Penultimate Passage

I won't beat around the bush, because I'm sure you all want to know: Yes, we have passed our plumbing inspection! Weeks after the plumbing was "done," and at least a double-digit number of days since it was actually completed, we finally got us a sticker. Despite having an inspection scheduled for last week (supposedly), it took until yesterday to do it, since we had to secure an inspection on the fireplace beforehand. Wish we had known that sooner, because last week, while thinking "hell, we might as well get some stuff done on our own," we called our trusted fireplace people and had them cap our flue and do some pointing. So of course, as soon as I pay them, I hear we need to find a chimney guy. "Nope, we're calling my guys and that's it." Within 48 hours, we had our certificate. (Granted, the inspector had a whale of a time trying to discern what the paper actually said, because of poor penmanship, but hey, maybe the guy was Dr. Chimney, thank you very much.)

But it's not just a piece of paper that we've scored since I last wrote. Our two straggler windows were finally delivered from the custom shop in Baltimore and installed; the one in the balcony doesn't make that big of an impact, but the one in the dining room is amazing, because it was the one window we never actually saw light through-- it had been boarded up since the first time we saw the house 28 months ago. Now? I sit at my dining-room table and am actually a bit distracted by seeing the top of the windmill on the right side of my peripheral vision. It's a distraction about which I will never complain.

Speaking of the dining room, we finally got our chairs. Or rather, we finally ordered our chairs, and they were delivered crazy-fast. We had been holding off until most of the construction was finished, and once we reached the point where we needed to self-propel, they were an obvious choice. We got six, and plan to get two more, either matching or complementary. They're uber-modern, metal chairs-- three with white coating and three copper. They look really great with the striated table from my grandma. They arrived in pieces, and we had to put them together; IKEA definitely didn't write these directions! After wrestling with the first chair, I got an expletive-laden voice-mail message from Abby about the experience, but by the time numbers five and six were constructed while I watched House Hunters Sunday night, they took about five minutes apiece. For metal chairs, they're really comfortable, although I did have a bit of an accident while constructing #4, and have a gash on my right wrist to prove it.

Also completed recently is the switch of our hot and cold controls on the kitchen sink, as well as the installation of the dishwasher. No more washing dishes in the bathroom, and the machine is really, really quiet, which is great. So quiet, actually, that it's already been opened twice mistakenly during the rinse cycle. Gonna have to learn how to lock it! Although it is working, it's not anchored to the cabinets, so when you empty the contents it lurches forward just enough to make you think that this is the time it'll fall completely out, just like my recurring dreams as a kid of that strong wind knocking my house over to the extent that the mailbox post across the street would come through my window. Yeah, not gonna happen, but not taking any chances. The fridge also leans too far forward, and the freezer opens every time you close the fridge door. But it's wedged so tightly in the cabinets that I can't pull it out to adjust the tilt. Gonna have to wait for the cabinet guys to finish up to see if they can do it for us.

Ahh, the cabinets. Still unfinished, but supposedly the last door is going to be delivered to Home Depot tomorrow. Once it's in, they'll come out, switch out that glass door for the solid wood one they mistakenly installed in April, and do a couple other tweaks--like anchoring the dishwasher. Also hoping they'll install all of our handles and drawer pulls, despite us having purchased them online rather than from Home Depot. Abby's not so sure they will, but I have faith.

We've done a lot of buying lately, but the fun kind of buying: home furnishings, rather than home improvement.  There were the aforementioned dining-room chairs, which are BluDot Real Good Chairs from Fab.com.  Then there's the computer desk we got on clearance from West Elm.  And the painting we bought from an alternative art shop in Old Town Winchester during our anniversary weekend-- I haggled them from $150 to $100, so I feel productive on that one.  There's the mailbox we found on eBay and bought, only to have the letter carrier say we should really have one on the curb instead of the house, so we just put it on the porch for the time being, but today we found it to have been installed by our contractor on the wall.

On the flip side, there's the storage-room door we swear we bought but is nowhere to be found, so we had to reorder it from Home Depot and it's due in later this week.   And of course the bathroom hardware for the upstairs bathroom that we found online and had shipped to us, only for Abby to decide she doesn't like it; it's already on its way back.  Oh, and the still-nonexistent upstairs-shower door that we had measured last month, received the quote for yesterday, and think we can do better on.  So obviously, WE still have some work to do; the ball's not entirely in the contractor's court.

