Before... mid-process... and after.

What you see there is a new handrail, 9 balusters, 1 rosette, 1 newel and 1 cap. And if you have no idea what those words mean, you will from a post some time next month. There’s even a volute in the next one!

Before and after from the bottom...

He suggested that I use this space to update our vast readership of 3 (he insists it’s more like 2o, but I think that the same 3 people just read each post like 7 times…) about what’s been going on in lovely Virginia Beach.  We’ve been surprisingly productive, mostly because there really isn’t much else to do.  Since we made the very regrettable decision to leave all of our stuff in storage for the first month in order to lay flooring without having to move furniture from room to room as we go, we have no couch, no TV, no Wii, no Xbox, no Netflix…in other words, none of the usual time wasting devices that have served us so well in the past.  We do have our laptops and the internet, and the first season of Lost on DVD, but we still find ourselves with several hours a day to fill.   During those hours, we mainly do one of two things – buy stuff or fix things.

The buying stuff component has been taking up most of our time lately, primarily because we have so few of the things that we need to update the house, let alone live in it.  On our trip east, we were limited in how much we could bring due to the ridiculously huge cat carrier we bought for Neko, which took up 3/4 of the backseat.  Considering he spent most of the trip on one of our laps, that ended up being a great buy.  In any case, we quickly discovered that although it is possible to live without things like chairs, tables, dishes, curtains, etc., it’s not very comfortable living.  So we’ve become regular shoppers at the 24 hour Walmart, as we only seem to need things after 11 pm.  We’ve also been picking up the supplies we need to bring this house into the current century decor-wise.  So far, we’ve bought lots of paint, laminate flooring, carpet, plumbing materials, and the dozens of parts needed to make a new banister.  And of course, for each project we begin, there are the requisite tools that one doesn’t really need for apartment living.  This list is shorter but more expensive – Richard has gleefully bought himself a miter saw, a shop vac, a new drill, two kinds of automatic painters (which admittedly work incredibly well), and several other hand-held tools that don’t require a power source.   We’re also in the process of buying new appliances, as our house did not come with such luxuries as a refrigerator, washer, or dryer.  Living without a fridge is painful, so a good chunk of time has been devoted to shopping for one of those.  And although our one trip to the laundromat was pretty cool (did anyone else know that they have those massive industrial washers that can do 8 loads at once?  very neat), it was also surprisingly expensive and time consuming – I wouldn’t want to visit every week for the next few years.

Neko after his brush with our new paint

Aside from spending money, we’ve also spent some time on actual renovations and repairs.  Richard successfully fixed our upstairs bathroom sink, which was suffering from some very very old pipes, and we’ve finished painting both of the upstairs bedrooms.  Our only previous experience with painting was pretty negative, but painting so far has been OK.  Our “decorative” plaster walls are a bit challenging to work with, as they don’t accept paint evenly, but I’m generally happy with the end result (you can see some pictures of the process in our new photo album [coming soon], in case you’re curious as to what we’ve done).  The only annoyance this time has been trying to keep the cat from getting into the paint.  Neko has developed a love of corners, something which he didn’t have much access to in our overfilled apartment, and during our first day of painting he snuggled into one and wound up partially blue (picture on the right).   Richard is also in the process of building us a new banister to replace the ugly metal one that we currently have.  Building a banister is a lot more complicated than you’d think, so I’m sure he’ll be posting himself to describe the process once he’s done.

So that’s basically been our lives for the past week and a half.  The next two weeks will likely be more of the same, as we still need to paint the downstairs, remove the hideous wood paneling, drywall, lay tile, install laminate flooring, have our carpet installed, and hopefully have the movers bring our stuff so that we can begin to unpack.   And once all that’s all over, we get to start work on the kitchen and bathrooms.  The fun seems like it will just never end.

Three reasons for this: 1) a package with our new Dyson was going to arrive, 2) we wanted to receive our pile of mail that had been held at the post office and 3) we weren’t sure if we needed to be home when the power got turned on.

#1 went fine.  The Dyson arrived, and it looks pretty awesome.

#2, not so much.  It turns out that Amy scheduled the mail hold to end Thursday instead of Wednesday.  But still no problem – we could wait another day for mail.

#3 was a bit more of an issue.  Around 3PM, still without power, I decided that perhaps I should give Dominion Power a call and see if they knew when the technician would be coming out.  I managed to look up the phone number for their customer support line through Google on my phone, and gave them a ring.  It turns out a hold was on our account – we needed to send in a fax with two forms of ID for our account to be processed.

