people's homes, not the other way around!
(Honestly, good on someone... because it's COLD and DIRTY up in there...)

Tiny Morsels of Progress

Still waiting on the inspections, which are supposedly scheduled for the second half of this week.  I'll believe that when I see the green stickers on my window.

Our new electric transformer box, behind the house in the parking area.

BUT, there has been some progress at the house, seen by my very own eyes this weekend.  Pulling into our parking space, we couldn't help but look right at our very own, dark green, brand-new electric transformer!  Okay, so there's a caveat: it's not there because we asked it to be there, but rather because the contractor working with the Windmill next door got it put in.  But either way, it's there, sitting on the existing cement pad on the part of the lawn that's common area.  The transformer will serve our two houses as well as the Colonial (the yellow house that hasn't been sold yet), and can be hooked up to actual gosh-darn electricity as soon as bollards are installed.  (For those of you outside the DC area, who may not be familiar with the term, bollards are those cement poles that guard things like electric transformers or sidewalks or the White House from being damaged by runaway cars or trucks or terrorists.  We're intimately familiar with them here in the capital, and me even more so with my line of work.)  Anyhow, I got an email late last night from Lee, the contractor working with the Windmill, asking me in the nicest way if I might consider possibly talking to him about the potential for me to possibly hopefully be okay to maybe help them with some of part of the cost of installing the bollards, since we were sharing the transformer.  Really, he asked in the nicest, most polite, nearly Canadian manner possible.  It was actually very nice of him, because it very much is something that's my responsibility to pay for; it's just nice to be asked!  I emailed him back this morning with a very short note letting him know of course I'd be happy to pay a third of the cost (along with the owners of the Colonial and the Windmill).  Based on his reply back to me, I'd guess he's also not finding willingness to help a plentiful commodity during his work, because he was definitely appreciative.  Hey, in my estimation, I'm all about being as friendly and accommodating to my neighbors as I can, because in the end, once all the contractors leave, it's they who are going to be staring into my windows all day long...

So after the transformer, we headed inside to take a look at "the boxes."  "The boxes" are two, well, boxes that our contractors said they had to build on either side of the fireplace.  They told Abby about them late last week after we had discussed what kind of fireplace we wanted.  Although we have a real, working fireplace in the house, it has been impressed upon me by my parents that what we want is a gas-insert fireplace to put inside of that, so we don't have to haul wood around or worry about flue issues or have crazy losses of heat any more than we already will, what with 49 windows and cathedral ceilings and all...  I'm all about actually using the fireplace, and I was totally sold on my parents' gas fireplace they had installed in Grand Island; a flip of the switch and you're good to go.  So after installing the gas line, the contractors told us that code requires the hose to be completely closed in by some sort of housing.  They built a small box around it, just to the left of the fireplace.  It's a pretty low box, less than a foot off the ground and about a foot long.  But to make it even, they built a faux box on the right side to mirror it.  Looking at the fireplace with the two boxes in place, they don't seem to get in the way much.  The only problem, though, is what we'll be able to do with that space now.  It's hard enough to think about what kind of furniture's going to go in there, but now we've got to deal with these weird little boxes.  Plus, the wall to the right of the fireplace was going to have our handy-dandy, futuristic, tv-pops-out-of-it console that we are going to buy ourselves for our birthdays or anniversary or Arbor Day or something.  Abby says that box on the right has to be there for purposes of symmetry, but I'm betting it won't stay long.  In the meantime, hopefully I'll be sitting all warm in front of a nice gas fire while she debates the longevity of the right-side box.

The fireplace flanked by the two new boxes.
But since the boxes are uneven, my guess is one won't be staying long...

The left (functional) gas box up close and personal.

