'Twas the Fourth Day Before Christmas

We just got back December 10th from a 3-week adventure in Patagonia to Christmas mayhem in the U.S. (I know, don't cry for me, I've been in Argentina.) Since we missed Thanksgiving and the ensuing weeks of holiday music piped through every commercial speaker, we have been playing mad catch up trying to (a) even "get in the holiday spirit" and (b) get all the shopping done, cards sent out, and cookies baked. After frenzied shopping and some baking (plus doing the mountain of laundry and finally going grocery shopping to restore household provisions) last weekend and this Saturday, we were finally feeling jolly and ready to spend a leisurely Sunday lolling about the house wrapping presents and frosting gingerbread men...

When what to our wondering eyes should appear
But some melted ice-cream, and barely-cold beer!
I looked behind the fridge to see what was the matter
And discovered our compressor had gone down the crapper.

Damn Magic Chef! Damn Santa! Damn house so a-curse-ed!
Damn Lowe's and Home Depot! Your selection is ab-surd!
And January sixteenth is your earliest delivery?
But what do I do with these organic groceries?

So I drove off to Sears and found just the right size
It's arriving tomorrow with ice and water puritized.
So what if now there's no money left for me?
At least I'm supporting the American economy!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM ME & MY NEW REFRIGERATOR:

This House Brought to You By ACORN

I bought this house as a HUD foreclosure in March 2001. At the time, I had been working for 4 years as a grossly-underpaid public interest attorney and had just been hired by the US EPA at an entry attorney salary, which was under $60,000/year. I also had over $150,000 in law school debt. I thought home ownership was an impossible dream for me in the increasingly expensive DC-area because of this. Sure, in theory I could have gone private and made more money, but my heart was in making the world a cleaner place (and the firms weren't hiring anyway).

Then I found out through Bank of America that I could qualify for a loan under their ACORN program, which was a program to provide low- to mid-income people who had good credit to qualify for a home loan. This program existed because ACORN started suing banks for discriminating unfairly and engaging in predatory practices against credit-worthy low-income people. The outcome was that several banks started partnerships with ACORN to provide affordable mortgages to low- and mid-income people. Thanks to ACORN, I own my own home. And I am one of the tens of thousands of people around this country who got a loan because of ACORN and are paying their mortgage every month on time. If I had not been able to buy this house when I did, there is no way I could have afforded to buy it now that my income levels look a little better to Chase and Citibank - the home price levels now would require mortgages we would still be unable to pay. And, as a footnote, a lot more was required of me to get my ACORN-sponsored 30-year fixed interest 3% down home loan in terms of income documentation than was required of me when we refinanced the house privately two years ago and the mortgage brokers didn't ask to see much of anything from me and tried to push me into one of those insane interest-only adjustable rate mortgages.

I have put blood, sweat, and tears into this home as you have all seen below. Despite my venting on the wounds I have incurred in the process, I am grateful every day for this home, for my loving neighbors, and for giving my husband and I a place to nest. I am, ultimately, grateful to ACORN for fighting for people like me. To hear them spoken of as some sort of terrorist un-American company in current politics makes me sick sick sick.

LEARN THE TRUTH ABOUT ACORN!!

We Interrupt This Blog for a Partisan Announcement

I am sorry for the absence - I actually do have tales of home improvement to add, but of late have actually had to, um, work. A lot. These last few weeks have been really busy both at work and on the Eco-City project I've been working on. I gave myself one free night off this week to watch the vice-presidential debate. I have said to my husband that while I see the humor in Ricky Gervais and The Office, that sort of humor is so painful for me to watch...it's like a visual scratch down the chalkboard for me.

Last night's debate was about 45 minutes of chalkboard scratching. The other 45 minutes, Joe Biden was talking.

The NYT did a marvelous editorial (IMHO) on the debate, but then they cut out the last line the next day about Palin's "disdain for knowledge, education, experience and contemplative leadership." I thought this was a perfect summary of the thrust of her entire candidacy, but apparently this was too offensive to her fans. Whatever.