But for now, our next big date is Thursday; that's when we have our big, final inspection.  Pass that, and we get our Certificate of Occupancy.  In other words, we won't be squatters here anymore.  We refinanced a few weeks back-- had our mortgage payment cut by more than a thousand bucks a month, which is like getting a KILLER raise-- and I had been worried that we'd need the Certificate of Occupancy in order to finalize the closing.  I don't know why, other than my mortgage company told me I would.  But here I am, with a new mortgage and my old one so officially closed that my website login has been disabled.  So all the inspection will mean to us is that Maryland blesses the work that's been done.  But we also have to pretend we're not living here for that to happen.  And by pretend, I mean pack up a bunch of our stuff and seriously pretend we're not living here.  Seriously.  So tomorrow, on what would normally be a fun half-day at work picking up the kids from their half-day, it'll be more about making sure the kids are happy and occupied while Abby and I repack the most important things we have here, into the boxes that have been sitting in the living room for a month awaiting this day.  Our clothes will go back into bags, our food... um... maybe into the community room fridge for a few hours?  (Luckily, I haven't been grocery shopping in a week and we're running low on basically everything.)  But hopefully, come Thursday night, we can forget about permits forever, and start focusing on the end goal: living here, with no more work to be done by the contractors, and beginning our quest for landscaping and that big Maryland Historical Trust payoff.  

In the meantime, though, off to repack our house.  

The Tortoise and The Bungalow

Once upon a time there was a tortoise, who was ever so slow, but whose perseverance was known throughout the land, for he beat the quick but lazy Hare in a race for the ages.  What you might not know is that the Tortoise is well on his way to beating another foe, Bungalow.  You see, boys and girls, the Bungalow is a strange creature, who looks small from the front and big from behind.  His cute and unassuming face is offset by his grand and nearly see-through behind, as well as his cavernous insides.  But what really sets him apart from the rest is his ability to drag on and on and on; while the Hare's surprise loss kept readers rapt 'til the end, the Bungalow's sporadic fits and starts seem more to disappoint and underwhelm than to interest and delight the audience.  Ahh, the Bungalow is a creature who may prove, in time, to defy time itself and regress back into the very local timber and stone from which he was built.

Oh, wait.  I was told in a recent review at work that less frequent use of sarcasm might serve me well in my career.  Let me unsarcasmafy that last paragraph and state what I mean in clear, simple terms: "BUNGALOW SLOW AS MOLASSES IN ALASKA WAFFLE HOUSE."

"But no," you say, "your last post was about the drywall being completed, and this post contains pictures of even more drywalling, with news of even further work!"  "Ah," I counter, "but it also contains sad tales of woe-- or rather-- sad tales of whoa."

Drywall continued to go up after my post last week.  In fact, Abby went by the house today and found most of the second-floor drywall to be complete.  But it was supposed to take several days at most.  The first floor remains incomplete, with the initial work in the kids' bedrooms and the family room not joined by the rest of the floor.  This is because, understandably and ununderstandably, the front porch has to be ordered: understandably, because the front porch is what overlays that area of the house that was excavated, so it forms the roof of those several rooms and, without it, the drywall could get wet from precipitation; ununderstandably, because last week I specifically asked the contractors why they hadn't laid the porch yet, and they told me it was because they would wait until the end so as to avoid heavy foot traffic on the new flooring.  Yet, in the same email they told me the drywall was beginning.  So if they knew they wouldn't be able to complete the drywall until the porch was laid, why the heck wasn't the porch laid at least concurrently?  I believe it's a mystery.

Two nights ago I had to pee at about 2:45am.  After I accomplished the major feat of getting out of bed, trudging across the basement to the bathroom, and going back to bed, I managed to make myself stay awake for the next 75 minutes having an argument in my head with the contractors about the major issue of them having drywalled the first-floor bathroom without first having moved the door like we wanted.  Seriously, I was awake until 4am having an argument in my head with someone about a door.  Do I feel vindicated now that I know the bathroom is part of the area that has not yet been completed?  I don't know; ask me when it's all over.  In 2058.

