CafeChatNoir

Let’s say you needed to go out and buy a fridge. Here are the places that I can think of to shop for one:

Local Maytag shop
Sears
Home Depot
Lowe’s
Best Buy (really, REALLY don’t want to go there)

Is there some obvious retailer I’m not thinking of?

Second, I don’t have a water-line setup for an ice maker. Well, at least I think I don’t. In the 25 years since my parents bought this place, we have never had an ice maker in a fridge, though that could be simply because my folks felt it was something else that could go wrong. I can also find no evidence of a water-line pulled over to the fridge area from the basement. (I can’t be 100% sure until I move the fridge to see if a water line is there, and it’s just too heavy to muck with right now.)

Now, most of the bottom-freezer fridges out there just come with a ice maker whether you want it or not. Is there a way to properly remove an ice maker, or am I just stuck with looking for ones with either no ice maker or the ice maker being optional? (I know I could get a top freezer model with no ice maker for almost nothing, but I’ve really grown to love the bottom freezer versions since I’ve had them.)

I think the freezer is dying.

The drip pan on the fridge is decidedly gunked up.  (Or at least that is my diagnosis after some googling of “What the hell is leaking out of the bottom of my fridge??!”)

I’ve already vac’d the front grill, but I am just dreading pulling that thing out to clean it. I know for a fact it is going to be SO INCREDIBLY DISGUSTING it is not even funny. Of course, at the moment, I’m not even sure how to pull it out – I can’t tell if the grill is snapped on or if the screws that I can see are actually holding it in place. Google keeps saying it snaps off, but I suppose we’ll find out for sure here shortly.

I wonder how much my I can pay my brother to do this task for me?

Ick.

About 20 minutes ago the power went out. At last check there were 3500 customers without power in the area because a circuit breaker apparently did it’s job and broke. Estimated time of restoration? 5:00PM, which isn’t too bad, except for the fact that it is 38 degrees out and it’s a tad chilly to not have heat. Gas furnaces are great, unfortunately the blower requires electricity.

This is why I begged my mother to put in a gas oven/range when she remodeled the kitchen. I could at least reheat my lunch that way. We do at least have hot water, so I can continue to make coffee. (Lunch will be Christmas chocolates.)

The dog is rather unnerved by the silence and has gone outside to look for squirrels to bark at. The cats simply don’t give a damn.

As if that wasn’t fun enough, the handle on one of the toilets just broke off in my hand. I went through the spare parts inventory and it seems I managed to break a piece we don’t have an extra part for.

Maybe it’s just time to start pouring Jamesons in the coffee…

Went out to watch the end of the Jets/Bengals game last night, got home and thought, “Damn, it’s chilly in here.  That wind just comes right through the house.”

Not quite.  The furnace had died again.  Fanfuckingtastic.

Get the guys out today and the limit switch which had been the initial suspect the last time we had problems had in fact finally up and died.  So, we have a new one and warm air coming out of the vents again.

Now, there are some good things to come of this.  First, it didn’t happen while we were out of town.  Second, I discovered my brother has a very nice little space heater which kept me & the kitties warm last night.  (The dog didn’t even notice.)  Third, we have a quote for coil cleaning which was quite a bit cheaper than I expected, and should prevent any future wonkiness with the furnace.  (And even though it isn’t cheap, it’s much cheaper than a new furnace.)

But still, I’m so much better suited to apartment life.

I even slept in this morning in an attempt to ensure it.

First it was the discovery that it was 60 degrees in the house.  Then discovering that the assumed problem wasn’t the problem, but instead an airflow issue and we have to have the ducts blown out.  (This does not shock me, there is likely a dead body in the ductwork.)  That right there took up the bulk of the day.

Then my grandmother decided to just go off the rails.  For whatever reason, she is absolutely convinced that she needs a new photo for her ID, and that if she does not get one, she will not be “legal”.  I do not know why she thinks this, what she heard or what someone may have said within earshot of her that has caused her to have this idea so firmly cemented in her head, but it is there.  (And if I ever find out if it was an actual person that said this to her, there will be an epic beatdown.)  That took up the entire night.

Let’s all hope that today is a quiet day.

It was the pilot light on the hot water heater.

But, now I know where the pilot light is, and how to relight it.

(Yeah, you’d think I would have known where it was, but I didn’t.)

We get to buy a new hot water heater!! (Or maybe repair the existing one. Or maybe it’s just the pilot light and I’ll look like an idiot.) Either way, no hot water round these parts…

I seem to recall that hot water heaters have a lifespan of 10-15 years, and this one is about 12-13 years old, so I suppose it was time. Extra annoying cauyse the outside looks so nice and shiny – I just can’t help but look at it and think, “But it LOOKS fine!”

