nwhiker | Entries tagged with remodel

When we remodelled the house, we had to put in a new septic system. We were very unhappy that it was waaaay overspecced and essentially put a small water treatment plant in our backyard.

The size of the tanks -gigantic- was problematic because we didn't use enough water and that would cause them to throw error codes and shutdown the pumps.

However, it's nice that the tanks were really big, because we woud have had problems otherwise.

See, one of the pumps failed three weeks ago and we didn't know about it until today, when dh just decided to walk down to make sure everything was ok. Everything was NOT.

Why didn't we notice?

Well. Last time the septic people were here to service and pump the system, they lost some part in the tank. And had to come out to replace it a few days later. While they were waiting for that part, they disabled the alarms, so we wouldn't have to listen to the constant bleeping.

We can all guess were this is going, right? Yes, they did forget to reconnect the alarms.

So for the past three weeks, we've been putting water into the tanks. And it's not being pumped out to the septic field.

Actually, the system has been running on just the two tanks for a lot longer than this... see post from 10 Feb!

Dh said there was a bit of place left in the discharge tank... that's the water that's been UV treated and is ready to be pumped out, and he doesn't want to check the other tank. It should be at the same level, but eh, not worth opening that tank for.

So we're on full 'no water usage' until Monday when the septic guys can come pump things out. We could, of course, wait until the tech can come out, on Wednesday, to see what is wrong with the system, and hopefully fix it, but that's two extra days of water restriction and just no.

We are very lucky. This could have ended up as a disgusting mess. Fingers crossed that it does not.

We had three skylights in the house pre-remodel. They were old, dating from the mid-nineties, but didn't leak too badly, so we didn't replace them with the remodel.

The remodel added two additional ones, placed above the kitchen. We opted at the time against opening models based on some reviews (which I can't locate right now, but the gist of it was open skylight, rain sensor didn't close, and not enough solar power stored up to close them). Figured when the tech got better, we'd upgrade.

During the remodel, they re-did the roof.

During a NW windstorm, all of a sudden, we hear a gigantic CRASH! and... something changes in the room. Oh. There is a hole in the roof. Dh (and Perry, who will never pass up an opportunity to climb on a roof) climbed up to investigate. Turns out one of the old skylights had... blown off. And blown into one of the other old skylights. Both were broken.

Further investigation showed that the MORONS hired by the remodelling company to do the roof... never screwed the skylights back in. Fuckers.

At least it wasn't raining. Duct tape patched things up, and dh and Perry got the skylights back in place.

We've been planing on replacing the skylights since, but what with the other urgent project the stupid fucking remodelling left us with, since nothing was leaking, it wasn't a prio.

We finally did it yesterday.

Bought: three opening skylights. Removed the three old ones. Played musical skylights, moving the remodel non-opening ones to places where the old ones that shouldn't ever need to be open were and installing three opening ones in places where they'll help the house airflow.

Whee!

... Which is French for this and that.

♥ We're redoing the railing on our deck. Because the moron builders built it using framing lumber, and on an ipe deck, with the plan being to have a glass railing, posts and top rails in ugly, knotty (and not in a pretty way) splintery framing lumber is not ok. I'm pissed, though. One things we had told the builders? That we did NOT want to be left with loads of projects. We were left with loads of projects.

♥ I spent almost 6 hours yesterday plating seeds in the laminar flow hood. I started out properly with good posture and with good technique. By the time I was doing the last few plates? Ha ha ha ha.... I was half sprawled on the bench, my elbow leaning all over the place etc. I just hope I don't get any contamination. I expect I will. I think I ever remember which plates I did last so I can check if those get icky. It was exhausting, and I probably should have spaced it out over a few days, my mistake. Again. Because I've done this before.

♥ I'm not even going to comment on Trump. I can't.

♥ I'm re-reading The Martian Chronicles. I last read it as a teenager... I hope it isn't too dated. I'm concerned in large part because Larry Niven and Roger Zelazny left me shuddering in horror at rereads, and I did love much of Bradbury. There really needs to be a good website with "OLD SF TO AVOID". Anyhow.

♥ I just read a trilogy and I can't recommend it, the books were The Queen of the Tearling, The Invasion of the Tearling, and The Fate of the Tearling. Book1 and 2 were pretty good, with some problems, but nothing unsurmountable and book 3 started out ok. Until the last two chapters, when she pretty much ruined the whole thing in a completely unredeemable manner. Here's what I wrote on goodreads:

To give an idea... I gave 5 and 4 stars to the two previous books of this trilogy. Up to the last few chapters, this one would have gotten a solid 4 stars. It kinda went out to the weeds from time to time, but it was still a pretty good book, and looked to be wrapping most of the storyline up.

