Let There Be (Sun-)Light!

We were in Florida for a couple of weeks, just getting back this Tuesday, so I hadn't had a chance to see the house since the day before we left.  But Abby had been there just before the trip, and saw the very first step in our window refurbishment process.  She proceeded to take a picture on her phone... and there it sat for 2+ weeks, because we have no idea how to get pictures from her phone onto the internet.  And, weirdly enough, she can only send/receive pics by text, and my phone can only send/receive pics by email. (Is it an AT&T-vs-Verizon thing?  Whatever...)

ANYHOW, yesterday was the first day since late March I was able to go up to Forest Glen, and I got an eyeful: the original windows on the first floor have been entirely refurbished!  The ones that had been boarded up for so long are now open, and all of them have been stripped and primed white, ready for the next step.  And that's no small task: we've got 17 windows just on that floor!  (Okay, now that I think of it, there's one window that wasn't done-- in the first-floor bathroom.)  Regardless, the change from the outside is remarkable, and makes me even more impatient for when the whole place is done.  The change from the inside is amazing, especially in the family room, where all five windows had previously been boarded up.  Granted, the room's crazy bright right now because light from the 12 windows in the kids' rooms is shining through what will be walls, but still... most of my previous visits to the room have been in the dark, and even in the light there was pretty much no light getting in.  Now, the three little windows facing DeWitt seem just to be waiting to hover over Anyu's piano, and the two big ones facing the glen are filled with bright green from outside.  Yes!

Many of the second-floor windows are currently being refurbished, so several blocks of 'em are empty, with big plywood slabs posted over the openings as if expecting a hurricane.  The second floor will definitely take longer, because not only are there the 25 regular windows, but also the 6 up in the balconies, the five surrounding the front door, and the huge bay window overlooking the glen.  In other words, maybe it's time for another trip to the beach!

The initial view from the parking spaces.  Get a load of those windows!
They're all original windows so far; none have needed replacement.
If you look through them, you can see the walls going up in the first floor.

Lola looking out of the newly-unboarded windows in her bedroom.
She's standing up on the sill, which starts just about at her forehead
if she were standing on the floor.  The window looks out at the glen,
the windmill, and where our patio and barbecue will be eventually.

Who is this clean-shaven guy looking out of my daughter's gorgeous windows?

The glen side of the house, showing the three refurbished windows
in Lola's room, along with the two newly-unboarded windows in the family room.
The kitchen windows (above left) are currently being refurbished,
and the window in the dining room (the little one next to the window box)
is one of the last to still be boarded up.

A newly-unboarded window on the glen side of the house,
looking through the family room to the three newly-unboarded
windows looking out onto the street side of the house.

Isaac looking through the newly-unboarded streetside windows, through the family room,
and at a posing Abby (if you can make her out) standing on the glen side.

The street side of the house, showing additional new refurbishments,
in our bedroom (at right) and in the great room's windowbox (at left).
Also notice the refurbishment of the strange white frieze at bottom right,
which used to be the divide between the house and the screened-in porch--
which is now our bedroom and the kitchen.
(Plus, note the completed roof!)

The newly-bright family room, thanks to five newly-unboarded windows.
Isaac's room's to the left, laundry room and stairs to go up to the right,
and a space for Anyu's piano right along the wall.
Also, lots of room for needed storage (12"-18" deep) all along the top.

The newly-bright family room, this time looking toward the glen.
Lola's room to the right, and the guest room, the second stairway up,
and the entrance to the mudroom and bathroom are to the left.

Nice view

So we've got news of visible progress at the house... but it's really late and I don't want to stay up writing about it. So, in the meantime, I'll show you some pics I took both right next to the house and from the house. I promise to show pictures of the house tomorrow. :)

The renovated windmill.  Not done, but gorgeous nonetheless.
The owners are in the military, in their last tour before retirement.
In three years, they'll move in here permanently.
Our house is just off camera to the left.

The view from our kitchen windows, with the refurbished windmill in the foreground.
Can't wait to be seeing this as I'm packing my lunch in the mornings before work!

The kids playing at the end of DeWitt Court, with the windmill off camera to the left
and the Colonial's front porch to the right.  When the school was operational, there
was a bridge that went straight ahead, over Forest Glen, to the Castle and the Villa,
which are off camera to the right.

More of the Colonial.  No owner yet.
It may become a condo rather than a single-family home, because of the
problems potential buyers have faced with financing and insurance,
given it's attached to another section of the Seminary that remains undeveloped.

Can you speed it up?

So the lovely Patty from our mortgage servicer emailed the other day to request that we set up a draw inspection, which is good, and right on time. (A draw inspection is a regular meeting with the FHA Loan inspector and our contractors in order to make sure things are proceeding on time, and for the contractors to get some more money based on what they've completed since the last draw, as approved by the inspector and us.) So in the process of scheduling the draw inspection, Patty notes we need to be finished by May. Um, come again?

Yeah, so apparently these things should only take six months. Who knew? Well, we knew things could be open for six months at a time, and that you could get extensions. So at first our loan servicing agreement was good through December, and since in December we hadn't even gotten permits yet it was extended through May. Problem is, even though we've had a lot of progress lately (and hope to see more tomorrow, during the aforementioned draw inspection), we're not exactly done. Or close to done. Or thinking of being done.

Our target is still Labor Day-- it has always been Labor Day. At first, our target was Labor Day because we wanted to be sure Isaac could start kindergarten in Montgomery County schools. Then we added an "ish" after the target holiday because we liked Isaac's pre-k so much that we are nearly certain we're going to keep him enrolled there for kindergarten (and just drive him once we move). So now we can fudge on our target date, we think, because we're no longer pressed for that school-year-driven date. But Patty has other thoughts.

