So Expensive: Part 3

Part 3:  Install New Garage Doors

(read part 1 and part 2 of our adventures in expensive house fix-ups)

As is fairly established by now, Husband likes spending time in the garage taking a certain vehicle apart.  The new house has a stand-alone garage.  The old house had a connected garage, and the washer and dryer were in the garage, so I would go into the garage on occasion (and inevitably manage to bash my arm on a tailpipe suspended, improbably, four and a half feet in the air).  But the new one is all on its own and literally jammed to the brim with the Old Car.  I never go in there.

Haunted by rusty ghosts.  Really, just rust.

But Husband is in there all the time.  He shimmies around the edges in the narrow path he's made to get to whatever rusty part of the Old Car he is disassembling at any given moment and doesn't even look like he minds it.  When he isn't working, or sleeping or baking pies, or hanging out with me discussing plot inconsistencies in the Transformers franchise, he's out in the garage working on his car.

Husband:  I think we need a new garage door.
Liz:  Why?  What's wrong with the old one?
Husband:  The springs are really old, and the door is really heavy, and I'm worried the garage door is going to collapse on me and kill me.
Liz:  We're getting a new garage door.

He wasn't delusional: the old garage door had no automatic lift and was made out of solid wood, and every time Husband lifted it, it made a terrifying dying-badger sound.  It was just that a) I knew it would probably be a bunch of money and b) after the heinous floor experience, I didn't know if we were ready to deal with another upgrade.  But Husband's life was at stake this time, so it had to be done.

Miraculously, this time, finding a service provider was easy: Husband found a guy on Yelp and called some people, and one of them was remarkable:

1. He actually replied
2. He seemed reasonable on the phone
3. He was willing to come out the very next day to give a quote...
4. ...even though the next day was Sunday.

It was amazing.

He came out on Sunday and brought a brochure of doors we could pick from.  He showed us the one he suggested, which was one of the cheapest ones, and a very good door as well, because it's really just a garage door and who needs...

Liz:  I want that other one.

Garage Door Man:  Oh.  Well, that one is a fair amount more money... 

Liz:  I don't care.  I want that one.

The Garage Door Man seemed baffled that I was willing to spend more money to have a better-looking garage door.  Or maybe he was trying to be sensitive: on the weekends, I generally dress like a twelve-year-old and I'm not old enough looking that when I'm dressed like a twelve-year-old that people can see, ahem, another sixteen years past that.  

Aside:  One time, right after I had taken the bar exam, I sat on a plane next to a director at a company I really like and chatted very intelligently with him about the directions his industry was taking (as I'd done a 120-page paper on that industry my last term of law school).  Mr. Director kept doing double takes / expressing incredulity that I had a JD - because I was wearing jean shorts and an old t-shirt from a mock trial tournament.  Whatever!  It was summer!  I had just taken the bar exam.  I'm not some person insistent on throwing back to the 60s by dressing up to sit on a sweaty Southwest flight.   

Machine washable clothes save the world, too.  Down with dry cleaning.

So the Garage Door Man probably through we were stone cold broke and I was some sort of 18-year-old bride.  Instead of what I actually am, which is a stubborn lady who intends to buy new garage doors only once in the rest of her existence and is thus going to get attractive ones that look like carriage doors.

(Which Husband also wanted.  I'm not some kind of garage door tyrant wife.  Which is going to be the title of my next blog.)

The Garage Door Man nicely acquiesced, and began telling us about his nine (nine!) children and beloved wife while he went to inspect the current door.  Which was the best part, because our garage door was no regular garage door.  As you can see, within the door was another, regular-style door, complete with glass panes and a locking doorknob, though you have to step up over the ledge to enter through it.  Also, the garage door had in it a separate cat door.

This was part of the reason it was so heavy and why Husband and I were genuinely concerned he could get smushed under it.

Garage Door Man, admiringly:  You know, I've seen doors in a garage door before, but I've never seen a cat door in the garage door before.  Two doors within the door.  That's a first.

We were pretty proud to have a garage door unlike any the Garage Door Man had seen before.

We agreed on a price and signed the contract.  After he left, though:

Husband:  I'm sorry - I forgot to negotiate with him at ALL.

Liz:  Don't worry about that - he has like a million children to feed.  I don't want to negotiate with that guy.  