Next up: the downstairs bathroom.  As I mentioned last week, this is the most vexing of our issues with the house right now, apart from the inspection issue.  We want the bathroom to be split into two rooms-- one with sinks and storage, and one with the toilet and shower-- so that two kids getting ready in the morning can use it at the same time.  Right now, because of an ill-placed toilet pipe, that's impossible.  But my brilliant mind came up with a brilliant answer that hopefully won't be shot down by the evil needs of the inspector, who I think from now on I might call "Javert," since he's not exactly been nice to our cause as of late.  Anyhow, the idea is to move the door to the left, and be okay with a little jog in a dividing wall.  (Looking at the picture will help here.)  So right now, the doorway's a few feet from the left end along the wall between the bathroom and the mudroom, and opens straight into the toilet, which presumably would face directly out the door.  My super-brilliant plan is to have the door moved all the way to the left (towards the sink & storage section), to turn the toilet 90 degrees counterclockwise (so it faces the tub), and to create a zig-zag wall that runs behind the toilet, then to the right of the toilet, then back to the wall with the mudroom, so the two parts of the bathroom fit together like puzzle pieces, rather than just two rectangles.  (Listen: the reason I use the word "brilliant" here is because, for the amount of time Abby spends thinking about this, for me to look at something and have an idea she didn't think of yet?  Well, that's just brilliant.  Or crazy.  I'll take either one, as long as it works.)

The downstairs bathroom, as seen from the mudroom.
The doorway should be moved left, to accommodate that white toilet stub.

Looking back on this, it is kind of amazing that I view this as "progress," although I did preface that word with the modifier "morsel," so I think it's acceptable.  Or maybe I'm still not in the acceptance stage of this renovation.  Regardless, I'll leave you with one more set of pictures to show you more of the ceiling that was finished last week.  This time, it's a view up at the Great Room Balcony, which will serve as our home office once we move in.  The before-and-after will give you only a little taste of the difference in the house as a whole, since the balcony area didn't actually suffer too much at either the hands of the Army or time.  Still, though, it's a cool comparison.

Balcony after ceiling
and windows painted

Balcony pre-renovation

Post-London Frustrations

This is how McKayla Maroney feels about our contractors right now.
You'd see us feeling the same, but someone had to take the picture.
(What: you think we came back from the Olympics without souvenirs?)

After spending a month abroad, Abby and I were understandably excited to come home and see all the progress that's been happening at the house.  Okay, so we only got one picture the entire month from the contractors-- and only after some heavy hinting that we wanted something-- but that's okay, because they must have been humming along so well that they had no time to take pictures, right?

Right?

All of the ductwork is done.  Excellent!  And the HVAC people even managed to hide the basement ducts so they don't run in front of the fireplace pediment, and they don't intrude on the storage space running along the wall.  Good stuff.  No actual system, but ductwork in is a good thing.

Okay, I see some electrical work has been done, too.  There are a few places where the outlets are in weird places, but that's kind of our fault because we didn't specify, for instance, where the beds would be.  Lola's bed will be a built-in, and there's an outlet right in there that'd be blocked.  One's behind Isaac's bed too, and behind where we're going to put Abby's grandpa's huge armoire.  Oh, and there's a sconce outlet behind the armoire too.  And in the guest room, there is wiring strung across an opening we had specifically noted we had wanted to be kept open to get into the under-stairs storage.  Okay, we can deal with that; it's easy to change the placement of a few outlets.

The recessed lights are in, but there are no lights in the kids' closets, and only one in the center of ours, even though it's nine feet wide.  Is that going to be enough light?  And speaking of closets, mine still hasn't materialized.

The toilet's roughed in.  And it's not in the right spot-- it's basically smack dab in front of the bathroom door, so when you look through the back door from the outside the only thing you see is the toilet.  It was supposed to be to one side, with the door on the other, so we could divide the room in two and both kids could use it at the same time when, for instance, they're getting ready in the morning, since they both go to the same school.  I guess we could have the door frame moved.  But the toilet?  How hard will it be for them to rough it in again?  Hmm...  At least the upstairs toilet has been moved to where it needs to be, right?  No-- the rough-in's still where it was a few months ago when I talked to the plumber and he said it wouldn't be a big deal to put a 45-degree pipe in to shift it over six inches.  (He also told me it wasn't a big deal because he'd just "charge Mark for it..." which means I'd pay, even though it's not where we said we had wanted it to be.)  That toilet has to move, because it's too close to the shower.  It's still there, though.