Thing is, Abby asked the contractors at the house today why the door hadn't been moved, and got pretty much a blank stare of an answer.  She got the same answer when she asked why the toiled hadn't been moved.  She's pretty angry, and for those of you who know Abby, that takes a lot.  I'm pretty angry, and for those of you who know me, well, um, it's become par for the course lately.  Tonight as we headed across the neighborhood to a neighbor's Hanukkah party, I opined that this is the point where normal people would fire their contractors.  Abby didn't disagree.  (Only we're both wrong, because normal people would have done that a long time ago, methinks.)

And yet again, progress comes from next door, where Lee the Windmill Contractor (I picture him dressed as Don Quixote, since we've never met) emailed me several days ago about an issue they've encountered with the water company.  Seems as if the water company is requiring some sort of fancy-schmancy $200+ water hookup for the Windmill because of the way the line is set up.  Lee said the water company told him we would need that too, but I hadn't heard anything of the sort.  So I forwarded the email to our contractors and asked them to hook up with Lee to see what was going on.  Crickets.  So a day later, I get another email from Lee, saying he had talked to the property-management company and they had agreed to pay for the hookups, since it was only $200 apiece.  I forwarded that to the contractors as well, again asking they advise me and/or Lee on what to do.  I did receive a response of "let me talk to the plumber," but only, I think, because I used ALLCAPS when writing my email.  Now this would only normally be mildly annoying to me, despite the fact that our neighbor and their contractor, who is helping us, is potentially being put off by the lack of communication, were it not for another set of emails from my contractor only one day earlier. Yes, this set of emails involved the contractor asking us for the money for the extra insulation we asked for in the walls and floors.  I have no problem paying this bit the contractor claims to have not known about, even though we had mentioned it over and over and over again throughout the whole process.  But the problem is that the four or five emails we had on this subject all happened within about a half an hour.  No problem replying to my emails at all when it involves a check, huh?

But enough of the sarcasm.  Now, back to the serious business of returning to the normalcy that is living in my basement with my wife and two kids.  Luckily, the drywall down here was finished about four years ago by a contractor who was neither Tortoise nor Hare, but rather a dependable worker who showed up, did his job, got paid, and let us go on with our lives.

Inside Lola's room, with her bed area at left and closet center-right

Family Room, looking left as you go down the stairs,
with the doorway into Lola's room at right

Almost A Go

Well, what do you know: we got a green sticker today.

It's been a long time coming, but Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission, they of the cumbersome and somewhat antiquated-sounding name, have awarded the American Bungalow at National Park Seminary a green sticker, and that means the only thing that stands between us and getting walls put in is an inspector from Montgomery County.  And if anyone knows what kind of Edible Arrangement that guy likes...

JUST KIDDING.  But not really...

Definitely excited to get past this hurdle that has been eluding us for so long.  Not only did it take several tries, but even Hurricane Sandy had to get in the way, since our original inspection was scheduled for Monday morning, when she decided to plow through town.  This afternoon, we took our DC neighbors Marni and Alex to the house to show them around, and I hadn't even thought about the inspection having been rescheduled.  While we were driving up, I got a call from the subcontractor doing our kitchen-cabinet install, wanting to know if we forgot about them.  No, I assured them: we've already paid you the $13,000, so you can be darn sure we haven't forgotten about you.  The first email I sent out was not to thank the contractors or brag to my family, but to the cabinet people, letting them know we were now one step away from finally requiring their services.

This is the second time in four days we've been up.  The first was on Sunday, since the neighborhood was having its Halloween party.  It was a great event, with a costume contest that I must say was nearly swept by the Wahl family: Isaac won Third Place in the 6-and-under division for his Solar System costume; and the Adult category was all us-- me in Third with my Orion Constellation; Abby in First with her Cat; and my mom a surprise out-of-state Second-Place winner with her Black-Eyed Susan.  Granted, only three adults showed up in costume, but we don't need to discuss that right now...  After the party, we opened the house up for anyone who wanted to see.  We met some great new-to-us neighbors, including a couple who have two kids nearly the same age as ours.  (We also met some neighbors on the landscaping committee, which might come in handy once we get around to that next year... what was that number for Edible Arrangements again?)  