The very next day, Garage Door Man sent the oldest of his million children over to install the new garage door, which did require Husband to roll part of the disassembled Old Car out of the garage.

But other than that, the garage installation was easy and quick - the guy worked outside on it for half a day, and by 5 p.m. we had a brand-new garage door that went up and down by itself and had a nice keypad on the outside.  Just like regular people do.  No cat door.

  

Which is really a loss in case Husband ever trains a cat to help him put the Old Car back together.

So Expensive: Part 2

Part 2:  Install new floors.

[read part 1 and part 3 on how our new house is proving so expensive to fix up]

The old floors in the kitchen and family room were insane tile of the brownish-shape-pattern variety. It was not a good look.

If you look closely, you can see that the pattern is repeating perpendicular dog bones.

The rest of the downstairs had hardwood floor, so we decided to get hardwoods to match. We knew it would cost, but would be worth it in the long run. So all we had to do was find someone to do it. Easy enough right?

WRONG. It is unimaginably hard to pay someone to install a new floor for you.

I dont’ know if there is a profession-wide state of willful insouciance amongst floorpersons, or if floor installers are just rolling in the dough and don’t need work, or if they all just dislike Husband and I personally. But it was nigh impossible to get someone to do hardwood floors in our house. Here is a flowchart of how our process with hiring these guys went:

Finally, we hired someone, which after all of that felt like a miracle. Floor Guy had the excellent credentials of "being the first person to have answered his phone." Our standards were low.

We bought the wood from the guy.  That meant waiting for the wood to ship, which took a couple weeks.  And then once the wood arrived, we had to leave it to "cure" in the house. Apparently wood is moody and needs to get used to the ambiaaaaaaance before you install it.

That would have been just fine. We didn't mind having a ton of planks of wood in the family room - we didn't have any furniture to put in there anyway. It was fine having planks of wood around for Husband's birthday party.

What wasn't fine was that by the time the wood had cured, the floor guy had vanished. He wouldn't answer calls or e-mails. Oh, had I mentioned?  This guy didn't have a website.  He wasn't actually on yelp.  All we had of him was a phone number, that he wouldn't answer, and an e-mail address, that apparently meant nothing to him.

It was like he had been a figment of our imaginations, except for the pile of red oak he had left.  Which meant that we restarted the process:

Finally, one of the earlier non-answerers picked up and agreed to come install the floor. When he came by, he made a big fuss that we had ordered waaaaayyy more wood than we needed. Waaaayyyy more. Husband ignored Floor Guy #2's histrionics and firmly said, "Okay, fine, we will be glad to have the extra for spare then."

We set up a schedule with Floor Guy #2 to install the floor.  But this meant first that Husband and I had to manage to move the entire refrigerator through various narrow passages in our house out of the kitchen.  We were going to put the fridge in the laundry room.  Except it turns out our fridge is wider than the door to the laundry room, or to the bedroom next to the kitchen, or to anywhere but the back door.

So onto the back porch it went.  I wish I had a picture of how our back porch now looked like we were trying some avant-garde experimental kitchen project.  No, wait, it just looked weird.  And was very inconvenient to have to go outside.  In the winter.  To get milk.

Did I mention it was the winter?  Everything in the refrigerator doors froze.

Floor Guy #2 got to installing the floor.  Which you'd think is a fairly simple process.  But it wasn't at all; it was instead days and days of process:

1. FG2 comes to remove the old tiles from the floor.
2. FG2 comes the next day to sand down the gunk from under the old tiles.
3. FG2 comes to install the new wood.
4. FG2 comes to install the pegs and the wood filler on the wood.
5. The wood filler cures endlessly.
6. FG2 comes to sand the floor.

All of the above was complicated by the fact that he was incapable of showing up when he had said he would, or of informing us when he would show up.  So Husband would leave work early to wait around for the floor guy to show up, when he wouldn't; I would be at home on a conference call and answer the door to find, unexpectedly, that today was evidently Sanding Day.

Once he got the wood down, at long last, it looked nice, but pretty raw.

And for blah blah blah reasons, he couldn't stain and finish the floor (which itself was a multi-day process) for another x number of days because he probably enjoyed making our lives difficult. Don't tell me it wasn't intentional.  He could see the fridge out on the back porch.