And the painting is mostly done on the exterior.  All of the dark green trim is done, so the black doesn't look as stark as it had.  Still don't love it, but it's better.  Wish it were still white.  Abby likes the black, and it looks nice from the inside, so that's fine, and honestly, there's no way what's black will ever be white again, because there's so much of it.  How many coats of white would you need to put on the black just to make it, I dunno, gray?  That's fine, I'll get used to it.  But there are still parts where there's streaking and someone needs to go over it with a finer brush or something.

And that's it.  The wall didn't go up between the kitchen and the bedroom, so the cabinet people are still twiddling their thumbs waiting to be able to do a final measure.  The appliances are all sitting in boxes in the living room.  There are no outlets on the outside of the house, and no spigots.  I don't know how to feel about this.  I had expected so much more to have been done in the month we were gone.  So many big strides were made in the month beforehand, and we put so much work into finalizing cabinetry and appliances while we were in London, that it's just a major let-down.  I honestly don't know how much should have been done, but it just doesn't feel right.  We've written to Mark & Rory to tell them the issues we have, and are trying to be upbeat about it.  We have had no reason not to trust them up to this point, and I don't see why we would stop trusting them at this point in the game.  It's just, well, I'm bummed about it all.   It's the middle of August, we wanted to be in in the middle of September, we shifted our expectations to the middle of October, and I'm nervous now.  We have to get this thing done, if only because we have a renter lined up for our current place, and he wants to move in in the second week of October.  That was going to be a possibility, or at least a really close overlap.  But now?  Maybe I'm just being a Debbie Downer, and everything's moving along just as planned.

We'll wait for Mark & Rory to get back to us and all will be better.  I hope.

Year Two Starts Today

These beautiful, newly-restored and reinserted windows
in our Great Room will *never* hold a Romney sign,
despite being in our "second home."

Yep-- today marks our first anniversary as owners of a second home.  "Second home" sounds so swanky, like we're automatically going to vacation in Aspen and send our children to expensive private schools and vote for Romney.  Let me clear that right up for those of you who don't know me: don't ski; having a hard enough time as it is sending my kids to a public charter school, after Abby & I amassing 37 combined years at public schools; and HA!  Still, this will only be our "second home" until we move in, at which it'll become "home" and the building currently known as "home" will become "absentee slumlord property."  (Wait-- did I say that out loud?)

First thing's first: it must have been the mention at the very end of yesterday's blog that we would be temporarily uninsured that caused the regional tornado warnings and accompanying thunderstorms this afternoon.  Well, Mother Nature, sorry: we're now officially insured, (Phew!) although not without requisite drama, of course. Contacted the insurance company this morning to get the quote and buy the policy, and it turns out they wanted $1100 for four months of coverage.  Yeah, this after $438 for the whole year.  However, they were the only ones that agreed to insure us, right?  NO, wait... way back when Travelers dropped us I went to Insweb and filled out a form and got quotes back that I thought were way too expensive.  I called the cheapest of the bunch, Lloyd's of London, and we are now insured by them at a much more reasonable (but still astronomical if you ask me) $570 for three months of coverage.  So yeah, I'm breathing a sigh of relief that I only have to spend five times as much on insurance, rather than eight times as much.  At least it'll drop back down once we move in.

Next: you might be wondering how our utility work is going.  I showed you pictures yesterday of the pipes going in under the house, but you may also be interested to know that the gas line was scheduled to go in yesterday.  Not sure it did, but things have been pretty much on schedule... once they've actually been scheduled, that is.  The gas company agreed to foot the bill for re-placing the meter at our back door, rather than in the ridiculous blocking-the-windows location where it currently stands; hopefully it'll be joined by the water and electric meters as well, and we can put a big bush in front of them all or something.  PEPCO has informed us that they would be happy to install a service line for us-- for the price of $1,800.  After some back and forth, there has been not a millimeter of budging on their part, so we've gotta swallow that price; sending a check tomorrow.  (Yeah, they'll only accept a check, which is super annoying.)  Regardless, they assure us they'll come out the moment the check arrives, so I'm hopeful.  Water's still up in the air, as I mentioned yesterday, because of the questionable placement of the toilet drain in the upstairs bathroom.  I'm also pretty sure the plumber's not done, because we haven't heard that he wants his money yet...

