Tag: Home Improvement

when she was young, the lady sparkler legendarily got upset that they rearranged furniture in order to put up the Christmas tree. (i can neither confirm nor deny that this is why i shipped her off to austin during the move.)

so, in an attempt to protect life, preserve sanity during the move, i’ve been sending her pictures of the progress of Flickr and short videos (below) of the rooms as they’ve gone from project to completion.

i should manage my wife professionally.

we spent three hours pouring over the place on Saturday, and really didn’t come up with nearly as much as we would have thought.

there was a loose toilet on the first floor which we didn’t want to start leaking, a couple small electrical issues and a joist which showed some possible termite damage — all of which the sellers agreed to fix.

there are some other issues which we’ll want to fix ourselves in the months after we move in: the boiler was installed in 1982, and probably is a little behind as far as fuel efficiency goes; the attic could use a little more insulation; and there are two code issues with railings on the porch and on the steps to the basement.

the first two will take some planning (and some $$$$) but the latter i can fix myself on pretty much any random Saturday afternoon.

oh, and even our termite fears turned out to be over blown. the porch next door does have a small termite issue, but “our” porch has been treated and got a clean bill of health — and they were actually replacing the offending porch during our inspection.

i think we’ve got one contingency left (our appraisal) but the last week of May seems a lot closer than it did even a couple of days ago.

MAP: From Baist’s Real Estate Atlas of Surveys of Washington, District of Columbia, circa 1919. “Our” place is #79, located just above the “M” in Monroe Street.

it would have been a stretch for us at full price, but it’s been sitting one the market without any offers for more than two weeks now. that means that the market has spoken and deemed the price too high.

so, tonight we’ve put an offer for (effectively) 4% off the list price, with the expectation that will be negotiated back down to between 2% and 3% off list — which is much more in line with what we were thinking for a house budget.

the place *is* beautiful.

it was built in 1915, resides within a formal Historic District, has all its original molding and the original floor plan — things that no other house we’ve looked at has had. the view from the porch and the front bedroom is across rock creek park, and just stunning.

our only real complaint is the lack of a second bathroom upstairs and a kinda small third bedroom, but both of those things can be fixed with a small addition off the back — something that both neighbors have already done so there is every reason to assume it’d be approved by the District.

(also, if we ever get around to having a “thing #2” of our own, the smaller third bedroom has it’s own porch so the demand between the two rooms will eventually balance out.)

our target house also has a rental efficiency in the basement that was (at one point) officially licensed by the city — a bit of a rarity as far as basement apartments go — which we can expect to take about $800 or $900 off our mortgage each month for as long as we care to rent it out.

so, all engines are go — let’s hope this thing works out.

UPDATE (FRIDAY @ 9pm): We’ve heard back from their Realtor that they’ll be responding tomorrow (Saturday) by noon. Responding is good, because it means our offer hasn’t been summarily rejected.

UPDATE (SATURDAY @ 11AM): The response timeline has slipped a little bit — from noon to “some point today.” It came accompanied with the story that the new house they’ve bought in New Jersey flooded this week, which seems to be reason enough to give them a break.

UPDATE (SATURDAY @ 5PM): Now we’re starting to get a little cranky. They reviewed our offer and decided that they wanted some more supporting (eg. financial) documentation. Seems like that was something they could have asked for, oh, say … 24 hours ago.

Brandon (our agent) said it’s because of how we structured the deal — instead of taking 4% off the price, we said we’d pay full price but they’d have to give us 4% of the value of the house at closing.

Apparently asking for the cash back can either be interpreted as (a) smart, because right now borrowing money is so cheap vs. having cash on hand; or (b) reckless, because the seller thinks you don’t actually have the cash to complete the transaction without the “subsidy.”

I don’t have the heart to break it to them that the only reason we asked for such a large number was because we assumed they’d chop the figure in half before the sent it back to us.

UPDATE (SUNDAY @ 11AM): More waiting. They got the financial stuff, and are going to meet (Realtor and sellers) this afternoon to discuss.

UPDATE (SUNDAY @ 1PM): They countered. They “kept” our 4% cash back at closing, but upped the price by three percent to take three-quarters of it back. We’re countering at exactly halfway between our initial offer and their list price (which is conveniently enough where we thought we’d end up anyway). Seems like a fair compromise.

UPDATE (SUNDAY @ 2:30PM): God, this is excruciating.

UPDATE (SUNDAY @ 2:45PM): The sellers are on their way to New Jersey (to their flooded house, presumably) but Brandon made it through to their real estate agent and she “didn’t see any reason why the counter wouldn’t be accepted.” I think that’s about as good a news as we could get without a formal “yes” — but i’m breaking out the hard liquor to numb the pain regardless.

UPDATE (SUNDAY @ 3:15PM): “The waaa-aiting is the hardest paaart.”