So for another week or two we stepped very gingerly and carefully on the unfinished floor on our way out to the back porch to the refrigerator.

The floor guy finally stained the floor after Husband signed a BLOOD CONTRACT that the stain was in fact the stain we wanted.  And Husband has a good eye, because it looked awesome:

We were enjoying the finished product until we had a near-simultaneous recollection of a conversation that had happened approximately 300 trips to an outdoor refrigerator ago.

Liz: "Where's all the extra wood he said we would have?"
Husband: "Maybe it's in the garage?"

It wasn't in the garage. It was nowhere.

When we called Floor Guy #2 to ask him where he had taken the rest of our wood, he played dumb. I don't think it was a tough act for him. But he wasn't prepared to deal with two disgruntled homeowners, one of whom was a cranky lawyer with experience in litigating over home construction cases. And if there's one thing you learn in law school, it's that the one still holding the money has the power.

After writing a series of terse letters to Floor Guy #2 (i.e. Stealy McStealerson) that featured the charm of a young litigator and the lyrical elegance of an engineer, we finally agreed to pay Floor Guy #2 a certain amount, which was less than he had quoted us, to compensate for the disappearing wood.

A slightly less aggravating detail of this was that the new flooring also involved removing the old wood-burning stove that was in one corner of the room, which took up a lot of space and made little sense in a place with central heating.

Husband wanted to keep it because it was old.  I pointed out that we had plenty of old stuff around already and that the entire garage was, in fact, full of something old.  He agreed.  We replaced the large black eyesore of a stove...

with a large black eyesore of a really old TV.

But the stove didn't show me episodes of Chopped while I wash dishes, so this is definitely a net improvement.  Though the downside of the TV is it also shows me HGTV, including episodes of shows where people effortlessly install hardwood floors in a single day, and there's no flowchart I can draw to show how enraging that is after all of these shenanigans.

So Expensive: Part 1

"Fixing up our new house is so expensive."

"How expensive is it?"

"It's so expensive Jay-Z raps about fixing up our new house."
"It's so expensive it's becoming suggested as a comparable alternative to law school."
 "It's so expensive they sell it exclusively at Whole Foods."
"It's so expensive Kim and Kanye made it a part of their wedding."

In addition to re-painting the cabinets, which was well worth it to eliminate the pumpkin color scheme, there were a few more necessary things to do to the new house... all of which were expensive.

Part 1: Installing a new oven

The old oven was a double oven, which is great for if you want to bake a ton of stuff, which, ahem, I always do!  But it was really old.  You just looked at it and knew it was really old.  The clock/timer had analog roll-y numbers on it, which is practically Pleistocene.

I mean... come on.

The black oven and orange cabinets have a nice Halloween look.

In addition, there was no built in microwave, and I didn't want to bring our crappy old countertop microwave, which had lived for many years under Husband's dorm room bed (that was the place one kept a microwave in our dorms. they were small.)  So we decided to get a new oven, which was a microwave on top (that could also be a small convection oven) and the oven on the bottom.

Getting a new oven was especially feasible because I got a discount on appliances because someone at my law firm either once sued someone or defended against a suit from someone on behalf of an appliance manufacturer.  I was pretty jazzed about getting a discount, because I love a good sale.  But it was terrifying how much appliances cost even WITH a discount.  Who decided refrigerators are a four-figure operation?  How did this oven cost twice as much as my 3D plasma TV?  Either there is some shady oven cartel happening or TV manufacturers are getting a raw deal.

Once I was over my sticker shock with ovens, I bit the bullet and bought a new one, strengthened by the thought of how ugly the old one was.

The game was afoot.  The first task was to remove the old oven.  Neither of us had previously pondered what one should do once one has removed an enormously heavy oven from a wall.  The solution we settled on was to set it on a milk crate as if we were on  MythBusters testing the load-bearing capacity of milk crates.

Ready, steady...

Answer: A milk crate can support at least one oven.  

Once the oven was out, we discovered that there was a different shade of green paint underneath the orange paint on the cabinets.  How deep did the conspiracy go???

Look above the cooktop and to the right of the ovenspace.

Because this would be shorter than the old double oven, we got a contractor to build a space for a new drawer on the bottom (and in the meantime the painting occurred). 