Anyway, after working on Eco-City stuff until 2am, I posted the following:


Wow - I got an "Editors' Selection!"

What The Hell I Was Thinking (Part 3: The Kitchen/Dining Remodel)

Another Era of the Hadean Age was the Kitchen/Dining Remodel, which commenced as soon as the bathroom was complete. This Era started with the above-documented world - that is grease on the walls and light fixtures, by the way. I wish I could also give you a scratch and sniff sticker for that dishwasher and sink cabinet, which contained, respectively, the most disgusting stagnant water & green slime, and moldy, semi-dissolved particleboard with about fifty dead roaches. As I mentioned earlier, the sink drain wasn't even connected to the waste stack anymore - water from the sink just drained straight into the cabinet and through the floor.

The dining room, which is next to the kitchen, looked like this in its original state:

Don't you just love the floor? As far as I can tell, it was 7 years worth of uncleaned dirt. I scrubbed the floor for a few days and although the top layer came up, the wood was permanently stained. Being no fan of parquet floors, it wasn't a big loss to me - I just painted the floor "Wheat" which brightened things considerably.

So the first phase of the Kitchen/Dining Remodel Era was demolition, which took a couple of weekends and involved roping my dad and another friend to take that vile stove and dishwasher out to the curb for pickup. Bless you City of Alexandria for your free Special Item Trash Pickup! Here are a couple of demo shots. This is the kitchen stove area before and during demo:


This is the kitchen from the back door and looking to the dining room during demo:


And here's the view from the dining room during demo (roughly pasted together):

And then for The Surprise, because every Era had a Special Surprise: I hadn't thought anything was behind the kitchen/dining room wall, but I was oh-so-wrong. My hammer hit the drywall with a menacing thunk instead of a satisfying punch. When I was able to pull out enough of the wall to see what the problem was, to my horror not only were there two ducts heading upstairs, but they were covered with asbestos tape:

I think people could probably hear my cursing for blocks.

I carefully took out the rest of the wall wearing a NIOSH mask, double wrapped the ducts with heavy duty garbage bags, and started calling the asebestos remediation companies. And so, this was the Kitchen/Dining Era for 6.5 months - granted, lacking a kitchen for 7 months is not ideal, but it was a vast improvement over its original state:

Scout vs. Hanna

Tropical storm Hanna is here. Scout ran out before she checked the weather report. Despite the brave fight, I'd say she lost the battle. Of course, upon seeing this I can only think: "Look what the cat dragged in - her sorry wet self!"

I've spent the day trying to chase down the sources of the various leaks into the house. So far, I've changed out of wet clothes twice - first, after having dug out the drain tile (to aid in keeping the basement from flooding), which is supposed to daylight to the alley, but since Contractor #2 had the exit point slightly lower than the alley and our lot is still a big pile of dirt, the opening has been 90% covered in mud. I dug out a new trench for the runoff to actually get out to the alley. The basement is leaking nonetheless, but not as badly as usual. Guess the new gutter system is working, even if the drain tile system isn't!

The second time out was to clean the gutter from the old part of the house of sticks and leaves, which was causing the gutter to overflow and send a stream of water down the wall of the house, which has major gaps in the masonry as it turns out, and thus a stream of water was trickling down my kitchen wall - right into the lightswitch.

Ahh, home ownership!

What The Hell I Was Thinking (Part 2 - The Hadean Age)

The Hadean Age is that primordial period described as an "eon of massive solar system catastrophes." Essentially, this was the 767 million year period in the beginning of the Earth's formation where the planet was being bombarded by solar explosions, crusts were starting to form, and gases swirled around in a time considered by geologists to represent Hell on Earth; thus the name.