The reason I bring this all up, though, is because while we were showing people the house, who walks in but our contractor, Mark.  He's there to board up some of our windows ahead of Sandy's grand entrance the next day.  Say what I will about the lack of communication on his part, or the plodding pace of late, but it was very impressive to see him show up with boards and hammers, unrequested, to make sure our pricey windows remained intact.  Brownie points indeed.  He also explained what was going on with some of the red stickers we've been getting lately.  For instance, one had to do with the main pipe under the house, which was perfectly up to code for a house our size... but not for one below grade, which is what ours is, since it's on the side of a hill.  The pipe had to be something like a quarter-inch wider and at a bit of a slant to stop any potential backups.  I think.  (That sounds about right...)  Little stuff like that.  It satisfied my unasked questions on Sunday, although I still feel these are things that should have been known about before, and things that should have been communicated to us when the red stickers appeared.  (That said, I still haven't gotten anything from him today, even though we got a green sticker, so it's not like he's just incommunicado when there's bad news...)

He also said he's not quite sure about our new plans to save the division in the downstairs bathroom.  We will likely have to go ahead as planned, and make that an amendment at the end, if at all.  Even moving the door over a foot to the left may present problems, since there is wiring in that space right now and no extra slack on the wires to be able to move them.  We may lose that, which sucks, but we're not going down without a fight.  What we did "win," though, was placement of the air-conditioning condenser out in the yard. We wanted it to be as far away from the barbecue area as possible, and he had it sitting right next to the back door.  As a compromise, we moved it as far to the front as possible, while still being positioned along the east-side wall.  Stick a few bushes around it and it'll hardly be seen.  (Plus, having it where we wanted it originally would have meant seeing it out the bathroom window, a placement I don't know if we had thought about.)

So what else is going on?  Tomorrow we're supposedly getting the giant HVAC unit delivered, which will be a milestone-- especially since it's ready to go in.  Also, all the trash has been removed from the yard, which is great because I just started getting very pleasantly-worded complaints again, which I hate.  (It's not like I want that trash to be there!)  The contractors graded the whole yard, which I think was a bit of a waste, because it's not how we want it to be in the end-- the whole thing is graded as a slope away from the house, which I understand is wonderful from a drainage aspect, but not exactly from a livability aspect.  It did, however, give us a good idea of what we'll be dealing with in terms of run-off, since the rain from Sandy carved a definite trench across the yard.  We can definitely do something with that-- likely putting in gravel and maybe a French drain to corral the water onto the sidewalk, rather than through the yard.  (By the way, did you know that the "French" in French drain refers not to France but to Mr. French, the father of Daniel French, he of Lincoln Memorial fame?  Yeah, you're welcome.)

Look at the trench carved out by Sandy's rain.
We hope to redirect it off the bottom-left corner of the picture.
That's our HVAC guy working on the vent for the heating system.
The AC condenser will be at this corner of the house.

Overall, this has been a very positive four days.  Sure, tomorrow's November, and we're supposed to be completely done with absolutely everything in 18 days, and we wanted to be moved in last week.  But baby steps, people.  Baby steps.  

And at least that baby's stepping.

Work proceeding on the cement bollards for the electric transformer.

Slow Going

I know I haven't posted anything in a while when I get pinged by my sister.  "New blog post!"  Okay, Courtney, but it's not going to be very exciting.

Slow going these couple weeks, doing a lot of waiting.  It's been pouring lately, and the ground's pretty saturated.  So the plumber hasn't been able to finish, because there's water everywhere.  And the wall behind the retaining wall needs to dry too, I think.  But supposedly both of those things will start up again tomorrow, when the plumbing inspector comes out and puts his stamp of approval on the connections that have gone in.  Yes, the plumbing is not 100% done, but we went yesterday and saw we are now officially hooked in to municipal water and sewer.  The plumber dug up under the sidewalk that faces the kids' bedroom windows-- getting awful close to the huge Yew tree in the process-- and around the corner into the house.  We got there just as the crew was pouring gravel on top of the pipes, so we did get to see the PVC before it was closed up.  And it's not just the water piping that's done-- Washington Gas came out in the last week or so and relocated that crazy pipe that was outside Isaac's window, sure to break the glass the first time he tried to open it.  That big metal thing's now a thing of the past, and we didn't even have to pay for it's removal and relocation.  Yay!  Montgomery County had supposedly been giving Mark the runaround on the permit for the retaining wall downstairs, so the excavation has been at a standstill.  However, yesterday I think he got it all sorted out, so hopefully, since there's a dry forecast for at least the next week, that project can get back on track too.