Husband got excited for me to blog about the oven because, in his words:

•   It was really heavy to move the old oven out and the new one in
•   It took forever to install the new oven
•   He has a bunch of pictures of the installation process.

Unfortunately, I think he forgot the main obstacle to me blogging about it, which was.... I totally left him to do all of the work and didn't help at all.  Everything was too heavy!  The Brothers were over to help with the lifting!  I .... am horrible and selfish and didn't want to deal with it and don't have experience hardwiring appliances or ANYTHING ELSE and... had important iPad games to play.  I only helped a tiny bit at the very end to side in the new oven once they had it installed.

I know.  I am a terrible person.  Unlike Husband, who is a brilliant person who can fix literally anything.  It's very impressive.

What I can tell you is that this oven BARELY fits onto the wall.  It has like half a millimeter of clearance on either side.  If we put too many coats of paint on  the wall, it won't fit anymore.

It also has a digital display because this is America.

But I do remember this.  Once the new oven was installed, we were waiting on the new drawer to come for the space beneath the new oven.  Husband came in to the house holding a drawer.

Liz:  Did the contractor drop that off?

Husband:  No, I just found this in the garage?

Husband experimentally tried the drawer in the hole in the wall - the hole that, keep in mind, the contractor had JUST BUILT and built expressly to fit our new oven.

The drawer fit perfectly.

?!?!???

We were both baffled.

Liz:  But he's already building the new drawer.

Husband:  Well, now we have this one as a spare, I guess?

It was HIGHLY improbable.  But I guess with all of the money we paid the contractor to build and for the new oven, it was nice to find something - however duplicative - for free.

return next week for parts 2 and 3 of the saga in "Home ownership is expensive, no duh Liz, everyone knows that"!

Not Unmoved: A Tale of Packing

When I was in college, I moved every.  Single.  Year.  It was no mean feat, either - when I first rolled up to college, I did so in a uHaul packed with my possessions.  I overheard whispers of awe as I hauled all of my dorm necessities up the stairs.*  And everything when back down the stairs nine months later and into a storage bin, out of which it came three months later, up a different set of stairs, and so on.  I lived in a different dorm all four years of college.  I thought it was a luxury when I lived in one of those dorms for 12 straight months rather than 9.

Of course, after college, due to a specific confluence of circumstances I ended up moving everything out, back to my childhood home a thousand miles away, and then back to the exact same school again three months later.  If I ever want to plead insanity, I will have plenty of people to testify that I actually did this.  

Twelve months later, I moved again.  

So in five years of my life, I had moved all of my earthly possessions a total of nine times while stubbornly refusing to reduce the quantity of said possessions.  Despite the moving.  Despite unsolicited suggestions as to the appropriate quantity of shoes required for existence as a student.  Despite the trauma to certain groomsmen called upon to move my couch while still recovering from and dressed for our nuptial celebrations.

After that ninth time of moving, I was of the opinion that moving could SHUT UP.

Fortunately, that last time was moving in with Husband after our wedding.  We successfully snookered various members of the bridal party into doing at least the final heavy lifting while we were on our honeymoon in Hawaii.  (Apparently we have a habit of going to Hawaii during housing transitions.)

And then we didn't move again for a long time - five glorious years of no moving.  But we bought our house!  Which was very exciting!  Until the initial elation faded and we realized what it meant.

We had to move.  Again.  And moving makes your place look like this:

As Husband can attest, I don't even like packing for a short trip.  It's one of my least favorite activities.  I did not greet the task of packing our entire life up with tremendous enthusiasm.  SOME person I MAY OR MAY NOT be married to may have described my demeanor as "sulky."  Perhaps it was: starting to move required confronting three very serious things I had henceforth largely been able to ignore:

1.  The exponential increase in stuff-accumulation that happens the longer you don't move

2.  The mold

3.  The entirely disassembled elderly vehicle in our garage.

Point the First:  Stuff Accumulation

I have modeled below the Liz Functional Theorem of Stuff Accumulation:

Current stuff = ((starting amount of stuff + major gift-receiving life events) * number of closets) ^ (years in residence)

In our case, the theorem proved chillingly accurate.  (OK, I can't really quantify it, but close enough.)  Neither Husband nor I are particularly inclined to throw things away.  We have "reference" files full of papers that include his resume as of his senior year of high school, or a job offer I got for a summer internship halfway through college.  We have a full costume box.  We have a selection of sheets for XL-twin beds that haven't fit any bed since we left behind the crappy dorm ones.  I have enough bottles of half-used hair products that, if dumped into the bathtub, could drown small rodents.  