Painting is nearly complete on the main Tadpole Green color.  We were going back and forth, pre-painting, on whether to paint the spanking new cedar shakes on the dormer, because the wood is just so gorgeous.  There's no way we could leave the whole house unpainted because of the previous paint job, but we thought it might not look weird to have a painted house and an unpainted dormer.  Yeah, we were wrong-- dormer will definitely be painted.  Only a few spots remain that aren't Tadpole Green, and I'm guessing that's because they ran out of paint.  Next comes all the trim, which should be exciting.  

Yeah, we know: the unpainted dormer looks weird.

I was out admiring the paint job when Jimmy was here this week and a couple of neighbors came by with their kids in tow.  So nice to see kids our kids' ages in the neighborhood, because we were slightly worried the place'd be mostly retirees.  (Not that that's a problem for us, but Abby grew up in a 'hood full of kids her age, and I'd love that for ours.)  Judging by a spirited debate on the neighborhood listserv today regarding building a playground on-site, there are most definitely a bunch of families with small kids hiding behind those  historic and faux-historic facades around us... as well as a bunch of people who may be just a bit wary of having a playground so close to what apparently had initially been marketed as a quiet retirement-esque community.

Speaking of visitors, I must mention that Courtney & Chris (my sister and her husband) stopped by the house this week too; it was his first time over.  It's hard enough getting Chris to venture out of his Prince William County sanctuary, let alone drugging him enough to cross through the dreaded District of Columbia and into (egads!) Maryland, but we did it by bribing him with steaks.  I didn't remember their visit along with Jimmy's and the Stewarts' because, well, I didn't go with him-- Abby did.  But yes, Courtney, I do appreciate the visit.  

The Pagoda and Chalet

Anything else?  Well, The property manager, Dave, responded to my request that the ungrated opening underneath the lions, possibly leading to the inner workings of the fountain, be covered up lest ne'er-do-wells start being all nefarious in there, and it was fixed with one email: hooray!  It looks like new concrete has been poured all around the pagoda, and it looks great.  Don't know if construction is at a standstill at the Chalet, or if things are just progressing inside right now, but I can't see anything different in the last few weeks over there.  I heard the Spanish Mission was sold, but can't confirm that.  And our sad neighbor, the French Colonial, remains alone, destined to be sucked back into the realm of condo because of its peculiar connection with Practice House (I think that's what that building's called...)  Oh, and get this: for how political of a being I've been for so long, I made what I believe may be my first-ever call to my Congressman today about a house-related issue.  Abby's none too excited about the NPS property bordering the railroad tracks without any sort of barrier, so I called Rep. Van Hollen's office to see if they knew what we could do to get one built.  We'll see if that works, but in the meantime I feel like a bit of a busybody, especially since I probably haven't even been at the house for a combined 48 hours yet.  Still, I came out of the exchange with one new piece of annoyance, which seems pretty par for the course: the U.S. Postal Service does not recognize our address.  When you go to their website and try to find out our ZIP+4, it says they don't deliver to our address, and that any mail addressed to it will be returned to sender.  I called them to say, yet again, that yes, we do exist, but the woman on the other end said it was our responsibility to tell the city to tell the post office we existed.  

I'm'a leave that call for another day.

28 Hours Later

Went out to the house twice this week-- Wednesday evening and again this morning for what was supposed to be a short meeting but turned into two-plus hours and enough for me to take the whole day off of work-- and saw a bunch of good stuff happening.  I did take pictures, which I'll post this weekend, but wanted to give an update on some of the less visible -- and perhaps more important -- stuff that's been happening.