UPDATE (SUNDAY @ 6:00PM): they agreed. we just bought a house. in dc. in mount pleasant. what the heck?!? good things really do happen all at once.

there is plenty of space, a potential rental unit downstairs, and all the little things that make a DC property great (molding, layout, finishing) are still there.

there are some quirks — one bathroom on the top floor, not a ton of closet space, and no parking — but we could easily see ourselves spending the next couple of decades of our lives there.

the seller isn’t even entertaining offers until Tuesday night, so we’re in no great rush — just pulling together all the details and hoping it doesn’t get into a bidding war.

i’m guessing we won’t hear anything until Thursday at the earliest.

our real estate agent came through tonight and picked out new wall colors that he said would help our place move more quickly.

ever since we painted our very first room, the lady sparkler and i have known that we’d have to repaint all of our wall colors when we moved out — but it didn’t make the new (rather dull) color selections sting any less.

Living Room
before:	after:
Grape Green (Behr)	Reticence (Sherman Williams)
Master Bedroom
before:	after:
Ruby Ring (Behr)	Soft Tan (Sherman Williams)
Nursary
before:	after:
Acorn Squash (Olympic)	Hubbard Squash (Sherman Williams)
Bathroom
before:	after:
Warm Spring (Behr)	Caen Stone (Sherman Williams)
Kitchen
before:	after:
Cerise (Olympic)	Sand Trap (Sherman Williams)
Foyer
before:	after:
Porpoise (Behr)	Reticence (Sherman Williams)

if i ever needed confirmation that i’m nothing like the rest of the kids on the playground, this did the trick.

ever since we first stepped foot in australia, we’ve been fascinated by aussie plumbing … and not in a grossed-out-because-it’s-only-a-hole-in-the-floor sort of way.

apparently, australia has been in a drought for much of the decade (actually, for most of their existence) so the aussies have developed some smack-yourself-on-the-head brilliant toilet technology.

the best is a toilet with two “levels” of flush: one flush is what one would expect in any bathroom in America, and the other is a half-flush for waste of a liquid persuasion.

anyway, our building is replacing our old, out-of-date toilets with more efficient models (we’re trying to drive down our shared $16,000 annual water bill) and we opted to pay a little extra for the sexy aussie model.

needless-to-say, we (a) are both really excited, and (b) both really need to get out more.

so, the lady sparkler went away on tuesday … and all of a sudden, i start having problem sleeping.

is it because i miss her loving presence? because i can’t sleep without someone kicking me the bejeesus out of me throughout the night? or maybe because the moment she left the furnace started knocking like a nuclear powered jiffy pop machine?

we had been getting some light pinging from the new family furnace ever since it was installed last month, but nothing particularly noticable. being a slacker, i was giving it a couple of weeks to see if it fixed itself … because inanimate objects often do that sort of thing.

then, all of a sudden, yesterday the noise became loud enough to wake the dead — seriously, if sparkler would have been here, even *she* would have woken up.

the very nice people from the local furnace conglomerate came by this morning, tweaked a few screws, and — poof! — didn’t make another sound. until five minutes after he left when it started shaking it’s milkshake again.

turns out it was something in the exhaust pipe. the very nice people came back again, replaced the whoe thing, and now it is as silent as the lambs … and not just the ones with the fava beans. now, sparkler can come home and continue to sleep through absolutely any noise — hurricanes, tornadoes, motley crue concerts — uninterupted.

all is well with the world.

well, we (finally) polished off that hallway-painting-project that we started way back on labor day weekend.

actually, we finished up most of it last week, but still had a couple of touch-ups left for today … a switch plate here, an empty picture frame there, that sort or thing. we’ve got a couple more things left in the bathroom, however, so we won’t be able to slay that beast until next week.

never thought such simple projects could take so long. they say that, for home improvement projects, you should take your original estimate and double it … but, i think we are somewhere around 16x.

well, at least it looks purdy.

the lady sparkler and i decided to do a little painting this labor day weekend. [insert punchline here.] as you can guess from the picture, it isn’t going terribly well.

we decided to paint the hall and the bathroom.

unfortunately, the hall has five doors, two archways, and a whole bunch of heating and air conditioning objects to dodge.

even more unfortunately, once we moved stuff out of the bathroom, the wall had 30+ holes left over from at least three remodelings, the tile work (under the sink) wasn’t ever completed, there is a hole through our wall going down to the neighbors below, the last paint job peeled off on in the face of light sanding, and our light fixture was cracked to the point that we became retroactively frightened for our safety during the last year.

needless to say, this one is going into extra innings.

IMG_0831, uploaded by [ecpark].

We woke up this morning at 1 a.m. to the sounds of glass shattering.

Never a fun thing to wake up to, we stumbled out of bed and found that the door to our medicine cabinet had collapsed into the middle of the bathroom floor. The cabinet had glass on both sides of the door, so we got a two-for-one discount on the 7-years of bad luck offer.

About a year ago, in our previous place, we woke up to a horrifically loud crash … I woke up with such a fright that I landed (literally) on top of the lady sparkler. Our bedroom closet shelving had collapsed. To this day, we don’t know if I was trying to protect her or if I was running away and just got stuck on top of her.

Anyway, all the kings horses and all the kings men couldn’t put that vanity back together again, and to make matters worse the collapsing medicine cabinet ruined the sink on its short trip south.

i guess it’s time for a trip to home depot.