And then, blam. The ending was a WTF moment of total mess, a ridiculous clown nose added to a perfectly fine bottle of wine. That sounds weird, right? Well, so were the last few chapters.

I don't know what to say. I'd love to recommend the series, but the feeling of being let down by the author is quite overwhelming.

I hate it when that happens. A lot less investment in this series than HP so it pissed me off less than Deathly Hallows and its Christian crud. Still, disappointing.

♥ School is ok. It's taking a long time. I changed research project early last July, so it hasn't been a year yet, and plants take a while to grow. That's the hard part. A long while, from seed to collecting seed to a new plant. Ah well.

♥ I also wrote a review on Flavor, by Bob Holmes. It's on my goodreads account. I'd love a few extra friends... If anyone reading here isn't already my friend on goodreads, of course.

♥ I am so tired of my kids being lazy bums and ignoring me. This is getting to be a serious problem.

♥ I am sending Linnea to rowing camp with Perry this summer. Most camps, the rare ones that take over 12 year olds, are one week, rowing camp is three times a week for about 6 weeks. Much better. I'm getting a bit tired of the sit in front of a computer or the TV thing. Because of her trip to Scotland/Ireland, she'll miss the first few days of camp, I might see if Perry's coach (who is running the camp) is willing/able to give her an hour of private instruction, or can tell us who at the club might. Not that I'm ever expecting Linnea to become a rower (though I think she'd make a great coxswain), but I want her to get out and do some stuff this summer.

♥ Annoying thing. When we buy milk at Costco, two gallons, I use a sharpie to write 1 or 2 on the top before one or both go out to the fridge outside. When milk #2 comes in, it's time to think about buying more. Well, someone brought in milk #2 before milk #1 and I bought more. Grrr.

♥ Also about fridges. Our new one is less than two years old. It's already having a hard time maintaining temp. Even set at 1C, it barely keeps food in the safe zone (at 4C according to my fridge thermometer) and at times has been up to 8-10C, meaning everything had to be moved out etc. We're currently watching and waiting, but I think an extended warranty claim for a repair is going to have to be made and I'm very annoyed. Major appliances should not fail in less than two years.

♥ I'm boring boring boring. Ugh.

They look absolutely spectacular.

And the comments that the island is long enough to land a 747 on are calumny.

Seriously, it's gigantic. I mean. Really big. I love it.

( Some photos, none of them great, I'll try to get better ones tomorrow. )

I will need to find a name for the island, since if I don't I fear dh's "deck of an air craft carrier" might stick. Heh.

Perry's lamp came and it's a garish as I expected it to be.

He's a bit dismayed that the dragonflies have blue eyes, not purple as in the description.

This is the lamp he choose:

71XoRy-iR7L._SL1361_.jpg

I've shared photos of his room, right? The room that emits a nuclear green glow into the hallway?

This room?

He likes green.

Also, note: we're moving in Thursday. Nothing was done at the house today, there were no workers at all. FML.

Done with this. We have 1.15 acre of land and the only place they can put our system is the 200sqft of my roses.

I thought we had a solution that spared the roses. It seems that the septic project manager never talked to the guys who do the work.

Fuck the damn county and their environmental regulations that keep the water pristine so that all the cities downstream can pollute pure water.

And we just paid a few extra thousand to demolish some concrete in an area the septic manager told us to, in the interest again of sparing my garden, and the installers now say they can't use that area anyhow.

ETA. Here's what seems to happen with all the contractors we've dealt with, from the builder on down: nobody tells you the whole truth, and they play hot potato with information, tossing it around to make sure we never EVER have the whole picture.

When I was processing my c-section with AC, one of the things that had been the hardest to swallow was that I was lied to at least twice, at critical points, by my midwives. In both cases, the medical records are at odds with what I was told, and dh remembers my version of what happened. It was difficult because I kept on coming back to one thing: how can I make the correct decision, or a full informed decision, when I'm not being given true information? Answer is that you can't. It was not that "nobody knows", it's that the information given was incorrect or a lie. And that's what I constantly feel like here, that I'm either not given information to allow me to make an informed decision, or everyone tosses the truth around, and it never lands anywhere long enough for us to take a good look at it, and assess its import.