1. Gas service.  Washington Gas is worse than any cable company you can imagine.  Get this: they have to come out to the house, and tell our contractor, Mark, that he has to be there between 7 AM and 5 PM. That's the window they give him-- 10 hours!  But that's the only way it can happen, so he goes out there.  What do you know: they don't show, and he's spent an entire day out there.  He calls and asks why they stiffed him, and they ensure him he was the one that stiffed them, and that they don't believe our address exists.  Take two, and another 10-hour window.  Mark asks that the gas guy call him when he's coming, just so he can guide him to the house.  Another no-show day, gas guy nowhere in sight.  Twenty hours wasted.  Mark gets angry and tells them to get GPS.  Another 10-hour window and the guy finally shows up-- at 3:30 PM.  So Mark waited 28 1/2 hours for the gas guy to come, and the guy takes maybe 10 minutes to look at the pipe sticking out of the ground, pronounce that it's our job to pay for anything, and is ready to leave.  But rather than let the gas guy leave, Mark assures him that our house is over a hundred years old, and it's just a tiny bit against code to have a gas meter so close to a window.  Yeah, did I mention the fact that Washington Gas wanted to set the meter directly outside Isaac's window, less than a foot away, in a place that would not only block us from being able to see out the window, but also would block it from opening?  Apparently Mark worked his magic, because the service is being moved to the far side of the house, and Washington Gas is paying for it all.  Yay Mark.
2. Electric service.  We have a permit!  PEPCO came out this week and certified that the lines from where the meter will be to where the transformer will be are good.  Now they are going to set the transformer, and we can begin to have at least rudimentary electric service at the house.  The transformer hasn't yet been set because it will service only three homes: ours, the Dutch Windmill, and the French Colonial, none of which currently have electric service.  So it looks like we'll jump ahead of the Windmill on this one, but then when they're ready they won't have to go through as much hassle, because the transformer will already be there.
3. Water service.  Besides having to pay $15,000 to have a pipe go from the water service to our house because they happened to build a water main within five feet of our house without connecting us to it, and besides having to pay $750 a year FOR 25 YEARS to pay for the building of said water main, we will have to pay $3,400 to have our service turned on, because the water company doesn't recognize our house.  That is, unless we can prove we have had water service in the past.  Now, I'm no plumber, but the fact that we had toilets and sinks and bathtubs and underground pipes, coupled with the fact we have no well or septic tank, should be an indication that we have had water and sewer service in the past-- no?  Apparently not.  The water company needs either a meter number or a customer number from the past to link into its system and prove we had service, at which point it will supposedly refund us the $3,400 we had to pay to have them even consider looking at our property.  I called the property developer, Alexander Company, in Wisconsin yesterday and asked them to please find out what these numbers were.  (Alexander is the company that bought the whole property from the Army-- or maybe it was from the State?-- for $1 and then developed the condos around us.)  Greg Hunt at Alexander is on the ball, and said he thinks he remembers seeing that our three houses, which may just be the Three Amigos (or the Three Stooges) of the property, were on the same water meter, and will look for that number somewhere in the reams of paper he's got on it.  Hope he finds it... Alexander's pretty much washing their hands of the place now that nearly everything's sold, so hopefully they haven't started sending stuff like that to the Indiana Jones archival warehouse.
4. Painting.  Not all the paint is off, but the house has been scraped and is ready to paint!  Mark and Rory are trying desperately to convince Abby that we don't need five colors of paint on the house, and Abby and I are reminding them that 95% of the house is one color, and that one of the colors (red) is just on two exterior doors and that's it.  Mark said "after 15 years of marriage, I know who's going to win this battle..."  I say after 8 years and 50 weeks of marriage, I do too!
5. Our first outlays of $$$ outside our loan. Yep, it had to happen, and it did in a big way.  The $3,400 check for the water company and the first half of the $15,000 payment to the plumber happened this week.  I learned Citibank doesn't let you cash more than $5,000 per day out of your Home Equity Line of Credit, and also that Mark has an intense hatred of banks that makes me think perhaps he has bad memories of watching the banking scene from Mary Poppins growing up. (This transaction, however, was a helluva lot more than tuppence!)  What really sucks is that these two costs will not be eligible for the historical refunds the State and County will give us at the end of the process, because they don't do anything to the house itself.  I don't understand how connecting a home to water service doesn't count as making an historic building habitable, but I'm not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, no matter how annoyed I am by its rules.

So that's all for now.  I hope to upload pics of today's fun sometime in the next couple of days.  Some things you can look forward to seeing:

• Brand-new flashing and a pristine white bead-board ceiling on the heretofore decrepit porch;
• No more nasty picket fence surrounding the porch;
• The massive windows in the Great Room have finally been removed for restoration;
• The downstairs bathroom is being excavated, and all that dirt under the porch will be taken out starting Monday;
• There's a six-foot section of a load-bearing wall sitting on AIR; and
• Probably some cute pictures of Lola sitting in front of mountains of debris that were trucked away this afternoon.