The water/sewer pipes snaking around the side of the house.

Tight fit for the water/sewer pipes between the sidewalk and the Yew tree.
Notice the big root they dug around; hopefully it won't cause any damage.
The blue pipe sticking up is where our responsibility ends and the
water company's responsibility begins.

We're having more than just a little feeling of crunch time lately, not necessarily because we're behind schedule but more because we have a crazy busy summer coming up.  Between going to Buffalo for a week for the Fourth of July to going to the Olympics for a month for work and going to Russia for a couple weeks to cover a summit, I have literally four free weekends at home the entire summer.  I've been trying to impart this to Mark & Rory, giving them our schedule and pleading with them to tell us beforehand what we need to have decided, and they're slowly giving us things to do.  We went the other night to Home Depot after work to pick out shower heads; not a good idea.  Shower heads are incredibly boring to choose, and taking the kids between school and dinner maybe wasn't the best choice.  We came home grumbling to ourselves, "we are not being overly strict to expect our kids to behave in Home Depot for an hour, are we?"  Lola actually got a time out in the shower-head aisle.  We came out of the experience with one "meh, that one's fine," and one "I guess--"  not the best results for a shopping trip!  Luckily we don't have to pick out bathroom faucets, because they come with the vanities we've already chosen and Abby loves.

Yesterday we stopped by to meet up with people who are going to give us an estimate on kitchen cabinets.  It's a place where they specialize in custom stuff with an ecological bent-- they sell sustainable cork and bamboo flooring, as well as kitchen counter-tops literally made out of paper, for instance-- and we've already chosen floor tile for the bathrooms from them, so they said they'd give us a discount on a custom kitchen.  Fine with me!  But when they came by, I think they confused me more than helping.  Of course, seeing a blank slate, they had all sorts of ideas... that were different than hours.  And when we told them our ideas, it was kinda Seinfeldesque: "Not that there's anything wrong with that..."  The two were an older Iranian guy, Mo, and a younger Serbian guy, Igor.  Mo was kind of the idea man, and Igor was the planner. Or something.  Either way, Mo mentioned moving the wall abutting the bedroom back a foot because our bathroom closet was too wide to be a normal closet and too narrow to be a walk-in.  He mentioned moving the pantry over to the window side of the entryway and blocking out that one window-- a non-starter with me, since the windows overlooking the glen are way too important to block, in my opinion.  He mentioned moving all of the cabinets over to one side of the room, getting rid of the counter-top that blocks the bottom pane of each window, and putting in seating and a quasi-breakfast nook in the corner.  I hate breakfast nooks.  And I am truly scared about the potential lack of storage in this house, even though he assured me there'd be the same amount of storage with his idea that there'd be in mine.  The one important thing he mentioned I hadn't thought of before: the exhaust vent from our stove.  I had thought it should go straight up and out of the roof, but he said it'd be better to make a 90-degree angle and have it exit through the side of the house, since apparently roof exhaust pipes deteriorate more quickly than wall ones.  Problem with his idea is it blocks out the top 6-9 inches of half of the upper kitchen cabinets.  My response was to suggest the pipe go through the wall before making the 90-degree turn, instead using the top 6-9 inches of our bedroom closet.  He was intrigued...

So, they took measurements and will get back to us.  We have someone tomorrow coming as well to give us an estimate; a man Abby met a week or so ago that she described to me as "an old man who is literally in love with granite."  Since we are not putting granite in our kitchen, I hope he's okay with our plans!  In the meantime, we're going to do some more independent study, and hopefully the slow moving will speed up.

Primed Suspect

It's finally happened: our house has changed color.  (Almost) gone is that disgusting Army-issued shade of salmon, replaced (mostly) with the primer that'll go under our Tadpole Green.  And we didn't even know it would happen.  Love those moments.

Our initial view of the new paint-job.  "OMG! It's not pink anymore!"

The color is just a primer, but the actual color won't be all that different.
However, with the highlight colors, it'll be more green looking
than the just-this-side-of-white it looks like right now.