On the positive side, if I don't call this whole project off and take King County to court, we apparently can use the tanks if they're in by Friday, the electrical, which is supposed to go in Mondays (nobody scheduled it. The builder and the septic people each though the other one was going to, and each told us it had been done, thinking the other party had done it. So we'd not be completely dependent on the port-a-potty.

Right now, we've made it clear that they can damn well dig the ditches behind the roses by fucking hand.

Also, I just added the "birth" tag to this post. Bizarre, eh?

Septic start today. Ugh. Already issues, since all of a sudden they want to remove half our driveway when, when we talked a few months ago, it was 2ft,not effing 12!

Also,the schedule we were given showed then starting with tanks, and we budgeted time Wednesday for rose pruning and pinpointing what asphalt was going to be cut. Yeah, no, we're doing that today and the heavy duty equipment will be here Thursday. The same day we're supposed to be coming in with a large moving truck.

Left hand right hand and we're stuck in the middle.

This is why I'm in a total panic, people. These photos were taken this evening. Today, they grouted about 1/3 of the kids' shower, and part of that will need to be redone, and hung two doors. I have to move into this place on Thursday, or at least, all of our stuff will be moving. With no septic, mind you. No kitchen sink either. Etc.

( Cut for photos. )

At the rate of two doors and a teeny bit of grout work a day, I figure it might be almost livable by October. Shame we have to move in in two days. This is why I'm a stressball!

At this point, I'm a total basket case, folks. I just want to curl up and sob, because everything is just not working out.

No, it's not a life threatening crisis, and part of me feels like, hey, really, you're complaining about being homeless with two cats, one of whom is in end stage kidney diseases and pees all over the place? At least you're not....

Here's the deal. We have to move. We need to officially be out of the rental by Aug 31st, though I'd like to be out by the 30, Sunday, since, really, it won't make a gigantic difference for us, and will be easier on the folks moving in since school starts on the 2rd, thank you asses of the local school district, stealing the last week of summer.

Our house will not be ready. We will not have occupancy permits. We will not have a septic system. They claim we will. The way everything with this project has been going? I can't count on that.

We have to move in anyhow. With the cats, finding any other lodgings is difficult, expensive, and disruptive. I might be able to board BamBam, but my sweet old (peeing everywhere) lady? Cannot realistically be boarded. And taking her/them to a hotel isn't practical, as they'd need to be in their carriers the whole time. Etc.

So we're moving. Scheduled movers for Thursday, though we'll keep our camping gear and sleep here for the next few days (see: no septic...), until Sunday. Sunday night, we'll need to be in the house.

We made that clear to the builder and got a note back saying fine, but then we were forfeiting our right to have anything fixed after we moved in. They'd finish the work they'd contracted to do, even though there is a clause in the contract that say that by moving in, we accept the place "As Is", so they could skip out on the rest of the work, but that no problems will be fixed. So any problems (scratched floors, dinged walls etc) are 100% on us, and anything they choose to complete to lesser standard? Too bad, so sad.

It's like jesus fucking christ, you guys are over TWO FUCKNG MONTHS LATE, we have nowhere to go, your delays have costs us about 10k, and you're condescending to put in the fucking millwork, sinks, toilets, cabinets,countertops etc out of the kindness of your hearts, and complaining about because even though because we now HAVE to move it, we're no longer entitled to them?

Ugh. In the middle of that, some jackass online equates not being a reader with not bothering to learn, and I lost it completely and broke down in sobs. My spouse is not a reader, he's, however, one of the smartest, knowledgeable people I've ever met. He might not have read Twilight or Cryptonomicon, but he can reason, think, and infer information as needed. He'll almost never pick up a book for pleasure, but for information.

And that is why I'm taking a break from the internet for a few weeks. I'm waaay too vulnerable if the opinions of ignorant people leave me in a puddle of tears. I'll still be reading email, because I can't avoid that.

I got the MMR today. I apologize to my children for not giving them ice cream AND soda AND cookies after their shots. Because it fucking HURT. OTOH, it's done.

Why is it done? Because I told AC I'd buy her a latte if she reminded me to do it, I kept on "forgetting".