Fine – we very quickly load the car and drive to the nearest FedEx and send the fax.  On the way back to the house, Amy calls Dominion Power again.

“We just want to verify that you received our fax,” Amy says.  To which the support rep responds that it will take 72 hours to verify any faxed documents.

“And then it will be another 48 hours to reschedule someone to come out?”  Yes, apparently it will.  We’ll be without power for a week.

At this point, we’re both a little irate.  When Amy asks why she needed to send these documents, having not been told this the three prior times we’d called (the first being over a month ago – Dominion Power Failure #1), the rep tells her it is because she gave the wrong SSN when she was ordering.

Except she didn’t.  The problem was that the high-school dropout on the phone when Amy called the first time couldn’t remember more than 2 numbers at a time and wrote her SSN incorrectly into the system 4 times.  Apparently that flagged her account in some way that we needed to provide the extra identification.  Failure #2.

So given all this, why didn’t Dominion Power call us when the system automatically canceled our appointment for something that we didn’t do?  Well, because they don’t do that.  It’s up to you to discover that your house doesn’t have power or if the appointment that you’d scheduled isn’t really happening.  Failure #3.

Now, did I say “a little irate” before?  At this point, it was probably a little more than a little.  Amy quietly and rather angrily explained the situation to the rep at Dominion Power, and to her credit, the rep immediately understood how her company had wronged us several times.  We’re on hold for 5 more minutes.

“Someone will be out tonight.”

So ultimately – redemption for Dominion Power.  They made several mistakes, but ultimately made it all right.  Thankfully.

After we had power, we got to discover all of the little things wrong with the house that we didn’t remember.

1. No power outlets are grounded except in the kitchen.
2. Both bathrooms have giant holes behind the vanity.  Our cat, Neko, is thrilled about this and has already made several attempts to reach wherever they lead.
3. The downstairs bathroom shower head is broken off – as in, there’s a tiny, rusted metal piece screwed onto the threads.
4. The upstairs bathroom sink’s drain was stuck closed, and the shower drain is very slow.  Upon investigating the apparently-but-not-actually metal pipe under the drain, it collapsed in on itself, and now pours whatever water comes down the drain out into the vanity.  The only way to fix it is to replace the lower u-bend of the p-trap, but the thing is attached in such a way that I can’t figure out how to dislodge it (the part I would expect to screw off to remove the u-bend is a metal circular ring).  Not to mention the brown, green, and white powders all around it (which I am assuming are rust and calcium).
5. The ceiling fan in the upstairs bedroom makes an unpleasant thumping noise periodically when it’s running (about every 4 rotations).
6. The air conditioning does not really make it to the second floor, leaving the downstairs freezing and the upstairs warm.
7. Insects.

If you have any advice on what to do for any of these, especially #4, please let me know.

On the bright side, we came home yesterday to find a little green frog attached to our front door.  I thought we should capture him and put him in a terrarium, but Amy convinced me otherwise.

Somewhat surprising to us, it was actually cleaner than when we looked at it in March.  All of the changes we requested were apparently done correctly (at least, aside from converting the two-prong outlets to grounded three-prong outlets), and the walls are all covered in primer, ready for us to get to work.

Tonight, we are in a hotel for hopefully the last night in a while.  Tomorrow, the electricity should be turned on, our mail that has been held for a month should be delivered, our new Dyson vacuum cleaner that we bought on Woot should arrive, we need to buy painting and basic household supplies, we need to call a contractor about several jobs (knocking out a wall, adding grounding to some of the plugs, moving the water lines for the washer/dryer from the kitchen to the utility room, and putting in new flooring over asbestos tiles), we need to set up an install for cable Internet access at home, and we need to set up our new local checking account.

In other words, a full day!

This time, we thought, we’ll be proactive.  We’re moving across the country (hiring professional movers and everything!), so we should do things right.  Virtually everything small we owned was in a box of some sort.  Anything larger (like our bookcases, although they were disassembled), we left out.  Apparently, that was an incorrect course of action.  When the movers arrived, they came in, looked at our pile of stuff, and sighed.

