theparkerfamily.org

Tag: Home Improvement

  • twitter saves the day, again

    I’m starting to think the office tweeter is the most powerful person in any bureaucracy.

    The internet is littered with stories about regular people getting their offline problems solved after complaining to corporations online.

    Heck, we did the same thing in the aftermath of a certain automobile recall last year.

    Turns out that corporate tweeters aren’t he only ones saving the day — the District government social media teams are jumping in, too.

    Our permit application to park a mobile storage container on city street this weekend mysteriously stalled earlier this week, and all of the lady sparklers efforts ended up in voicemail-laden dead ends.

    So, late last night I tweeted to the Districts official Department of Transportation account.

    hey, @DDOTDC – we have a POD permit app that’s been stalled/ignored for a week. who can help fix tmrw before it’s delivered this weekend?

    By 11:00 pm, I had an email address for the guy behind the twitter account, asking for details on our problem.

    By 7:30 am, I was CC’ed on an email from him, forwarding our problem on to a team of people to solve.

    By 8:30 am, the lady sparkler got a call on her cell phone from someone from DDOT saying they would clear everything up for us within the hour.

    At 9:04, my wife had the permit in her hot little hands.

    I don’t know how much of this little bit of awesomeness was caused by the social media phenomenon in general, or the epic person behind @DDOTDC in particular, or about just tunneling through the bureaucracy to find the actual human beings inside.

    Either way, whatever is responsible — thank you.

  • transit is like soo 2008

    []
    I’m commuting by public transit today — for the first time since the Bush II administration.

    Public transit isn’t especially kind to me these days.

    I’ve got 3 bus lines and a metro stop within 10 minutes of my door, but it takes a little under 70 minutes to actually use them to get to work.

    … which does not compare favorably to the 22 minutes it takes me to get to the office by car.

    … even if that office is a major conservation organization (we’re Eco-friendly, not Eco-crazy).

    I digress.

    We’re getting a POD (portable storage container) delivered to the house on Saturday, just in time to have our M.O.H. spend the weekend helping is pack.

    Unfortunately, the District hasn’t seemed particularly interested in giving us a permit (in a timely manner, at least) to park the POD on city streets.

    … which means we can’t put up emergency no parking signs asking people not to park where we need to put the POD.

    … which means we’re using the car to block off that space.

    … which means I’m commuting by public transit, regardless of fact that it increases my daily commute time by 416%.

    If there is a silver lining, it’s that I’m actually listening to music that I bought three months ago (Sara Barellies, The Killers, Arcade Fire) that I haven’t been alone with my MP3 player long enough to listen to.

    That, and I have plenty of time to blog about things that I would have otherwise completely ignored.

  • boxes, part two

    []
    we’re up to fifty-two boxes packed now — which is pretty impressive considering i had the flu for four days over last weekend and the lady sparkler just got back from three days in san francisco.

    well, if anybody had any doubts — it looks like we’re really putting our place on the market.

  • sixteen boxes down

    []
    we’ve been packing.

    the lady sparkler’s parents were here this weekend, which has meant a happy and distracted baby/baby mommy, which has allowed me to start the long process of fixing/packing casa de sparkler up for sale.

    art is off the wall, books are off the shelves, breakables are off the flat surfaces. and i’m starting to work through all those little projects i’ve been putting off for the last three years.

    first observation: each and every project takes two to four times longer with a child. i have no idea where exactly the time gets sucked too — it’s not like i’ve been the one looking after her while i’ve been operating the power tools — but i’m going to officially posit it as a law of physics.

    second observation: we have a lot of crap.

  • color correction

    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.

  • mount pleasant-er

    []
    we might be in the market for a house.

    we’re not moving — at least, not moving out of mount pleasant — but there are a couple things going on that make us (er, the lady sparkler) think that it could be time to upgrade.