What is annoying? I do, in fact, need a second dose, ie the full MMR course. When I asked the person the kids see, they said most places will take one booster dose for adults, but yeah, NSM. Oh well. Had I known I was going to have to get TWO shots, I'd have opted for the titer (which I know would be fine since I had one done while pregnant. Alas, I have no idea what happened to my records for 18 years ago, since there were provider issues.). That said, I don't pay for the vaccine, and I would have to pay for the titer, so whatever.

The builder "thinks" they've found replacement granite. We've seen a sample. Bzzzzt, no, this is still the lower grade. To be clear, builder. The granite we HAD was black with some grey and lots of large pieces pretty shiny mica. The one you are trying to get us to agree to is grey with some black and a few small bits of pretty shiny mica. Keep looking.... :( We're pretty much resigned to laminate. :(

I went to Costco yesterday. I bought my 12 year old -since last week!- a size 7 Rainbow Dash costume. OMG.

I really hate emotional vampires. Especially on forums (fora?) They drain all the air from discussions by bringing everything back to themselves, and pointing out how miserable they are if someone requests supports and is then dismayed that the vampire had made it so that everyone pretty much... ignores them. Ugh.

See above: I got the MMR today. And now I have a migraine!!!! It's a vaccine reaction, I know it is! (Yawn. No, its not.)

What I wrote to some friends earlier:

So we're in a rental, and the landlord has been very kind, letting us extend our lease as the remodel took longer and longer and....

Yesterday morning, he texted dh to say the house was being painted yesterday and today.

Grr, because there is plastic over the windows etc, and it's 90F outside.

But here is the sad rant part?

The inside of the house has HORRID paint colours. Think pistachio and peach in the main area, and periwinkle blue in the bathrooms. Which is fine in the master bath, but since the main bath has turquoise blue sinks, it clashes.

The outside, however, was not repainted. It was cream, with a nice green trim. Needed re-doing.

When the landlord said he was repainting in grey, I figured one of the two greys that has become ubiquitous in the Pac NW, either a shimmery silvery grey, or a deep stormy grey (we're considering both for our house when we repaint. Can't decide which.)

But no.

The house has been repainted brownish grey, with a baby diarrhea brown door, and cream trim. It's SO ugly.

Hopefully I'll only have to look at it for one more month......

Perry has a regatta on Saturday. He's supposed to race at 5:45 PM. I do have to confirm that he really needs to be there for the coaches/rowers/judges or whatever it's called meeting at... 5:45 AM.

I have figured out a way to borrow books on my Kindle from the library system without getting an evil Bibliocommons account. I don't know if this is new, or if the instructions weren't there before, but YAY!!!!!

I've been reading a whole bunch of books by Tanya Huff. I'd started her vampire books at one point, but really, I hate vampire books, and as a result, I stupidly dismissed the author. Then I picked up the first of the Valor series on CD. Light, funny, SF. And now I'm reading a few other of her series.

Considering what I've seen so far of stainless steel appliances? I'm going to wish I could have gotten simple white one, and be very grateful that the blue range should be easier to keep clean.

Hot out. Blah.

So. What we found out this morning was that the fabricators had already cut our beautiful granite slab, and that they'd cut it too narrow. And it turns out, unusably narrow. I cried. Because.... well, it's a long story, and I'm just flat out going to tell it.

I HATE shopping. I hate looking at stuff, having to figure out what stuff to get etc. The only time I actually enjoyed it during the extended shopping trip that this fucking remodel has been was when we looked at granite for the kitchen.

We found it pretty quickly. We were positive. It was gorgeous, a granite called "Blue Volga" and we loved it. It looks kinda like this photo, stolen from the web, because it's hard to get a good photo of granite, especially shiny granite.

The shiny things are pieces of mica, they glow a beautiful blue under some lights, and they're big, some egg sized.

That first day, we sat down with the owner of the stone place, and our builder, and talked about what we wanted design-wise. One thing I made VERY clear is that I wanted a full-slab kitchen island. We had the room for it, and I wanted the big space. I nixed the breakfast bar in favour of a large expanse of beautiful granite.

We decided on our stove (cobalt blue!), and eventually had custom tiles made for the backsplash based on that granite.

Project went on, we specc'ed on cabinets in a long painful NASTY process. I said, several times, that I wanted the full slab width on the granite. They talked us out of the extra deep cabinets under one side of the slab, so I said fine, but I still wanted the extra width for the island and they said, sure, whatever.

And then... I asked if the slab would be long enough. Ha ha ha laughed the builder, of course it will. Two hours later... he called dh back. Umm, no, NSM. We needed an extra-long slab, longer than the gorgeous ones we'd initially found.

