Category: Home Ownership

So far I’ve spent my sec­ond day of fur­lough catch­ing up on var­i­ous items around the house. I need to get back into the habit of writ­ing here a bit more fre­quent­ly. I keep think­ing of things that are worth post­ing, but nev­er actu­al­ly sit­ting down to do so.

A bunch of exte­ri­or work is being done on my home right now.

  • Chim­ney caps, tuck-point­ing and new flash­ing;
  • Rot­ten sid­ing replace­ment;
  • Glass block win­dows added to the base­ment;
  • Gut­ter repair; and
  • Some patch­es to the foun­da­tion.

Our reg­u­lar guy does­n’t do exte­ri­or work, so I had to track some­one else down. Since you can find any­thing on Craigslist, I put up an ad. I got a bunch of respons­es, with the usu­al range of gram­mat­i­cal errors and pro­fes­sion­al­ism. I respond­ed to a few of the like­li­est and only heard back from one.

The guy came out to take a look at things, with two of his bud­dies. They were all wear­ing ragged and torn clothes, and one of the guys was more inter­est­ed in eat­ing as many peach­es as he could from my tree. Main dude said he’d get back to me with an esti­mate with­in three days. He kept try­ing to get me to tell him how much I’d be will­ing to pay, which is a huge red flag. Ten days lat­er, after one unan­nounced return trip and fur­ther phone calls where he kept try­ing to find out how much I want­ed to spend and kept try­ing to give me prices piece-meal, he final­ly emailed me his esti­mate. This esti­mate only cov­ered the cost of mate­ri­als for one of the items on the above list. Need­less to say he did­n’t get the job.

Mean­while, I received a response from a gal around my age who just moved from Port­land, OR. She came out, took a look at things, some mea­sure­ments and pho­tos, and got me an esti­mate with­in a cou­ple of days. She’s done his­tor­i­cal restora­tion work and has the nec­es­sary tools to get the job done. My chim­neys are repaired and the foun­da­tion patched, the glass block has been ordered and from what I’ve seen so far, she works both effi­cient­ly and effec­tive­ly.

Inside I’ve been paint­ing the new doors we got a cou­ple of months ago and touch­ing-up var­i­ous Bram-smears.

My ten­ant upstairs is mov­ing out this month. This means I’ll be out the sup­ple­men­tary $450/month that was quite a help. Thank­ful­ly Deb­bie’s now a full-time teacher, so her addi­tion­al income will help off­set that. Her broth­er might move in upstairs and just pay for util­i­ties, and I plan on work­ing with him to tear off the wall­pa­per and do a lit­tle bit more ren­o­va­tion up there as well. Once it is paint­ed, the elec­tri­cal is upgrad­ed and there’s new car­pet, I’ll prob­a­bly be able to get at least anoth­er $50/month on the rental price. It’s a 2 bed­room, so $500 is a pret­ty good price, I think. I could prob­a­bly do bet­ter than that if the bath­room was­n’t the size of a mouse turd.

Speak­ing of which, I’ve killed 4 in the last 24 hours.