Until then, just know that we made our first Bungalow-to-IKEA run this afternoon, and made it there in ten minutes flat.  That proximity, my friends, is truly a dangerous prospect.

It's Electric! (Boogie Oogie Oogie)

(Unless we can't find your address in our computers.)

So Mark and Rory asked me before I left for my trip if I could call the electric company and have them start service, that way they could not only hook everything up, but use the electricity to do stuff, I gather.  First off, I had to find out which electric company served the area.  Bad news: PEPCO.  They're our current electric company, and although I really have no problems with them in terms of delivery of electricity (unlike nearly everyone else in the DC Metro area), I have been attempting to get them to finalize our electricity upgrade at our current house since we bought the place back in 2003.  No joke: our front yard is currently torn up (after finally getting stuff to grow!) so they can put in our meter, and last month we had to literally rip the cast-iron porch railing out of the wall so they could make sure the meter box didn't cross an inch over onto our neighbor's property.  This, after them wanting to put a giant double-stack smack-dab in the middle of our postage-stamp front yard.  I know Miss Thea White at PEPCO very well by now, having called her multitudes of times over the past several years.

Unfortunately, Miss Thea White is the person you deal with when you have problems with PEPCO in your house in DC; there's an entirely different department for Maryland.  So I go online to find out who to call and, voila, there's a link that lets you register new service online!  Excellent.  Did it from England, got a confirmation email, all good.  Or so I thought.  The next day, I get another automated email saying they can't find my address, so maybe I'm just wrong that they're my provider, and thank you have a nice day.  Argh.  So I responded, thereby creating a new work order.  Okay, so maybe my response was snarky, but there are only so many ways you can say "um, yes, the house I currently pay nearly $3000 a month in mortgage for does actually exist."  No response from PEPCO.

So once I was back in the States, I called and found out the phone number for the Rockville service office.  Gave 'em a call and left messages, but have yet to talk to a real person.  This morning I get to work and I have a message on my voicemail... from PEPCO!  But the message is "hi, this is PEPCO, please call me back."  Argh.  Called several times today, no person, so I didn't leave a message.  Finally at 4pm I called and left as saccharine a message I could, noting it wouldn't do either of us any good to be playing phone tag; maybe they could just tell me in a reply voicemail exactly what I needed to do to show them the house actually existed, and we could get things going by phone tag.  (I also mentioned, very nicely, that they could Google Map the address and find it quite easily.  Hope that wasn't going too far.)

My big fear here is that the contractors will be slowed from their much-appreciated pace by PEPCO's notorious foot dragging.  If I have to drive one of their guys out to the house myself I will, if it means I can get electricity!

"The Pretty Toilet"

As for other utilities, even though we're not going to have a water hookup for several months, I had to pay the water bill this year.  The water is done all together with the whole neighborhood, which is weird.  What a way to totally discourage efficient use of water.  I was even torn between two different toilet models-- one that was pretty, and one that was normal but had dual-flush technology so you could use less water when you peed-- but decided to go for the prettier, more expensive one (which is also a water saver, but just without dual flush) because I knew no matter what I did it would cost the same.  (Shh... don't make me give up my tree-hugger creds!)  Regardless, $750 a year for water and sewer service; it's about what we pay here, but we don't have to pay it up front.  $60 or so a month just feels a lot better than a whole big chunk of change, just for water!  (I also had to explain to Isaac today that, yes, we pay for water.  His response?  "How do they do that?")

****UPDATE****

Finished the game of phone tag with PEPCO this morning (Friday 3/16)!  A guy named Scott said that it won't be as simple as turning on new service, since the house has never had its own meter before.  (That's why the computers didn't recognize the address.)  We have to submit plans to them first, which Rory's going to do next week.  Better still, Scott gave me his email address, so no more phone tag; Excellent!  Scott asked us to find out whether the windmill has a meter, to see if he can tell how they went about things and mirror it for us; if anyone out there would be so kind as to find out if they have one, and what it's number is (located below the bar code), we'd be much obliged!  

So at least we do have a little progress before the end of the week.  Rory was on vacation this week, but is back now, so we'll be getting a schedule soon for the next bunch of projects.  Can't wait!