It is a gas hot water heater, so I don’t know if we’ll have to coordinate between the plumber and gas company, or if the plumbers can just handle it on their own. (It does have it’s own gas shutoff valve, so I would think the plumbers could do it on their own – never had a gas hot water heater before.)

I’m just glad I discovered this before I attempted to take a shower and not halfway through a shower.

We’re going to have a LOT of flowers around here – especially if the dandelions in the yard are any indication.  The rain is also unfortunately bringing in the ants.  So, the ant baits will be coming out this weekend and scattered about the house.  There aren’t a lot of them, and I can’t figure out where they’re coming in – I only find a few at a time, so it’s not like I have a neat line of them marching from a door or anything.

But the weather does have it’s advantages – makes for a good day to finish the taxes.  Or, start some of them.  Figure I’ve got about 2 hours left of work on mine, Donald’s should take 30 minutes once I get it going, and I have one freakin’ line item I have to report for the estate.  Wheeeeeeeee.

I am pleased to announce that I have successfully replaced the shower head in my bathroom and all the water is shooting out of the proper places.

Yes, I know this is a job that a blind monkey can do, however my track record with home improvement and repair projects isn’t exactly stellar, so this is quite an accomplishment.

And the first thing to go was the stupid flow regulator. I do appreciate the fact that in the instructions they say, “By law we have to put it this in here, but here’s how you take it out!”  This house has great water pressure and I will take advantage of it!

The champagne was popped open last night and I am now the happy owner of only 1/2 of one house. I cannot even begin to describe how NICE it is to not have this on my mind anymore.

Of course, this now begs the question – where to next? :)

Well, the closing is done, but guess who gets to go to the townhouse tomorrow and meet with contractors? Yup, that would be me. Sometime this week the thermostat on the heat pump went tango uniform and wouldn’t work on the final walkthrough this afternoon.

I can’t say I’m really surprised.

Tomorrow I make copies of the various & sundry receipts from the past week’s repairs and empty out the townhouse once and for all. (Sorry buyers, I won’t be forgetting the good vacuum cleaner.)

Closing is Friday at 3PM.

Eep!

Good news: Got the replacements for the fans, discovered all I had to do was pop out the old motor and put the new one in. Much easier than having to remove the entire housing of the thing, which is what I thought I had to do, so that is done.

Had the termite inspection this afternoon. Passed. Yay! However, another company was there this morning and did a preventative termite treatment. I have no idea why. I’ve got a call into my realtor to figure this one out. If he put in the order, I do know there would have been a good reason for it, I just don’t know what, cause I don’t remember preventative treatment as part of the contract or why we wouldn’t use the folks that were doing the inspection anyway.

The bathtub has been caulked, the shower head is no longer leaking, the light in the master bath is working fine for me (can’t fix what isn’t broken) and I went over all the baseboards with a flashlight and can’t find a damn carpet staple to save my life.

My to-do list is complete.

So, yesterday my brother and I attempted to remove the bath fans… Got those suckers opened and realized we had absolutely NO idea how to remove them, much less replace them. Great. Called my go-to electrician first thing this morning and he’s booked until the end of the month. I’ll be making a panicked call to my realtor here in just a few minutes to see if his handyman can somehow handle this.

I can’t find the supposed staples sticking out of the carpet. I keep forgetting to look and figure out where the shower head is leaking.

Now, the good news is that the HVAC has been inspected and there is nothing wrong with it, the chimney has been cleaned, the vent flap that was stuck open is now closed, the smoke detectors have been replaced, and the aerator in the guest bath sink is clear and ready to go back on the sink. The bathtub will be caulked this afternoon, and the shower head either replaced or fixed today, and I’ll go over the floor with a flashlight to see if I can’t find these phantom staples.

I’m going to finish my coffee and then have a good freak out.

So, the home inspection was this weekend, which of course means a new freakin’ to do list. Nothing major, thank god.

Couple things we simply said weren’t going to happen. Given that I’ve not heard any bad news from my realtor, sounds like the buyer realized they were unrealistic with those requests.

Couple things that were totally reasonable and I’ve got no problem with handling them.

Couple things that just really annoyed me, cause if I was on the buy side, they’d be things I’d simply consider part of buying a house that is almost 30 years old and deal. When I bought the place, the only thing that we pushed on was the roof because it had defective plywood that would eventually cause the roof to collapse. The rest of it, well, it was a 20 year old house, I didn’t expect everything to be perfect.