Of a much shorter duration, my own Hadean Age ran from purchase of this house to installation of a kitchen sink 8 months later. This Age is marked with massive demolitions, injuries, and lots of unhealthy air. As soon as the keys to this little world were handed to me in March 2001, I hired a friend of my then-boyfriend's former landlord contractor to install a new roof, furnace, and air conditioner; being the end of March and freezing, I felt I really couldn't move in with no heat and a hole in the roof. I also talked to a plumber friend of the aforementioned contractor about redoing all the plumbing which would be necessary in order to use any of it. He wanted $5000 to redo the plumbing of a single bathroom. I called Service Magic to get another estimate and (like magic!) found the kind, reasonable plumber I still use today, who did the plumbing for the kitchen and the bathroom for $1500.

Lesson #1 in Remodeling: It pays to get second (and third or fourth) opinions.

Anyway, in order to redo the plumbing, the bathroom had to be gutted. The pictures above are the bathroom in its original state. I will admit that I had removed the tiles from the shower when the photo was taken, but other than that, it was what was conveyed by the term "As Is" - including the empty beer bottle.

Shortly after this photo was taken (about a week) the aforementioned then-boyfriend became the ex-boyfriend. This was a good thing in every way but from the standpoint that what little confidence I had in taking on this project came from the assurances of the then-not-ex that he knew how to do all this stuff and would be there to help. I didn't know how to do any of this stuff and facing the daunting task ahead of me alone felt like the metaphor of the walls caving in on you becoming a physical actuality. Fortunately, most relationships have a positive takeaway, and mine was that I got to keep the contractor and the vacuum, which were all I really wanted at that point anyway.

So the bathroom remodel was my first go at construction and went like this: (1) Lure new work friend who lives 8 blocks away over to help you demo the bathroom by talking up the thrill of actually taking a sledgehammer/axe to a wall in earnest; (2) Throw away all fixtures and window (saving the unbelievably heavy cast iron tub for the contractor); (3) Replace window with glass block and take up first layer of linoleum tile; (4) Take up second and third layers of linoleum, a layer of ceramic floor tile, and - SURPRISE! - the mud floor (try not to fall through kitchen ceiling below); (5) Call plumber for rough-in plumbing; (6) Finally install (with contractor assistance) new subflooring so you no longer have to balance on the floor joists and rewire the scary old electrical work; (7) Install new drywall/cement board; (8) Buy new fixtures (call Mom and ask for that awesome old Kohler sink she got 10 years ago and has dragged through three moves without ever finding a use for it - thank her profusely when it arrives unscathed from UPS); (9) Have plumber connect toilet and tub; (10) Move in!

Mind you, at Point #10, there was no tile in the shower (just 360 degrees of plastic tarp), the bathroom sink was sitting on the floor waiting for a cabinet and counter, the kitchen was in As Is condition (see earlier post), so the only usable water in the house was from the rough-in plumbing in the tub, operated with a pair of pliers. That's when I had my first overnight guest. Thankfully, my father is not a particularly demanding person and didn't once complain about the state of his lodgings, and insisted that there were "good bones" in the house and puffed me back up with his confidence that he just knew I could do this and that it would be great. He offered to help tile, which consisted of going to Sears and getting a chalk line, a level, and various tools before his flight out.

Anyway, yada yada yada, with more work and help from other friends curious to lend a hand for a day on projects like trying to figure out how to cut a hole in the counter for the sink, the bathroom ended up looking like this:

Please, God, Don't Let This Be Us

I saw a real estate ad today that embodies my deepest, darkest fear about our addition:

Home under construction for 30 years. No septic. Site used exclusively as weekend retreat. Close to Harpers Ferry, CharlesTown & Martinsburg with new Route 9, 25 miles to Frederick, MD or Leesburg, VA

What The Hell I Was Thinking: The Beginning Of It All (Part 1 - The House Primeval)

Things weren't always as bad with the house as they are now. They used to be worse. But unlike the current mess, once upon a time, there was reliable progress that came in on budget and on schedule...back in The Beginning, that is. There I am, on the cusp of The Hadean Age, standing in front of my first-home-to-be, smiling in the way only someone who has enjoyed the occasional episode of This Old House but who has never actually engaged in home renovation can smile about bidding on a HUD foreclosure that looks like 5 young boys lived in it without parental supervision.