    • interest rates are down 2+ percentage points from when we signed a last mortgage. when you add that savings to what we pay each month in condo association fees, we can have about a 50% larger place without paying a dime extra per month.
    • we were planning on moving in the next 2 to 3 years anyway, and *man* our place seems a lot smaller than it did, saaaay 16 months ago.
    • the market has stabilized enough that we’re sure we can get all our money out of our current place.
    • the economy is starting to show signs of life again, which means that housing prices only have one direction to go (and that would be “up”).

    that said, if we can’t find a nice little fixer-upper row house in mount pleasant that we can afford now, we’ll just stay put until we’re on the other side of our daycare payments.

    we love our neighborhood, and haven’t given up on the idea that we can raise baby sparklet here. we love our friends, we love our nanny. we love the fact that our vote for federal office is basically meaningless (wait, scratch that last one).

    and, besides, there aren’t a lot of other options …

    within D.C., we certainly wouldn’t move east of 16th street (too speculative), nor south or west of mount pleasant (we couldn’t afford it), and there really isn’t much in D.C. that’s north of us (all residential, little commerce, reduced transit).

    outside of D.C., we have the same problems we’ve always had: new england and chicago are too cold (for my beloved); texas is utterly without seasons (for me); the pacific northwest is really far away and people there actually slow down at yellow lights (the latter is a “third rail” for the lady sparkler).

    and besides, we all know how much my beloved likes change.

  • ohthankgod

    []
    our washer/dryer came today, ending a 44 day drought (not that we were counting). if this isn’t the absolute happiest day of our collective lives, it’s darn near close to the top.

  • excessive laundry

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b_D9DUG7SY

    about a month ago, our washing machine went kaput — and decided to flood the unit below ours.

    oops.

    the guy who lives there came up and told us, and was pretty chill about the whole thing.

    “oh, the last time this happened …”

    huh?

    turns out the previous owners of our unit flooded his apartment … as did the owners before them. actually, one of them did it twice, apparently.

    and, when we i pulled the washing machine out from the closet to see what the heck was going on, there was a half inch gap between the wall and the floor — so any time water splashed out of our machine, it went right through to the ceiling of his unit.

    so, i spent last weekend patching the open space — wood, plaster, caulk — and spent this weekend painting everything up nice and spiffy.

    and, while the lady sparkler was buying us new laundry equipment to complete the mini-renovation, baby sparklet was discovering the joy of automatic doors (see video, above).

    priceless.

  • babyproofing

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    photo of the week // week thirty-seven
    if friday morning wasn’t enough of a wake up call for babyproofing, sparklet decided to up the ante on sunday and pull herself up on the toy box, the couch (to reach the cat) and one of our arm chairs (again, for the cat).

    so, i spent the rest of the day at home depot.

    shortly after the first burst of pseudo-crawling back in may, i spent a weekend tidying up the electrical cables and generally trying to make some more space for toys and movement.

    with her doing pull-ups, however, we’ve had to start strapping down all the tippy furniture we have and trust me when i say, it’s all tippy.

    a by-product of living in a smaller space is that everything we own is a normal height, but only about half as deep (and we all know that height + depth/2 = tippy).

    to make matters worse, we have no overhead lights in our living room or either bed room, and have to rely on those tall “urn” floor lamps — which give us all the same tipsiness as the furniture, but with the added bonus of lots of shatter-upon-impact glass.

    so, we’ve bought a metric ton of straps designed to prevent furniture from falling over during earthquakes (“quakehold!“) and have been using them to secure pretty much everything to the wall — three lamps, a desk, a television cabinet, the hall table, and the ever important toy box.

    top that off an improvised latch (adjustable bungee cord fastened around the closet door handle) to keep sparklet out of the litter box, and we should be good to go …

    … except she just knocked the bejeezus out of her head on the toy box, so i’m off to the store to buy a swimming pool noodle to pad the box’s front edge.

    who says necessity is the mother of invention?

  • loose ends

    livingroom
    the lady sparkler and I have been crossing things off our list, dilligently trying to get everything resolved so we can relax with some peace and quite before sparklet arrives…

    and then we realized neither of us really has an interest in relaxing.

    case and point: things were winding down this weekend (I finished off the kitchen, and found places for those “last few items” without a place to live — she washed two and a half tons of baby clothes) when we spontaneously decided to rearrange the living room.

    nominally, the problem was nominally getting rid of a DVD cabinet that we forgot had (non-safety) glass doors, but the lack of quality television programming (I actually watched a William & Mary football game I was so bored) might have had something to do with it.

    so, we moved things around, and made space for a new chair that we are waiting to be delivered. the sofa now looks into the kitchen (which is a little weird) but the new setup is a much more economical use of space.

    the real “win” however is that I added something else to the todo list, because taking down the cabinet pulled up some of the wall paint, which will need to be patched and repaired.

    whew.