But, it will get done.  Still don’t know how we’re gonna close next Friday, but we’ll see.

Seems that I have a contract on my townhouse – with a completely different buyer. While realtor #1 decided to try to get into a pissing match with my guy, someone else came along with a better offer. So, everything has been signed and initialed and sent back and unless they find something absolutely horrid in the HOA docs in the next 3 days, things are good to go and closing set for October 12.

It’s a nice feeling.

Seems these folks put in an incredibly lowball offer over the weekend, which my realtor rejected immediately. (I don’t blame them for trying – you never know if you don’t ask.) They came back with something much more reasonable, but still want way too much for closing costs, so we’re countering with a lower subsidy and hopefully they’ll bite.

The good news is there are no contingencies, and they even included a letter from the lender saying this chick will in fact be able to finance the purchase.

Realtor was sending the counteroffer back this afternoon – figure I should know something this time tomorrow.

I might have an offer on the townhouse. My realtor got one offer this weekend that was apparently so far out in left field that he told them to sod off, and now it seems they’ve come back with something more realistic. He’s coming over in about an hour so we can go over it – let’s hope it’s something acceptable.

Being a Navy brat, I’ve walked through more homes for sale than I can count. The rules were very simple – you go in, look around, leave and the only evidence of your presence is your real estate agent’s calling card left on a counter.

Well, etiquette has apparently changed.

Couple weeks ago, it was black scuff marks all over the kitchen floor. Always fun to try to get those off.

Today I went over to do a quick onceover (even vacant, dust still manages to show up) and whack at the yard. Discoveries…

- A half consumed bottle of water sitting in the kitchen sink
- Dirt tracked halfway across the basement floor
- Every swingin’ door in the place left open. Sure, open the doors, find the closets, but effin’ close them when you’re done. How is that hard?
- A knob of some sort left in the middle of the basement floor. I don’t recognize it from anywhere in the house, so hopefully it’s not something important for continued functionality of the mechanical systems.

For cryin’ out loud – this is not your home. You are a guest. You buy the place, make as much of a mess as you want. In the meantime, show a little freakin’ courtesy.

Yesterday, the townhouse officially listed for sale – it’s out on the intarwebs and everything! Though it’s not over until it’s sold, my heavy lifting is DONE. The last two houses in the neighborhood w/the same layout as mine had contracts in 2 weeks and were closed in 6 weeks from listing – and those were this month. Here’s to keeping up that trend.

This has easily been the largest, most difficult, pain in the ass project I have attempted in my life. However, I feel like I have reached friggin’ expert status on prepping a townhouse for sale. Let me share a few things…

- Buying a house is MUCH easier than selling one. Sure, there might be more paperwork to buy, but there is no painting involved.
- Don’t wait 13 years to clean out your closets. Seriously. You’ll find sheet sets for bed sizes you haven’t owned since college.
- Every time you think you are “almost there” you will discover another project. This will slowly make you insane.
- No matter how much you get done beforehand, your realtor will still find something else for you to do. If you are lucky, they will be small things and you will be able to maintain your composure and not burst into tears saying, “Nooooooo! No more projects!”
- There are no minor projects. They may sound minor when you say them, but when you actually start to do them, they will not remain minor.
- When it comes to the various & sundry projects, having a brother is VERY helpful. So is a list of dependable contractors.
- If you have an improvement project you’d like to do, scrape together the cash if you can and DO IT NOW so you can enjoy it rather than looking at it and thinking, “well, I hope the new owners like it.”
- Watching the realtor put the lockbox on your door can take the weight of the world off your shoulders.
- Painting really seriously sucks – possibly because I really seriously suck at painting, despite my Mom’s best efforts to teach me over the years.
- Painting also uses muscles that you never, EVER use anywhere else. 4 hours of painting over 2 days will make you hurt – it really doesn’t sound like much, but you will feel like someone beat you with a large stick. (And no, it’s not me getting old, I double checked w/little bro and he felt just as beat up.)
- A good local hardware store is essential. God help me if Fischer’s Hardware ever closes.
- If anyone says to you, “It’s still not ready?”, you have my permission to pop them in the mouth.
- Craigslist is great for getting rid of things you don’t want to move.
- 1-800-Got-Junk? is excellent for getting rid of all the things you can’t unload on craigslist.
- For the most part, everything you really need to live can fit in one carload. Start a kickin’ bonfire with the rest of it.
- I’m quite sure I am much better suited to life in a very small condo.

Today my realtor put the lockbox on the front door of my townhouse.

I cannot even begin tell you how good it feels.