Prelude To The Beginning

I had wanted to live in Georgetown since my 8th grade CloseUp trip to DC from Nebraska, where I learned about the hallowed halls of government and that the teachers lied about sticking mailing labels on the hotel doors at night that would break if we opened them. I came back again in 10th grade with my 2Gen Hippie friend to protest nukes in The Great Peace March, and we stayed in some church basement in Georgetown and I remember being awed by Banana Republic and The Big City.

Which led in a roundabout way to me moving to Georgetown for the sweltering summer of 1991, which marked the apex of DC's murder-capital career. But living in Georgetown, cute as it was, had drawbacks. Like the $150 in parking tickets I accumulated the first week because I didn't yet have a document proving I lived in DC that would enable me to get a residential parking permit. Like the $200 in parking tickets I accumulated over the course of the rest of the summer because my street was a rush hour zone and the meter maids started writing $50 tickets well before the time restrictions even kicked in. Like the one paltry a/c unit for the kitchen, living, and dining rooms with 18 foot ceilings and ancient, leaky windows. Like lots and lots of drunk people stumbling around all the time. Georgetown in 1991 was not the bastion of elegance it is now; it was pretty shabby and I actually witnessed a robbery take place across the street.

After college, when I moved to DC to live the philosophy-poli sci major's dream of interning on The Hill and then working for Borders and then working as a paralegal for a patent law office, I had zero interest in returning to Georgetown. I loved Capitol Hill, but it was too pricey for a student budget without living in one of those 10-roommate houses with no a/c and 18 foot ceilings and ancient leaky windows. So I fell in love with Old Town Alexandria because it was like Georgetown, but without the swarms of drunk frat guys and army of corrupt meter maids. The only problem is that there is no living in Old Town on a student budget. So I moved into a group house in the more residential neighborhood of Del Ray, which hugs Old Town and is closer to the metro anyway. The landlord was pretty happy to have 3 pseudo-professional women in the house: he didn't have to deal with the catfights and 2 of us kept the place pretty clean. The house was a 5 minute walk from the metro and had a hot tub, which was as great as it sounds. And in the 5 years I lived in that house, Del Ray went from the slightly sketchy neighborhood next to Old Town to "funky" and "eclectic."

Sadly, my parents didn't accept my offer for them to buy and then rent to me and some friends the 3 bedroom/2 bath house next door that went up for sale at $155,000 in 1993, when I had my first inkling that I really, really should find a way to buy a house in this neighborhood before it was too late.

So by the time I was ready to buy a house in the Del Ray of 2001, it was too late. The place is now a "Front Porch Community" which largely means people took the bars off their windows and doors and the area gets written up in Cottage Living because its denizens can now walk to chichi restaurants and the best frozen custard outside of Wisconsin. My only chance to own a house here was a long shot with some drawbacks...this one and only non-condo in my price range: the HUD foreclosure on Glendale, just 3 blocks from the Hot Tub House. A lot of my friends thought I was nuts.

It wasn't really the ancient, leaky steel windows, the skanky blue carpet, the scribbling on all the walls in pencil, crayon, and marker, or the fact that all the door hinges had been pulled from the jambs due to kids swinging around on them:

And it wasn't really that the back yard had a monstrous near-dead silver maple hovering over the house and the deck was covered with green slime that became slick as snot in the rain:

It was probably more because of the circa-1940 electrical box, the lack of central air, the need for a new furnace, and the asbestos-wrapped ducts (covered safely in plastic!):

Of course, there was also the kitchen, with the stagnant moldy water in the nonfunctioning dishwasher, the sink that drained straight into the cabinet, the floor you could see through in spots, and the layers of grease on the walls and the stove:

Mostly it was the tar, gravel, and wet insulation falling through the foot-wide hole in the roof that struck fear in the eyes of my friends....but I had a mortgage approval letter and a dream.