We headed to the Bungalow early this morning... very early.  Actually set the alarm for 7:30 on a Saturday morning to make it there by 9:00 for the community clean-up day.  Took work gloves and my giant hedge clippers with us, along with the kids' gardening tools, and made like good neighbors for a couple of hours.  For my part, I helped clear what the kids call the "secret trail" of the overgrown vines and brush that have crept up onto it over the past year, and it actually looks respectable now.  I wore jeans, boots, and a long-sleeve tee, even though it was in the 70s already, because I didn't want to get poison ivy or any sort of bites/scratches from bugs/thorns, but by 10:00 I was cursing not having worn shorts as the sweat ran in a steady stream down my forehead.  But then I crossed the pretty stone bridge and made my way up the other side of the glen, and into the shade.  Phew... within minutes I was back to normal.  

Met a whole bunch of neighbors today-- some for the first time, and some for the second or third, although I readily admit I don't remember everyone I've met yet, especially since so many have popped in just to say hi as we did one thing or another at the house.  (I promise, neighbors, I will try my best to remember your names when I move in!  I'm just ridiculously bad at names; no idea why.)  Anyhow, how awesome are our new neighbors?  How's about a nice offer of refreshments after getting all gross outside, a tour of a beautiful condo unit inside the President's House building, and a volunteer (without us even asking!) to watch the kids draw with chalk on the sidewalk while we went to take a look.  Seriously, neighbors, you don't know what you're getting yourself into!  (That said, I believe the ladies responsible for those actions were Janice, formerly of Brisbane, Australia; and Chris.  But regardless of their names, which I may have gotten incredibly wrong, thank you!)

It's great to see that, once we get in there, we'll have a built-in community ready to go.  I even suggested we do pot-lucks around the Seminary so we can get to know each other (and spy on each others' homes...), just like we did when we moved to Petworth.  Got a good reaction, but it seems there's already a plan underway to have a fundraising tour of homes in September, and I gladly volunteered the Bungalow to be on the agenda.  It's a start!

After the clean-up, we met our good friends Eric and Janice (of New Jersey and Georgetown, not of Brisbane and Maryland) in the District and talked awhile about how things were going with the house.  After regaling them with stories of the extra $15k we have to spend on pipes, Eric asked me if we had any positive surprises with the house, to set off the several negative surprises we've had lately.  I had to think... a long while.  But there are some:

• This may be more of a non-negative than a positive, but Rory was able to argue our way out of that $3,400 fee the water company wanted to charge us to hook into the system.  You remember: the one we were being charged because our house supposedly never had water service before; the one we would be refunded if we could find the meter number that formerly measured water going in to the house?  Yeah, we no longer have to pay that, only to have to fight for reimbursement afterwards.  Like that.

• 

  Remnants of the useless front foundation wall
  and the new metal support columns.  Surprise!

   Our contractors have been doing a really good job.  Okay, so we're not thrilled about the recent unexpected costs, but we have faith in them, which is more than we can say for many of the contractors that worked on our current house.  You may remember them: the one who toked up in the basement; the one who decided to chip into our foundation rather than cut down the height of a door; the one that took a $2,500 deposit and moved to Georgia, never to be seen again; the one that hit on Abby, making lurid comments at her while she nursed an infant Isaac; the one that hit on Abby and me together, suggesting we swing with him and possibly his wife; the one that... oh, I could go on, but rather, I will point out that not only did our current contractors NOT do ANY of these things, but neighbor upon neighbor has remarked independently of being asked that the workers are working CONSTANTLY.  Not to mention, we discovered today that the dilapidated stone wall holding up the arches under the porch has been completely removed and metal support columns put in its place (see picture).  Not only will this help with stability and give us back a few inches in the downstairs expansion, it was a surprise we didn't know would even happen.  People are apparently amazed (as would I be, based on experience...) that things seem to be humming pretty much nonstop for 8, 10, 12 hours a day.  And improvements are visible.  Like that too.
• And, honestly, the neighborhood.  We very much could have moved into an uber-pretentious neighborhood, full of people who were more concerned about the historical significance of the disgusting pink color of the house rather than welcoming us and remembering our names and being honestly interested in not only how the house is coming along, but also in how we are doing.  Besides the initial surprise of finding the house on run-of-the-mill longandfoster.com, I've gotta say that's a pretty darn good surprise. I left those big hedge clippers by accident in our front garden, and I was initially worried they'd disappear, based again on experiences here in Petworth.  (Remember when someone stole PLANTS out of our yard?  Or broke into our house and stole a box of Golden Grahams?)  But I bet when I swing by tomorrow morning there's a better than 50% chance they're either sitting exactly where we left them or have been taken inside by a neighbor.  Either way, I really like that.