Well, last night I turned down the contract/consulting offer – found out today that the company is going public again. Not a real shock, given that the owners sold out to a private equity firm just over 2 years ago and everyone has just been waiting for them to flip it back to a public offering, but I feel like I dodged a bullet getting out of there and not going back. Even though the work could have been as few hours as I wanted, I know the way I am, and I know the way I work and before I knew it, I’d be doing 40+ hours again a week and it would be October and I’d have lost the summer. But, the upside is that it gives me another benchmark to work with for the trading I’m doing, which is good.

My realtor hasn’t had a chance to see the house yet, but I am praying that he’ll agree that it’s really ready to go. But, if he gives me another project, I’ll certainly do it. I’m hoping that whoever buys this place realizes what a turnkey operation it is – I can’t think of anything anyone would have to do to make it more liveable. I am insanely curious to find out what my realtor wants to price it at – right now there are two places in the neighborhood, 6 houses apart, with a 60K difference in asking price. The lower priced one is basically advertised as a fixer-upper, so I’m not too worried about that throwing things off – hell, if I could hit the middle of those two on price, that would be fine with me.

I just sent the damn happiest email of my life to my realtor telling him to come over and put the biggest For Sale sign he’s got in front of my townhouse. The recent prep for this can only be described as a comedy of errors – every time I was within 36 hours of being able to tell him to put it on the market, something else went wrong or I’d see something not quite right that I’d managed to never see in 10 years.

I swear, the place really wasn’t falling apart, Murphy and his law just seemed to be having a lot of fun at my expense.

But it’s ready. READY!!

and other thoughts after a fairly craptastic week in the world.

- No more putting off training (or anything else I want to do for that matter) because I feel like I should be doing ‘more important’ things with my time – screw that – I realized I was letting other idiots define ‘important’. Today I finally got out and ran for the first time in forever.  It was ugly and painful, which I fully expected, but it also helped clear my head a little, which I very much needed.

- Don’t let anyone else define what is important in your life. If it’s truly important, you’ll know it. If it isn’t, it isn’t. If that gets someone else’s knickers in a twist, too bad.

- There are some seriously messed up people in this world. Maybe they could have been helped with very early intervention, maybe not. But, they’ve always been there in this world and they’ll always be there in the future. Personally, I’m not going to spend my entire life looking over my shoulder waiting for someone to snap. At the same time, take the time to reach out to someone who might need a shoulder to lean on or an ear to bend for a few minutes.

- Some people have way too much time on their hands and become petty jerks to justify their existence. Please, go find a real hobby.

- Some people will always confound me, no matter how hard I try to understand them. (And yet, I’ll still try to understand them.)

- AUTiger23 summed up why some folks are just jerks very well with this quote from Scrubs: People are bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling.

- There is no such thing as having all home improvement projects finished. Ever.

- Earth Day can be incredibly annoying for a gun-loving, capitalist, beach-bum hippie chick. If you’re not hard core on either side of the arguments, no one wants to play with you.

- It’s 80 degrees and beautiful out today – which means it will probably be in the 50s and raining again in the space of a week.

If I have to call another contractor in the next 30 days, I will find a large, heavy object and bludgeon myself to death.

Just got a call from the HOA and the replacement windows have been approved! Just a matter of calling the window place on Monday and confirming the date I’ve got, and maybe getting it moved up if they’ve got any open days. Woohoo!!!!

Got all the posts ported over through April of 2005. Damn, I’ve written a lot the past 5 years.

Helped little bro w/ replacing light fixtures today and as a result of that, I’ll be calling an electrician to do the ones I need to have done at the townhouse – I’ve managed to really screw up my bad shoulder trying to hold things up while we got them attached into the ceiling.

Kenmore appliances apparently suck. The dishwasher now has a new motor, and is working, but there is one more broken part they will have to order and replace as well.

The halfway mark has been passed on the paper.

Decided stopping and eating might be a good idea. Sadly, I can only go so far on coffee.

However, I am wondering if the spaghetti is going to be as satisfying as I thought seeing as how I am sitting here watching Alton Brown sing the praises of duck…

It’s cold, there are high winds, which of course means the dog is outside and refusing to come in. I’m quite sure the neighbors think we’re abusing him. I hope they can at least hear our cries of, “Dumbass, get inside already!”

My final paper is just over 1/3 complete as far as word count goes. Not bad considering that the actual writing portion only started this morning. Granted, this is on top of a couple weeks of research, reading and fairly extensive note taking, so I suppose it’s not as impressive (or completely last minute) as it sounds.

So, is it a bad sign when the gentleman repairing your dishwasher has it taken apart in the kitchen and just looks up at you and says, “Can I just go home now??”