Sigh.

Off we went to a different stone supplier, Pental in Seattle. And we found some Blue Volga there, and it was big enough. But it was butt-ugly, with much smaller pieces of mica, and more green rather than black and grey.

We kinda said, yeah, sure, but we were bummed. Much of my excitement about the granite was gone, and it was sad. We debated changing the cabinets, but because of cabinet box sizes, we either had to go much smaller, which was not good when it came to the size of the kitchen, or pay A LOT extra for custom cabinets.

Then.... we were at the good granite place (Denali in Woodinville. Highly recommend.), shopping for remnants. And we saw..... A FREAKING GORGEOUS PIECE OF BLUE VOLGA THAT WAS BIGGER THAN THE OTHERS. We measured quickly, and yes, it would be big enough!!!

We spent a weekend on pins and needles, waiting to see if this holy grail of granite was unsold.

And it was. It was ours!

There was much rejoicing. All of a sudden some of the excitement about the project returned.

Last week, we got an email asking us to approve the fabrication of the granite. WAT? we say. Because we'd been told we'd work with the granite fabricator. And this design is not ok. We went a curve to one side, AND it must be bigger, this is waaaaaay too narrow.

We confirm this at the house. And find out they'd bolted down the cabinets, without leaving the gap in the middle that I'd expected. I was already annoyed because most of the drawers in the cabinets were specimen drawers (seriously wonderful if you are storing your butterfly collection in your kitchen, not so much if you are trying to use your kitchen to, well, cook.)

Anyhow, majorly annoyed here. They make a mock up of the slab at their office, we went to see if, and nope, not ok, too small. The plan had been to have fake doors on the "short edges" and I told them, move the cabinets, add a piece of plywood between the fake doors, and let's keep the island bigger.

All this was between the project manager and the designer and us. Then yesterday we get a call that we the builder wants to meet at our place.

We figure they're going to give us the hard sell, difficult to move cabinets, plywood won't look finish, and figured we'd have to fight over who was to pay for this, which, hey, if they'd listened to me, wouldn't be an issue.

They have a full size mockup up of the island again, on my cabinets, and it's pretty clearly too narrow, both visually and functionally. It's esthetically too narrow for its length, it leaves an area of the room as wasted space (and one of the reasons for this remodel was that we had a house with plenty of square feet, about 1/3 of them useless, and this was supposed to correct for this.), and makes the balance of the kitchen look off.

So we confirmed that we wanted the larger island.

Then we heard the truth: the slab was sent for cutting without our approval, it had been cut, nothing to do.

I think I started to cry.

I'm still angry, but more than that, I'm sad. Who the hell at the builder's told the fabricator to go ahead when we hadn't approved the design?

NOTE: they did offer us that slab for free. Fine, nice, a little savings, but who the fuck cares, because I don't have the only fucking slab I've found that I want, ya know?

We spent the morning going to a bunch of granite places in Seattle, looking for a decent slab. We could get ones that were big enough, but they were ugly, or ones that were beautiful, but too small.

Current plan is to give up on granite for now, and just install the cheapest possible countertop, probably laminate, and hopefully over the next year or three, Denali will get another high quality piece of Blue Volga that is big enough. That means my backsplash, with the pretty custom tiles we had made, won't get installed either, and we'll have an ugly kitchen for the foreseeable future. :(

Needless to say, while this is a tiny-ass-sorry-little-first-world-problem, it's a major bummer, and the only recent bright spot in this fucked up stupid project just got extinguished.

I wrote it all up, so I figured I'd post it here.

Though I must add that today, Thursday, both cats are peeing blood again. FML, ya know? My poor sweet stressed out kitties.

OMG. OK, pop the popcorn and prepare to laugh.

Because OMG, this was such a freaking ordeal, I'll laugh about it... someday.

So. We've been waiting for permits for the remodel for over a year. Yawn. We kinda never thought it would happen. Then blam. Can you be out of your house in three weeks?

Ummm... We can. Yah. We can.

It may kill us, but we can.

Now, when we realised, in early January, that we might get permits soon, we figured they'd set a start date around March. Which would have been fine. But no, they wanted to start now-now-now-now, and quite honestly, we weren't about to say Wait! because of the fear that some other project would slip in before ours.