So that's about it from clean-up day.  Monday starts our plumbing work, and hopefully by week's end we'll be connected to the water and sewer mains.  In fact, some of the sidewalk has already been dug up.  Over the next 48 hours we'll have to make final decisions on our bathroom fixtures, and Abby came to the exciting realization today that we have enough room in our upstairs bathroom for a 4-foot-wide shower; I also think we have enough room downstairs for the dual sinks she's wanted but been concerned about losing because of the 90-degree change in plans down there.  Needless to say, things are a-happenin' and I like that as well. :)

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.

Money Pit, Part One

Dear Readers: Please note the following wording, from our sales contract:

"The property is connected to, or has been approved for connection to, a public water and sewer system"

I'll give you one hint as to the reason for our grumbling today: it's the part of that clause that has been set apart by commas.  Yes, the bungalow has been approved for connection to water.  And what that means was spelled out by Mark today: $15,000.  Yes, $15,000 that was not in our budget.  That's what it will cost to turn the house into one approved for connection into one connected to water service.  FIFTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS.

Really?  It was a Spielberg movie?

With our current house, people used to joke about comparisons between it and the house from the movie "The Money Pit."  You know, that bad movie from the eighties with Tom Hanks and Shelley Long.  But that was really because of the state of disrepair of the house, not because of the actual money involved.  In fact, I think we've only spent about $70,000 total to fix up this house, and that includes that $13,000 "splurge" (ha!) on central air conditioning-- worth every freakin' penny, I might add.  This is, therefore, the most expensive thing we've ever done to a house.  And we're not near the end yet.  

As I wrote a few weeks back, we had some issues with the water company-- in that they didn't recognize our house as existing.  That's because we have no link to their pipes, and now we understand that.  When they upgraded the service years ago, they just severed the connection completely.  Nada.  A similar thing happened to our current house and the gas supply, which was apparently cut off after Norman the squatter was using the gas for free; they came and literally ripped the pipes out of the ground.  We had to pay $1,500 to have them re-installed, which we would not have had to have done had we known there was no gas service, and chosen not to have any gas appliances. In that case, it took until the plumber tried to turn on the gas for them to realize there was no gas service at all.  In this case, while the plumbers are only finding out our issues now, we don't exactly have a choice-- it's not like we can choose to go with electric showers and toilets.  Can we?  (Can we?)

Apparently the connection is near our parking spaces, and has to be dug under the house because the water needs to enter the house in our mudroom, the downstairs space just inside the back door.  My guess is the expense comes from the fact that digging will have to occur under the foundation, and care has to be taken so the house doesn't, you know, fall down and stuff.

So here we are.  We have $13,500 left in our FHA contingency fund, which means that, okay, we won't have to pay all $15,000 our of our own pockets right this second (it's already included in the total loan amount on which we're already paying the mortgage) but any other cost overruns will come out of our pockets.  And we've got plenty of work left to go.  The saving grace is that, at the end of all of this, we'll get a considerable percentage reimbursed by the historic folks-- if memory serves me, it'll amount to 20% of everything we do to make the house livable, courtesy of the state, and 10% of everything we do aesthetically to the exterior of the house, courtesy of the county.  (The percentages may be backwards, come to think of it...)  But that just means this will cost us $12,000 in actual dollars, not $15,000, and seeing that we're celebrating the recent payoff of our auto loan-- five years for $23,000-- an additional $12k (or $15k or whatever) added to the pile just means we'll have to drive our car for a few more years than we had planned.

Yuck.

(Please note while you are all invited to be guests in our home, any use of plumbing features, from showering to using the toilet or having your dishes washed before you're served food on them, will come with an historical use surcharge of $150.  The management thanks you for your support of historical structures and the fact that the water company can get away with putting in new lines within ten feet of an existing home without actually linking it to their system.)

(Or maybe, since this is an historical structure, we should just forgo indoor plumbing altogether...)

O Davey Boy, The Pipes are Calling

Even though we're on vacation, there's still work to be done, and much of the work seems to involve being on hold and leaving voicemail messages.  In this case, it's with the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission --WSSC-- a.k.a. the ones who will pipe water into and out of the house.