I didn’t take that to be a good sign, and it wasn’t.  Evidently – and I wish someone, such as, for example, the moving company, had told us this – movers can only take objects wrapped in blankets and packing tape or packed in a corrugated cardboard box.  So the movers set to wrapping every single object we owned in blankets and miles of packing tape.  At one point, I even drove to the Container Store to buy extra boxes into which we could put the smaller non-cardboard boxes.  The movers arrived around 6PM (they described this as “in the afternoon”) and left at 5:30AM.  Oh yes – they spent nearly 12 hours packing our one-bedroom apartment into their truck.  Admittedly, we have quite a bit of stuff.  But 12 hours?  We moved nearly the same amount ourselves in a U-Haul to this apartment two years ago in less than 5 hours.

And it cost us too.  The $1800 estimate we were given was of course based on too little information – an extra $800 in space from the estimate was needed, plus $600 in extra packing materials (including nearly $100 in packing tape!).  We ended up with around a $3000 bill for moving, which I think is a little steep.

The scheduling also put a dent in our plans.  Originally, we assumed the movers would be arriving around 2PM Saturday and spend maybe 6-7 hours loading.  After they left, we were planning to clean the apartment, set up the inflatable bed for our last night, and have a nice relaxing transition to our 24 hours worth of driving.  We had even made an appointment for Comcast to come between 8 and 10AM to pick up their equipment, and we told our landlady that we’d be out by 10.

At 6AM, I went to sleep for a nice 5-hour nap while my wife started cleaning (as one of us needed to be rested in order to drive the 8 hours later that day).  At 11AM, I woke to find my wife still cleaning, although she’d called our landlady to delay our move-out until 1PM and had napped next to me for an hour (although I didn’t notice it happen).  Comcast still hadn’t arrived.  I ran the excess 60 lbs. of clothes that we weren’t taking with us to Goodwill and got back to help with the final cleaning and loading the car.  Our landlady knocks at the door at 1:15PM with her carpet cleaner and basically shoved us out the door.  She promised she’d deliver the Comcast box to the company.  And I don’t think we’ll be getting our security deposit back.

So finally, we are able to pack the car in earnest.  That would be fine except that we never had time to test-load the car and have way too much stuff.  Add that to the fact that we decided to buy a N2N 36″ soft-sided pet crate for our cat to live in during the trip.  Now, this crate is pretty awesome, but it is huge.  It takes up about 75% of the back seat, and I can’t see out the back window.  On the bright side, the cat’s litter box, food, bed, and a cardboard piece for scratching all fit in it simultaneously.  The cat has even taken to standing on top of the litter box inside the crate.  Which is really amusing when we take a corner a little too fast.

As I think I mentioned before, our stuff is being held by the movers for about a month while we install new flooring, new paint, and new drywall in our new house in Virginia Beach.  So we needed to pack enough items to live for a month in our little Saturn sedan, which came down to an inflatable queen bed, clothes, tools, assorted pots and pans, and the cat.  It’s stuffed.  When I open the trunk, various bags literally pop out.

But it does fit.  We stuff everything in, fed the cat some diazepam, and set off.  That’s when the meowing started.  Apparently, preventing the cat from feeling anxiety enables him to express anger instead.  Fortunately, we found the secret to stopping the meowing – my wife let the cat out of his gigantic crate and simply let him sleep in her lap.  Problem solved.

As I told my wife earlier today, I consider this first day of the move not my first act as a new professor but my final act as a graduate student (even though my defense was several weeks ago, the school officially graduates people at the end of the month – in this case, 5/31).  This of course means that if it had gone smoothly and as expected, it just wouldn’t have felt right.

So now, 30 hours into this adventure, we are in Bloomington, IL at an Extended Stay America.  And surprisingly enough, in terms of the overall trip, we are on time.  I can only hope that tomorrow will be a little smoother…

Not us, but sometimes it feels like it... image courtesy somedaynurse.wordpress.com

We’re now only about a week out from our last day in Minneapolis before moving to Virginia Beach.    We’ve been packing for about four days, trying to figure out what we’re taking with us and what we’re not.  Of the things that we aren’t, we sold 72 books at used book stores and are in the process of getting rid of about 50 items on Craigslist, only about 4 of which have been sold so far.  We considered a yard sale, but we don’t really have enough inventory to justify it, on top of the fact that we’re in an apartment building, which makes the whole thing logistically tricky.

Of the things that we are taking, we’ve got 7 small boxes, 7 medium boxes, and 3 large boxes now full of things from our living room, which includes two desktop computers.  I’ve also disassembled 5 bookcases (so far), as it’s less expensive to have movers take several planks of wood than an assembled bookcase.  Plus IKEA bookcases tend to disintegrate if you try to move them whole.