So first we have to find a house. Which is not self-evident, because short term rental. I had one woman say "We don't do that type of thing" in a tone dripping in condescension, as if I'd asked if they rented whorehouses or meth labs.

We finally found a place. Total rip-off on rent, BUT it's very close to our other place. The landlord -this is important- is Indian, and lives near St Louis. His brother lives around here.

We had a place to move, now we just had to move 20 years of accumulated CRAP to the new place. The idea was to pack anything we wouldn't need for 5 months into boxes, and store those in the ground level rooms, and just move in with the stuff we'd need for the next months.

Now during all this. Anne-Chloe has a her major writing research paper due and a gym meet. I'm taking a class at UW and I have the first draft of a paper due. Perry has a big take home exam. So we ended up piece-mealing a weekend of packing. I ended up writing most of the first draft of the paper by myself, it was a group project, since I figured that the NEXT weekend, I'd have even less time. That was the weekend of the 7th/8th.

Sunday evening, we notice that BamBam is peeing drips of blood. Monday morning, it's a trip to the vet for him. No infection, stressed out cat is the diagnosis. Great.

AC's research paper was turned in and the following Friday of President's Day weekend, we rented a truck to do the major move. We'd been hauling boxes over etc, but there was still A LOT of stuff.

I had school Friday morning, but -and I find this quite impressive- when I came back, AC and David had moved about half of the furniture into the truck. I helped as best I could, and later we got 2 hours of work out of Perry, but both moving the PIANO and everything out and in to the new places? Most of that was done by my spouse and my teenage daughter. :)

We moved the cats on Friday too. BamBam was still occasionally peeing everywhere, and the little brat peed all over my comforter that evening. I was NOT happy.

Saturday: move more stuff. A lot of stuff. We're all pretty tired by then. I managed to do a teeny bit of work on my group paper, but didn't feel too guilty about leaving it to one of the other guys since I'd done so much of the work for draft 1.

Sunday: move more stuff. We were getting to the bitter end, and we probably had a few hours left when Perry and I drove a load over. And found the house covered in bloody pee. It was the OTHER cat this time. She's 20, will be 21 in April, so that ended moving for that evening, and it was straight to the ER vet with her. Same as BamBam, no infection, too much stress. She got happy drugs.

We got everything out by Monday evening, totally exhausted. The kids were off school that week, so at least I had some help. We spent Tuesday in a stupor, only moving to run after cats mopping up dribbles of pee. Since the older cat is in kidney failure, her urine is pretty much water, so at least that.

We limp through the week. We still have boxes and bags of stuff all over, the kitchen cabinets are teeny tiny, and don't fit a lot of my stuff, but we'd started to get some organization in place.

And then. Friday. It's time to do laundry. Earlier that week, we'd run a short load through the washer and everything worked fine, so I put in a full load of stuff, and went to the Microsoft Store with David and Perry to pick up his replacement computer (easy painless process. He spilled tea on the previous one, we had insurance, they replaced it. It would have taken 3 days had we not been so busy and putting weeks between trips to the store. He had a loaner from school during that time). Anyhow, just as we were pulling into the mall, my phone rang.

It was Anne-Chloe. Water ankle deep all over the ground floor. Which is where ALL OF OUR STUFF IS STORED, along with the piano. CRAP. We're about 30 minutes away, we head home, David talking AC through basic diagnostics(she determined it wasn't the drain, so he was able to get her to put the machine on spin and stop the situation from getting worse.) I was driving, I had Perry call my MIL, who lives 10 minutes from us, to see if she could go over and help AC. No, she's playing taxi for SIL again. Never mind. We'd manage on our own.

Anne-Chloe, btw, dealt with the situation perfectly. Except for not putting on shoes when wading in, she did everything right, and when we got home, she'd managed to get a good amount of the water up, mitigating damage.

In a stroke of absolute luck, and thanks to the three pallets we had a lot of our stuff on, our only loss was a futon we were planning on tossing anyhow, and one rug got wet and will need to be seriously cleaned. Water wasn't quite ankle deep, but probably an inch or so in areas.

The landlord's floor, otoh? Not so great. We finally get in touch with him, and he sends his brother over, with a dehumidifier rented from Home Depot. He and David rip up the laminate flooring, there is water under pretty much everything. Friday evening is long. On Saturday David moved all our boxes from one room to the room that had been dried, ripped up the rest of the flooring, and got the second room drying.