I responded to her email with an incredulous one of my own, then realized she's not the bad guy, nor is she asking us for anything we don't want to be giving her; after all, we'd like to be done by May! But, alas, that is not to be. Patty said we'd have to give her some really good reasons why we can't be done by May; I'm guessing "neither the electric nor the water and sewer utilities currently recognize our home address as existing, let alone are they thinking of beginning to inspect whether they want to allow us to apply for permits to possibly maybe turn those utilities on" is a decent one.

So where we stand right now is that we're trying to persuade our mortgage servicer to slow down, and our utilities to speed up. Meanwhile, we'll get to see progress tomorrow (with pics, I promise!) and we'll finalize all our plumbing fixtures over the next 24-48 hours (again, with pics, I promise!). In the meantime, I have to do some agonizingly early overtime over the next four workdays (arriving at work by 5 AM!) and all I can think about is that, in the end, these four days of jetlagging myself within my own time zone should at least pay for our dishwasher. (Gotta see the positives...)

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!

Ballroom

We're going on vacation tomorrow for a couple weeks, sans laptops, so if I am able to post anything before we get back it'd be from a Blackberry, and therefore pictureless.  So... I figured before I left I would leave you all with a picture of the National Park Seminary Ballroom, which is just steps from the house.  It's a gorgeous five-story room with original chandeliers, original statuary, and an original sound system by the Victrola Corporation, as well as condos whose front doors open into it.  Several condos are directly underneath, which severely restricts how much dancing there can be on the dance floor, but mark Abby's words: our children will be married in this room.  And you know Abby ain't no liar.

The Wahls Have (Framed) Walls

What a difference a bunch of 2x4s makes.  When Rory told us they framed the walls in the basement this week, I didn't know what I would think when I got downstairs.  My own bedroom is so small upstairs, but one of the rooms I was the most afraid of, size-wise, was the family room downstairs.  Especially since almost all the downstairs windows are segregated into the kids' rooms, I was imagining a narrow, dark tunnel with staircases at either end.  Well, that's not how it turned out.  Standing in what is now a well-defined family room, complete with 9-foot ceilings, I'm really happy at its size.  There's plenty of room for kid stuff, for tv-watching, and for Anyu's piano, whenever it gets down here.  (I'm a bit disappointed with the size of the kids' rooms, actually, but I think it's because I didn't picture well exactly where the dividing walls would be.  Both kids have spacious closets, but their rooms are not huge, and I'm already hearing protestation from 12-year-old Lola ten years from now.  Abby disagrees, and says the walls are exactly where they should be, so she wins.)

The newly-walled family room, with Isaac's room on the far left.

Next up is what I feel the most important find of the day was.  Walking into the house, first thing I walked up the steps and turned right, expecting to see the remnant of great-room wall above the bathroom cutout still there.  But it's gone!  I grinned like a little kid with a lollipop for about five minutes over that one, because I'd been waiting for that final piece of the great-room ceiling to open up since the day we closed on the place.  No sooner did I express my joy at this bit of demo than I turned to find Abby with that "I'm reworking things in my head" look we all know and love.  Uh oh, what's up?  Apparently she didn't realize what I meant by "that last piece of great-room wall that needed to come down," and in her head the part going up to the ceiling was staying.  Woman!  How many times do I have to tell you this was the most important part of the room to come down?!  No matter, though, because by the end she was thinking of places she could shop for an appropriate piece of art to go in the space.  See?  I get what I want, and she gets to go antiquing on a random girls' weekend with her mom.  We all win.

The box around the bathroom may look wonky, but it will be echoed on the other side with my bedroom closet, and  it opens up the ceiling and reveals the faux railing we didn't know was there originally.  It's a win win win win win, if you ask me!

Next up, that tiny little bedroom I talked about earlier.  You know, the one everyone thinks we're crazy for doing.  Well, first off, if Abby wasn't sold on it before (and she was), she is now, considering our (her!) immense closet is now in.  (You'd see a picture of it, except the one I took turned out really bad, so just imagine a great big closet with Lola and Abby smiling...)  With the closet framed out, we can now see exactly how much room we're going to have in the bedroom, as opposed to just doing what we had been doing up to this point-- measuring off the area in our current bedroom and making sure we can live with the space.  So I took a broom and swept the dust out of an area the size of our bed, just so we could see exactly how much space we were dealing with.  I think it's perfectly fine.  Yeah, it's not vast plains of openness or anything, but we're not going to be banging into things-- especially since Abby's grandpa's armoire will no longer grace the bedroom (hooray!).  See for yourselves:

We're left with a decent area to walk around the bed, as evidenced by the sawdust lines.
Also notice the frame of the closet in the far left; the closet stretches across the entire length (9') of the room.

Finally, I have to mention again how cool it is to have other people doing the work for us.  I feel so entirely spoiled to have so much (although not all) of the badgering and tooth gnashing of the project foisted onto someone else's lap.  I can just show up and-- surprise! -- work has been done.  Even before we got into the house, we could see progress when we drove in to find the entire bottom row of windows in the back of the house were frameless.  I guess they've been taken to the window restoration people for a first look at how that whole process is gonna work.  Additionally, the countertop in the kitchen has begun to be framed, and we can now see exactly how much of the kitchen windows (exactly one pane per window) will be blocked out by our need for storage-- and we're perfectly okay with it.  I'm very much looking forward to more of having other people do stuff for me... it's just such a foreign concept that I'll probably mention it about every other post from here on out!

Bottom window frames were taken out for restoration.
Notice the framing in the kids' bedrooms on the bottom floor.
Also notice the framing across the bottom of the six windows at top right (in the kitchen).

Close-up of the removed window frames

Comparing windows: our room vs. Isaac's

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!