In further preparation, we took our cat, Neko, to the vet in order to get his teeth cleaned.  He has several chipped teeth, and more surprising to us, several missing teeth.  Evidently his pre-shelter life was a little worse than we thought.  We’ve also been trying to connect with a vet on the phone in order to talk about some anti-anxiety medication for him.

Oh yes.  You read that correctly.  We’re going to drug our cat.  You see, he’s a little anxious, probably due to that aforementioned pre-shelter life.  Any time he’s in the car, he curls up into a corner of his carrier, stops purring, and moans very loadly every couple of minutes.  So the thought of him in a 22-hour, 1361-mile drive to Virginia with him moaning for all 22 of those hours seemed a little more than we could take.

We’re splitting the drive over 3 days, which means we have to find cat-friendly hotels in three cities: Bloomington, IL, Charleston, WV, and Virginia Beach.  You may wonder why we have to find a hotel in Virginia Beach – well, there’s no power in our new house at the moment, and Dominion Power refuses to turn it on unless the circuit breaker inside the house is off.  Of course, we could have them send a tech out anyway.  But if the tech discovers that the breaker is on, then he won’t turn on the power anyway, and also won’t call or notify us in any way that he couldn’t do so.  Then, we’d show up, find the breaker was on, and have to reschedule the tech, which for some reason takes 2 days.  So instead of sending him out there anyway and risking an extra day without power, we’re taking the safer route, and scheduling him for the day after we should arrive in town.  And yes, I anticipate great customer service from this company.

Anyway, this will be quite a drive.  Here’s the route.  It’s technically about an hour faster through Chicago, but the thought of delays in Chicago traffic were quite unpleasant, we we’re swinging south instead.  Here’s the list of the moderate-sized and the interesting cities that we’ll pass through:

1. Minneapolis, MN (start)
2. St. Paul, MN
3. Eau Claire, WI (brief stop)
4. Madison, WI
5. Rockford, IL
6. Bloomington, IL (overnight)
7. Urbana-Champaign, IL
8. Indianapolis, IN
9. Dayton, OH
10. Chillicothe, OH
11. Charleston, WV (overnight, crossing the Smokys in the morning)
12. Charlottesville, VA
13. Richmond, VA
14. Williamsburg, VA
15. Virginia Beach, VA (arrival!)

Our new house!

It’s done; we own a house!  And it all came down to a last-minute 1.5-mile bike ride through suburban Minneapolis.

Oh yes – I’m serious.  It’s been nearly a month since my last post on home buying, but that’s because not much happened until yesterday.  In the three weeks until yesterday, all we’d been doing was randomly stopping in Home Depots and Lowe’s to check out carpet, laminate, paint colors and types, and so on; we picked a carpet and a brand of laminate.  We also found homeowner’s insurance, which is surprisingly difficult when you live anywhere vaguely close to coastal area.  We are technically 1500 feet from a bay that attaches to the Atlantic and about 8 miles from the beach, which apparently makes us a “hurricane risk.”  One insurer outright told us that they were unwilling to insure us.  But we eventually found one, and everything related to the loan and closing was taken care of on our end over a week ago.

After doing that, as there wasn’t much left for us to do, we just waited.  So by yesterday, we started to wonder if we were really going to close on this house on time.  The sellers were supposed to do repairs, which it didn’t look like they had done.  We also had never been given instructions on where to send our down payment, so no money had changed hands.

Then yesterday, our loan officer e-mails us our settlement statement – the final summary of our loan – with the April 30 closing date.  Surprise!  I also learned a little more detail on where closing costs go; the statement lists around 15 distinct parties receiving money as a result of this sale.  It was also a bit of a surprise to learn that our closing costs were $1000 greater than our good faith estimate had indicated they would be.

Of course, at this point, it was too late to send a check – we got the statement at 11PM the day before closing, so we obviously couldn’t mail a check that would arrive in time.  No problem – we’ll just do a wire transfer tomorrow.

I wake up this morning to find my wife telling me that I have to initiate the wire transfer as soon as possible, only minutes before she walks out the door to head to work.  She’d just received a call that the closing was scheduled 3 hours later, and wire transfers, according to the company handling our title, take up to 2 hours to go through.  Annoying, but no problem, I think.  I’ll just call the bank and initiate the transfer.   I sit on hold for 20 minutes and finally get a bank representative.  “I’d like to initiate a wire transfer,” I say.