What Happened Next

I have left you all hanging in suspense for weeks as to what happened next (I have heard the hue and cry for more, I just ignored it). But stringing you along for weeks on end with no news or developments is designed to help you truly feel a part of this story, to get closer/climb into our 1800 ft2 world - a sort of scratch n' sniff version of our pain - for this is life with a home under construction, especially if your contractor is a worthless git.

Anyway, when last we parted, there was a tree on our addition and no roof, and the drought had come to an end. The above is what happened pretty much the day after the tree fell, the day after that, and the next several weeks after that. This is a picture of the basement level of the addition, about a day or two post rainfall, the frothy, putrid water artistically captured rippling in the light from the newly-installed windows...the Wet-Dry Vac backlit like a superhero coming to save the day. Can't you just smell the dank, rank liquid that ran down the walls of our unroofed structure, that seeped in (all for wont of a functioning drain tile) from the muck atop which we had built our simple 600 ft2 dream of a Room With a View (of the alley) and a fireplace for me, and a Room Of One's Own for my husband (a cat-free space for musical merriment)? Sure the foundation wasn't perfect, but we already had a whole functioning (and bone-dry) 50 year-old house on the same stuff and were only digging down an extra foot for this addition of modest proportion...surely the 18 feet behind the house were as stable and arid as the 35 feet presently occupied, right?

On a More Positive Note (It's Not Always Bad News)

Undeterred by the water problems, our valiant friendly worker bees (not the contractor) and I continued working on the addition once the tree was removed 10 days after its arrival. The next project was installation of the Wall of Glass. A favorite feature of mine, the plans called for 2/3 of the back wall of the house to be glass. This Wall of Glass consists of two massive window assemblies, each made up of several windows held together with some heavy duty staples and then installed as one piece into the opening. To be fair, the window installation is a story unto itself, but I sadly failed to photograph this adventurous phase of work. The sum process of installation involved stapling a few hundred pounds of windows together into an 8x4 or 8x9 ft block, then carefully (with many obscenities and much fear) lifting the 5 inch deep assembly and yourselves onto a 12" wide board straddling two manual pump jacks attached to the back of the house, each person clinging with one hand to the window assembly and with the other to the poles on which the jacks were mounted and stomping repeatedly on the jack to elevate the assembly to the appropriate height while blowing around in the wind, and finally cajoling the assembly into the opening, all the while praying to the gods that you don't die beneath some really expensive windows in the process. Here is a photo of the top half of the windows, taken from the inside. To give you a sense of scale, the window assembly is about 8 feet across and 9 feet high. You'll see a picture of the whole assembly further down. But this was not just a good thing, it was a great thing, for the installation of the windows was the first time that we started to see the potential beauty of this project being realized.


Meanwhile...
It took our and the neighbors' insurance companies about two weeks to fight it out and decide who to pay to remove the tree from our house, during which time it rained torrentially every day. Two weeks of rain without a roof or the ubiquitous Tyvek waterproofing membrane meant that the brand new framing and exterior sheathing of our little addition became totally soaked. Rain would also run down the unsealed gap between the old and new structures into the basement and pool up. The basement, as I mentioned before, was designed to have a drain tile underneath it to carry whatever rainwater that might build up below the slab off to the alley, however SS IC didn't install it per the design (more on that later), nor did he actually run the drain tile he incorrectly installed out to the alley for it to empty - he just ran a drain pipe around the perimeter of the house that went nowhere, and to compound it all, he never backfilled the trench containing the drain tile, so we essentially had a giant, undrained hole in which our vulnerable little addition sat, like an unhappy baby in a dirty diaper. After every rain came an icky little basement flood.