When you move, you at least confront the more egregious items that need to go.  The shirt that is really affirmatively torn.  The box of cards received on your last birthday.  The pens that are out of ink.

I wasn't used to having stayed in the same place for five whole years AND having had the use of all the closets in the house.  So when we started packing, I started finding some next-level crazy stuff:

•  A bunch of broken vases.  
• A plastic box containing:  

1. an empty box sunglasses had some in; 
2. a pink feather boa; 
3. a bunch of save-the-dates for our wedding; 
4. a fanny pack; 
5. a worn-out black leather belt.

• Twelve billion wire hangers

When did I decide that was an important selection of items to store together in the guest room closet?  

The most notable find was my dried-out wedding bouquet:

Which led to this inconclusive** text message exchange with Sassy:

Point the Second:  The Mold

We knew our house had mold.  You can't get a house for cheap rent in a VSREM just on good looks.  We also knew from the fact that for a long time, whenever it rained, the roof would leak and one of the walls would actually swell up with water and be kind of squishy if you poked it.  The landlord eventually repaired the roof, but our battle with mold had been ongoing.  We scrubbed the walls with bleach frequently.  We once painted a couple walls with mold-resistant primer stuff.  None of it seemed to do much good -- the house was damp and poorly insulated and it kept coming back.

We just hadn't realized how much. 

When you take the furniture out of rooms, the room looks pretty sad:

But when you take furniture out of rooms and find a ton of mold, that makes YOU look pretty sad.

Husband sprang into action.  He was DONE with mold and did not want to bring a single spore of it to our new home.  So... amazingly... we actually threw a lot of stuff away.  If we felt it was too mold-contaminated, in the trash it went.  All of the furnitures was thoroughly scrubbed and left outside on bright sunny days to kill the mold.  Items that had been in the room with the worst mold were cleaned and then sealed in airtight ziploc bags for a period of no less than two months.  We were zealous.

Friend:  "Your new house smells a lot ... fresher? than your old one?"

Husband:  nods knowingly

The rest of the move was fairly standard, with only the minor glitch when my mom and decided we absolutely needed to remove gross shelf paper from the shelved in the new house before we could put anything in that closet, so that had to happen immediately for obvious reasons:

There was also the issue that Husband really didn't want to move our old TV because it is ridiculously big and heavy.  It has a giant screen but is NOT a giant flat screen - it's an old projection TV and thus weighs twelve million pounds.  Husband, sensibly, wanted to sell the TV on Craigslist before we moved a buy a new one.  I, stubbornly, did not want to admit I had already bought Husband a new TV for his upcoming birthday.  The TV got moved.  

Astute readers will have noticed I never reached Point the Third:  Enormous Disassembled Elderly Automobile.  That's another story for another day, bien sur.  You will stay tuned, non, mes petits cheres?

* In justification of taking a uHaul to college: I was moving from a state without sales tax to a state with ridiculous sales tax!  I had attempted to buy everything I would ever need for the rest of my life before I left.  

** I currently cannot remember if I threw my spooky, Miss Havisham wedding bouquet out or if I hid it in the new garage.  Hmmm.

Functional Listmaking

When we told our realtor we wanted to make an offer on the red house, she was excited for us and supportive. She thought it was a good house for us and that we could get it.

So it just came down to the question that drives all economic decisions: how much? And unlike with buying a granola bar, the answer wasn’t a constant set by Safeway but the result of a multivariate equation. As I explained before, in this Very Special Real Estate Market, you have to pick a number you want to offer. And whereas in Normal Places, if the asking price is $p, you might offer $p - x where x is a function of number of likely other offers, amount of time the house has been on the market, and any repairs or renovations you might need to do.

‘Round these here parts, your offer is more like $p + y, where y is also a functional of likely other offers, plus some other stuff, like the fact that the weather was nice on the day of the open house and what the seller’s realtor’s horoscope will say in three weeks and then a fixed but unknown arbitrary positive number because it sucks to be you.