To which the representative replies, “You can only initiate wire transfers at a branch office.”  The problem is that at this point, it’s 2.5 hours until closing, the transfer will take 2 hours, and my wife has the car at work, where she is actively lecturing for at least an hour.  My scooter is also non-functional; we are missing a bolt/nut combo that apparently allows the entire thing to turn on.  So what option did I have left?  That’s right – the bike.

Not having biked since last fall (it’s still cold in Minneapolis in April), I hunted down the bike pump in a closet, pulled the bike from where it was stored, filled the tires to 70PSI, and 2 hours and 10 minutes before closing, took off down suburban Minneapolis streets for the local branch office 1.5 miles away.  7 minutes later (averaging 13 mph over 18 blocks, including several stop lights and signs!), I arrive panting at the branch office.  I sit down with the manager, hand her my ID, give her the routing and account numbers for the title company, and initiate the transfer.  Crisis averted, and only a minute or two late.

After a much deserved break at D’Amico & Sons, I bike back more slowly and arrive home about an hour after I initiated the transfer.  And look – in my e-mail, a message from the loan officer that the wire transfer had been received 15 minutes ago and all was well.  Fantastic.  Nothing like an unnecessary sense of urgency to get the adrenaline moving.

And finally, after all of this, it was quiet.  No messages, no phone calls.  Nothing.  Two hours of silence after our closing supposedly occurred, I receive an e-mail with the subject “Congratulations are in order.”  Finally, we are homeowners.  And it is a process that I hope I never have to go through again!

Courtesy organichealthblog.com

Problems with the house.  Apparently, there are several “issues” with our mortgage application that the bank only decided to let us know about two weeks before closing.  Well, technically they sent the letter April 8, but it only arrived April 14.  The problem is that they gave us a deadline of April 18 (four days!) for them to have received everything they asked for, which unfortunately is a fairly tall order.

#1) They don’t like our flooring allowance.  We had it written into the contract that the sellers would provide us several thousand dollars in cash in order to replace the floors in the entire house, which are all quite old and/or badly installed.  Because of this, the bank wants us to decrease the sales price of the house by that same amount, which effectively saddles the sellers with double the cost – not only are they giving us that amount, but they will receive that amount less for the sale of the house.  Which doesn’t make any sense to me at all.  Doesn’t that mean that our flooring allowance would cost the sellers double?  Our real estate agent is trying to figure out what to do about this.

#2) An agreement must be signed by the seller, buyer, and selling agent.  They don’t specify what this agreement is or how to get it.  I don’t think this would be that much of a concern except for the four day time limit.

#3) I received a student loan payment in February of a fairly substantial sum.  We don’t need this money for the down payment, but since it’s on my income history, the bank wants documentation of where it came from, as when you have an FHA loan, you can’t use another loan to pay the mortgage loan.  Why not just ignore it?  Why harass me about it!?

Anyway, I’m a little stressed, since all of this comes in the middle of a daily back-and-forth with my advisor on drafts of my completed dissertation, which I am basically working on from the moment I get up to the moment I go to sleep, every day, with short gaps to deal with the class I’m teaching, writing this blog post, and mundane wastes of time like showering or eating.  I called our loan officer, but she has not returned my call.

…

Update 4/15: Apparently mortgage companies use form letters.  Concern #1 can be dealt by moving the verbiage to an addendum.  Apparently if the wording is in the contact itself, it has to be considered part of the sale, but if it’s an addendum, it doesn’t.  It’s times like these that I wish I had a background in law.  Concern #2 was apparently dealt with on the original contract we signed, not that anyone told me that before.  Concern #3 is legitimate, but just involves me sending a fax to prove that the money was from a student loan and not from some other unspecified, nefarious source.  I’m not sure why it matters, but apparently it does!  In any case: situation resolved.  I just wish it could have occurred a week later!

I’m not sure what terrible thing will happen.  But I know it will be something.  Things can’t consistently go well.  I mean – I have a new job, a new house, reasonably good health, and my dissertation seems to be progressing on-time.  We’ve been having trouble getting insurance companies to get back to us about home insurance, but other than that, everything has been smooth-sailing.  So whatever’s going to go wrong, it must be big.

Plans for the house itself haven’t really changed.  We bought HGTV Home Design Software in order to better model what our renovations will ultimately look like, which has been slow-going.  It’s very complex software, but I think creating a 3D model of our new home that we can virtually walk around is worth the learning effort.  Plus, then my wife can redecorate at will without making me lift any furniture!

Some advice though – if you are buying a house from afar and planning to make a 3D model of it, make sure your room measurements are accurate before you leave!