At that point, we're exhausted and I'm irked at how much my spouse is doing. The landlord admitted they hadn't checked the washer and when David moved it later, and looked more carefully, he found loads of rust raining from it. Sigh.

Still, it could have been MUCH worse.

Sunday, we got back to the mall to finally confirm the computer for Perry.

We got back, had dinner, and Linnea -who'd eaten out with friends- came to tell us that she hadn't seen BamBam for quite a while.

Huh. Let's search for the cat.

It's quickly obvious that the little brat is AWOL, he probably escaped when the landlord came to pick up the dehumidifier. CRAP.

We spent a few hours searching. We made lost cat posters. AC went to bed in tears, he's her special baby. David and I drove around putting up flyers.

I got home and started getting a craigslist posting. David got his sleeping bag ready. We'd left BamBam's food in the garage with the door barely cracked. I posted my ad, David went down to sleep in the garage hoping that the bait would attract the cat and-- He opened the door to the garage, BamBam is in there, clicks the garage door down and the cat is back and trapped.

I deleted my craigstlist posting, and we head around the neighbourhood AGAIN to remove all the flyers we'd just put up. We got to bed at 2am, at 4am I was woken up because the cat had peed on my bed and it soaked my side of the comforter. Again, kidney disease, so very dilute, I spray it with Nature's Miracle and attempt go get another 2 hours of sleep.

So that was our move. It's been freaking exhausting, and that's not even mentioning all the crap about a fuck up in the house plans, and some unexpected changes there.

We stopped the cat's happy drugs today and she's back to using the litter box, so hopefully that's no longer an issue.

The new place is fine, it'll work for the time we have to spend here. I still have crap all over the place because last weekend was spent mitigating flood and not settling in. It'll be fine, though.

And dear heavens, next time we move, back into the other place? WE ARE HIRING PEOPLE. This college move is crap when you're no longer in college. The whole damn move cost us $208, including the truck, packing paper, and tape. We can afford to pay to get someone else to move the crap next time, damnit!

We ended up with four choices, for rentals. Most of these are within a few hundred $ of each other, nothing earth-shattering.

Each had their own issues.

1) Gorgeous house with view of Lake Sammamish. Plenty big. Nicely done. AWESOME landlord. Extremely cheap for what it is. Far from Linnea's school (ie long commute for me), we'd have to get cable because the cell network isn't, and really steep stairs to the bedrooms which would not be good for my frail old lady cat.

2) Cool old brick house in downtown Redmond. About 100 years old. It's enourmous, nicely done, kept up etc. Plaster walls and all that. Old knob and tube wiring, but seems well maintained. Moose head -no, I am NOT kidding- in one of the bedrooms, cedar lined closets. No real problem with it, beyond the fact that the furnace was ancient, the appliances as well. Slight mildewy smell, the house flooded last year, and I don't think it would be an issue, but our fear was that it would be hard to heat. Also no great place for litterbox except the basement, see above on stairs, one bathroom, and no dishwasher, though the last isn't that horrid. I did like the idea of my kids getting to live in an older house! Rent was more than fair.

3) Luxury apartments. 3 bedrooms, decently laid out, the complex is rather nice, there are three pools, a jacuzzi, and a nice exercise room. Near DT Redmond. Like most apartments, it's closely packed in, and people feel very close. Decent rent.

4) Split level about 5 minutes away from us. Rent is a total ripoff, they still haven't finished the renovation, the paint is horrid, it's a 70s house they're trying to pass off as something else. As I said above, they're delusional on the rent. It's got four bedrooms, three bathrooms, plenty of space, and the lower floor is at ground level, so easy to move stuff in, and the "living floor" above is all on one level, so good for the kitty.

We ended up choosing 4. Makes no sense, right? Except that first point: 5 minutes from here. Which means that I don't have to change my routines, and will not be spending an extra hour or more in commute traffic every day.

As dh just said, it was the logical call, but not the emotional call.

The funny thing? I liked the old house best, the Sammamish landlord, this location, and the swimming pool and jacuzzi at the apartments. I can haz mashup?

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Stumbling Through Adulthood

With Insomnia

Entries tagged with remodel

3$%$%$!!!!!

The skylight saga: end?

Ceci et cela...

OMG, countertops. We have granite!

Oh. My. God.

Back to wanting to murder my roses.

Going to kill...

And this is why....

More remodel hell and back in a while.

Randomness.

My sad granite story.....

OK. The moving saga.

Difficult decision.