You call WSSC and immediately get voicemail, which is something I always find fishy.  Like when you call an airline in the middle of a random Tuesday and they tell you how they're "experiencing a high volume of calls" or something; give me a break-- we're going to be put on hold, and it's because you're too cheap to pay more operators, not because too many of us are in need of your services!  But I digress.

So anyhow, this voicemail tells you all of the water people are busy doing what water people do, and you should pick from one of five choices.  The fifth choice is "permits," so I've always chosen that one. Each time, however, I have been directed to leave a message, and that's it.  Last week I left multiple mssages, and each time a guy named Dave called me back, leaving a message of his own. Always when I had stepped away from my desk for about 4 seconds, too.  Anyhow, it was a game of perpetual phone tag.

So on Tuesday, I decided to go out on the deck during the kids' nap times and do my voicemail-leaving and holding with a view of the ocean... and got frustrated again when choice number five led me to yet another voicemail box.  So I hung up and called back, this time going rogue and choosing #1. Nope, same results.  Hung up.  Called back, Choice #2. And guess what? Dave picks up!

So now I find myself standing on the deck looking at the ocean and speaking to the elusive Dave at WSSC.  Before I tell him anything else, I make sure he has my name and number in case we get disconnected, because I'm pretty sure we'll never reach each other again if we get disconnected.  

It's a long conversation-- at least a half an hour-- but it's very productive, and by the time it's over, I've gotten exactly the information I needed, as well as some interesting tidbits as to why no one at any utility knows what/where the heck our house is. Turns out our house has been listed as having at least three different addresses on three different streets, and different permits and site plans have been issued for each-- and this is just for water and sewers. It has been listed on the 2700-block of DeWitt Circle, on the 9600-block of nearby Hume Drive, and as having the same address as the main condo building across the street. So now, along with all of our permit request stuff, we also have to submit paperwork confirming that, yes, we do have a real address, and we are actually a single-family home (we're listed as a condo), and then they can go and normalize all the rest of the historical permit stuff.

Other stuff I learned:

1) We get to pay a $3050 fee along with our permit to help defray the water company's cost of bringing water pipes to the property. And that's on top of the $750 annual payment (for the next 20-some years) to help defray the water company's cost of bringing water pipes BY the property. (Did you catch the difference?)

2) Even though it's the same utility, we get to pay separate fees for water inspection and sewer inspection, as well as fees for each of the toilets, sinks, and spigots we build into the house.

3) We also get to pay a separate fee to have the water meter installed... So they can bill us for our water use.

Phew! Funny, because when DC Water upgraded our lead lines a few years ago, we paid not a cent. Guess that's the difference between living in the 'burbs and what my former boss called "the People's Republic of Washington."

In all, I won't really see most of those fees; they'll all be sucked into our giant FHA mortgage, to be paid in monthly increments for the next 7.5 presidential administrations. We have, however, already paid the $750 fee twice now-- yeah, we're only 57 days short of being a year into this now... I can't believe it either.

After hanging up with Dave, and thanking him profusely (I find that can never hurt with contractors or bureaucrats) I called Rory to update him on everything I had learned. He can pretty much take things from here on water and sewer, except setting up the actual account, which we have to do ourselves. Again, I'm psyched to hear he's been busy in the few days we've been away. Apparently either more windows have been taken off for restoration or those that had been taken off are now back on. Also, the roof is being finished, including refurbishment of the tin section above the front porch. (I promise pics when I get back in town.).

The big current issue is heating, though. He found last month that most of our radiators were unusable, and the replacement cost is likely going to be astronomical. So he and the HVAC folks have been figuring out the best road to hoe. Looks like the radiator/heat-pump combo is going in favor of a larger gas forced-air unit. He says "the numbers still aren't in" on the system, but from how he was talking I'm thinking it's a done deal. I can only guess at how the MHT folks will flinch when they hear the radiators are going-- me too, since we've loved our radiators in the current house-- but we'll be sure to salvage anything we can that's pretty. Not to mention, we'll regain some precious square footage in certain corners of the house, especially the dining room and Isaac's room.

Anyhow, that's it for now. Next week when we get back, we're meeting up to finalize small layout changes needed by updates to the HVAC plan-- as well as little tweaks like moving Lola's closet two inches to accommodate the bed Abby's already chosen for her at IKEA. :) In the meantime, I'll keep on sitting in the sun, on hold-- just not leaving messages with the water company!