It feels like witchcraft and I don’t believe in witches. I do believe in negotiation. I hadn’t believed that I was going to need to negotiate with my own realtor.

The negotiation was precipitated by the fact that the $y I wanted to add to $p (we’ll call my number $yLiz, with apologies that I can't figure out how to get Blogger to do superscripts) was far lower than the $y she thought we needed to add to get the place (we’ll call that $yRealtor). In fact, rather alarmingly, her idea of what $y should be was almost twice as big as my idea of what it should be.

The disparity didn't surprise me. There is an inherent difference between her incentives and mine - while she was extremely helpful, it was never going to be coming out of her pocket at the end of the day. And there was the, ahem, additional factor that she knew that I hadn’t exactly been Ms. Cucumber while we were at the open house.

But I think she wasn’t aware of the fact that a lot of my enthusiasm was generated by the fact that unlike most sane human beings (who watch television shows like, I dunno, what are the cool kids watching these days? Mad Men? Man, how I loathe that show), I have inoculated myself against fear of renovation by near-incessant viewings of Property Brothers, Flip or Flop, Love It or List It, and other key HGTV renovation shows. In other words, I’m far less likely than the Average Jen to be scared of a little orange paint and a melange of 1940s tile jobs.

So I sat down to negotiate with my own realtor and redeem myself as a Collected Professional Lady in the eyes of my dear and beleaguered Husband. And there’s one skill I learned in law school (I think by accident - I don’t think anyone taught us this) that comes in handy more often than you think. It works like this:

Take out a yellow pad of paper. Take out a pen. and start making a list of all the problems your opponent has right in front of them. If you’re really good at this, you can make the list while still staring them in the eye. And as it happens, I’m really good. (It helps that when you fold back the pages on a legal pad that the person across the table from you can’t see if your list is cascading down the page sideways because you’re not looking where you’re writing).

After I did that, she caved. She said that when she went to them with the offer, she could point out that we had really done the math and that we knew how much it needed ot be put into it and that our offer was very reasonable. And then she said she’d go draw up the paperwork.

Something that feels like a spa-level luxury to this lawyer: having someone else do the paperwork for you.
As she went to get the paperwork, Husband offered casually, “Oh, by the way, I’m going to be out of the country for the next week.”

She stopped walking and turned around. “You’re leaving the country while you try to put an offer on a house?”

Husband answered, “Yeah, I have work. Why? Liz will be here, she can handle anything you need.”

The realtor looked at him, then at me, then at the list on the table, then back at me with an expression I would describe as “retreating to a mental safe house.”

I tried to give her my best non-diabolical smile, but I think it’s gotten rusty.

----------------

We got the house.  Including an old ladder and some other old stuff that was in the garage, to the great delight of Husband.  It's the most grown-up thing we've ever done.

-----------------

The start of the closing process was pretty straightforward, in fact. It did require signing each of our names to approximately twelve kazillion pieces of paper (each).  But we had a strategy for the rest of it, and by a strategy, I mean a happy accident:

“Oh, hey, realtor/title people/mortage people: we’ll be in Hawaii during most of the closing period.”

The resulting consternation was extreme, despite the fact that our realtor should have known we apparently don’t respect whatever secret rule exists that whilst purchasing a house, you must remain within 50 miles of said house for the entire process. Our realtor, mortagee, and title person all could not believe that we were going AWAY. To a FAR-OFF ISLAND. During the CLOSING PROCESS?!?!?!?!?!!!!!

“Well, what do you need us here for?”

What if you need to sign/see/hear/be talked at about/re-sign something?

“You can call either of us on our cell phone. Or you can e-mail us if we need to sign something. We’ll scan it back. They have Internet there. It’s America.”

...but! but! BUT…

“It’ll be fine.”

I don’t know if we were wildly lucky. I don’t know if normally everything does come crashing to a halt if you vacation during your real estate transaction. I do know that I did have to sign a jillion documents what felt like seven times each, and that I was signing and scanning like I was on a personal quest to endurance-test the scanner. But despite the fact that we left town for half of our two-week closing, everything was fine.

And we came back from our vacation to our very own home.