The Draining Process for these little deluges consisted of:

(1) Climb down the ladder using your choice between the Larry, Moe, & Curly setup on the left or the steep but limited liability (assuming the door glass didn't break with the fall) option on the right; alternatively, walk around to back of house and traverse the mudpit to get to door (bottom, notice also the gorgeous full window assembly).




(2)Using a tiny, woefully inadequate submersible pump, connected to a hose that is then run through the round hole in the back door where the door handle is supposed to go, pump the water in dribs and drabs into the alleyway;


(3) Run that 1/4 hp motor full blast for about an hour until concrete floor is merely slimy and not actually covered with water;
(4) Go to work late again;
(5) Wash, rinse, repeat.

This rain = flood = smell = draining process repeated itself pretty much twice or thrice a week for the next few months. Even after the roof and Tyvek went on and the windows went in, although the walls stopped getting soaked, the basement still took on water with every major rain, which was often.

As a result of all this chaos, a couple of more shocking developments occurred, one of which I'll share now as your reward for waiting so long for this post. Also, this first turn of events happened a month after the tree fell - essentially the same amount of time since we last met up. We discovered this pervasive development a week or so after the roofing and Tyvek wrap went up. We thought the walls had dried out...but we were wrong. I think these images pretty much say enough - you can have fun imagining how you would react to this surprise.

How It Came to This

This is a sign, right? If you walked out and saw this, you'd run screaming, right?

Unfortunately, it came too late. We were already in for a pound. About 40,000 of them. So I just stood in the alleyway and laughed until I nearly wet myself.

Not knowing where to start this story, I figured I'd go Tarrantino-style and start in the middle. Then I'll just go past and present as I see fit.

What you are seeing is about Month 9 of The Addition, depending on whether you count the 6 month delay in even starting the project as part of the timeline (I did not). After watching ducks paddle around in the giant hole this went into for a couple of months, SS Incompetent Contractor set sail pouring concrete and building walls (without first putting in the drain tile, but we'll save that for another edition) around May. The walls were framed (by non-SS IC people, including myself) in September. The roofer was scheduled to come the next day, when, on a balmy, clear, and windless night the neighbor's beyond-dead rotting 70 foot maple tree split in half and landed on our day-old framing job with such terrifying force that I thought it was The End.

And about an hour after the tree fell, the drought broke and it rained on our freshly-framed and sheathed addition for two weeks straight with no roof because the neighbor's insurance wouldn't pay to remove the tree. But I am jumping ahead.

This is some funny shit. You know why? Because we had spent months trying to get Dominion Power to move the *&@# power line underground. And we had offered to bury our neighbors' lines as well, but they refused (because if it later needed to be fixed they'd never find it!), which caused this process to drag on even longer. They ignored my list of advantages regarding a buried line, like not losing power during a storm (as we had during Hurricane Isabel). So, after four months of fighting with Dominion, they finally buried our line and moved the neighbors' line over a week earlier. And the falling silver maple took with it the neighbors' power lines. Ours, of course, was safely underground. And so, upon seeing this incredible display of karmic retribution/ridiculous irony for them and continued streak of bad luck for us, I craughed. That's right - I cried and laughed til it hurt.

The silver lining for us was that the tree also took down the Verizon line we had also been fighting to bury for months without success, and they came a few days later and finally did their work, and miraculously, our spectacularly-built framing incurred only a slight dent in the parapet wall from the tree. (Posting about the rain damage TBA.) Sadly for our neighbors and invisible to the eye upon initial viewing, their power line was snapped so hard it actually pulled the power from their circa-1940 (and therefore irreparable) main circuit box, leaving them without power for about 5 days until it was replaced. I truly don't relish the financial suffering and discomfort they incurred from this event, as this generates bad karma. But i still think that the whole scene would have won for Best Comedy in Home Construction.