Heat and light

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

I’m writing a quick post this week. I hate to say that not much has changed, but in some respects, that’s true. There is so much lumber in our house it’s just amazing. Really, we could have built a new house, what with all of the sister joists and random reinforcements and other framing. At this point, all that’s very well in hand.

Last week Tuesday, I did what is more or less the final walk-through with the electrician, Chad from Mr. Sparky, to make sure that I liked where he placed the lights and the switches and so on. Oh, and to take away several $200 can lights. Throughout the rest of the week, he continued on his merry wiring way and now there are holes drilled through studs and boxes mounted and cans installed.

I think that a week or so ago we received approval from the DNR to proceed with our geothermal drilling, so I expect that will commence soon. Truthfully, I’d love to be there to see the process for drilling four 100-foot holes through our driveway!

But the real news is that soon we will have heat! And by we, I mean Eric, Erik and the rest of the crew. (Did I mention the two lead guys are Eric Duerst and Erik Lincoln?) The HVAC now snakes through the house and there’s lots of sheet metal and something that looks suspiciously like a small furnace living in the basement. This is all good news … except that the house still has plywood for windows. Hopefully those will come soon or we will, as our mothers always told us, be heating the outdoors.

Our new addition

I was going to title this post “Random rants,” but I decided “Our new addition” made for a more compelling headline. I’ll limit the rants to just two, I’ll keep them short, and I’ll get ’em out of the way now.

OK, first: Who knew 4-inch can lights were more than $200 each (and I’m assuming that’s installed, plus the fixture itself). During the walk-through with the electrician, I apparently went a little nuts with the can lights, to the tune of 38 of them. (I have a distinct dislike for single overhead lights, which tend to properly illuminate only the floor directly below them.) So, these “mini-cans,” not to be confused with the more standard, 6-inch variety, apparently are expensive. Bring on yet another change order. And we STILL don’t have our loan.

Which brings me to rant No. 2. Our guy keeps telling us he’s getting it done, but truly, I’ll believe it when I see it. He’s asked us for every piece of personal information we have. If he were an identity thief, he’d have struck gold. Seriously … he asked us for our most recent pay stubs, and then STILL had to verify our employment with the university. Hello? Did you not notice that the pay stubs say “November”? Aaaaaah! Stay tuned on this one.

Now on to the more exciting news. The construction crew has been hard at work, as usual, and late last week, the guys framed our three-season porch! This, in place of the addition we were going to put on. It’ll be a lovely, south-facing room with lots of windows and sunlight and space for some chairs, a table, and probably snowy boots. Did I say snow? Shame on me.

The only other major change is that the heating people have been running ductwork. When we last saw the house on Sunday, we didn’t think they were finished. I included one photo from the basement in the slideshow below, just as evidence of the HVAC. And you get the picture.

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Eulogy to The Tree

Late last week, the tree service cut down our tree.

We’d gone back and forth about this. It was a huge tree, likely planted around 1905, when the house was built. It wasn’t what you’d call a prize tree; its upper stories certainly had seen better days. I’m not even sure what kind of tree it was. Definitely not an oak.

The tree was smack in the middle of our yard. When we first decided to cut it down, we thought it was a great idea. And then we thought about our environmental slant, and the heavy leanings of our neighborhood in that direction. And we had a party at the house the day we closed. All of our friends asked why we were cutting down the tree. That night, after everybody had gone home and we were cleaning up, we paused for a second in the yard.

That night, the tree didn’t look so bad.

Then, of course, came fall. The tree lost its leaves quickly, and we could see its true shape. We talked with our neighbors, Jan and Nettie, who actually said they wouldn’t mind if we cut down the tree. In fact, they’d had to have parts of it trimmed.

So we breathed a heavy sigh—coupled with a sigh of relief that not all of the neighborhood would hate us—and we commissioned the cutting down.

It happened late last week. On Saturday, we were surprised to arrive at the house and find the giant red dumpster missing. There’s been one parked in the driveway since day 1. We certainly were surprised to walk into the back yard and see huge chunks of tree strewn about. Sad, too, and guilty.

Now that segments of the tree snake across the yard, I think we finally appreciate its true beauty. The smooth cross-section cuts revealed its unmarred, buttery yellow interior, the rings of its life laid bare to the world.

The tree, of course, is irreplaceable. We hope to save a thin slice or two. And we definitely will plant more trees in its honor. Just not in the middle of the yard.

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We’re going green

The title of this post is a bit misleading, because throughout our renovation of this house, we’re trying to be as green as possible. And that’s not really what the bulk of this post is going to be about. But the news is too big to slip into the middle of the text somewhere.

Our house is going to be heated and cooled with geothermal energy. I just signed the paperwork today at 4:45 so Erik L. (not to be confused with Eric D., our new project manager) can take it to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources for a drilling permit.

Know anything about geothermal energy? Well, essentially, we get energy from the heat in the earth. Since we need to replace our cracked driveway anyway, the plan is to bore four 100-foot-deep holes first. We’ll use this energy, delivered, I believe, via hot water, for home heating, home cooling and hot water heating. There are some decent rebates and tax incentives available for this system, so, while there’s kind of a steep up-front expense, we’ll recover some of the cost right away and totally slash our energy bills for the future.

Truthfully, anything I say after that is sort of second-rate, at least in my mind. So, the rest of this is really a report of what’s happened over the past week.

Our house is now off the MLS. Our loans are in progress. I believe we are signing paperwork Friday evening. Tons of work got done at the house, which is not surprising, given that there are something like six guys working at any given time. Most of the evidence of that work is in Emily’s Penthouse, where everything has been sister-joisted to within an inch of its 105-year life.

Our master closets are framed; we get his and hers closets of relatively equal sizes, which is great. Openings for the door and three new windows in our master bedroom are framed, too, and the bath has taken shape.

On the main floor, we have closets next to both the front and back doors, and the bathroom is framed. The back door is still in its original location; however, I think it’ll move soon. And right away on Monday, the crew moved our front door. As you’re looking at the house from the street, that’s to the left. We (or they, really) moved it to accommodate a much-needed coat closet inside the front door, and to preserve space in our rec room in so doing. This new, smaller entry room will house the piano I will inherit from my parents when we move.

In the basement, the really huge news is that the oil tank is out. At last check, I saw the beast sitting in a corner of our back yard. However, I can’t confirm that it’s still there, as today the crew started tearing siding off the back end of the house to prepare for our three-season mudroom/porch.

Why is that a big deal? Lead paint. Did I mention the outside of the house is covered in lead paint? So, we’re back to the “Danger. Poison!” signs again, and we’re not allowed anywhere close to the back yard.

Finally, on Tuesday I walked through the entire house, top to bottom, with the electrician. Our goal was to identify every single outlet location, every single light location (in 20 years, people are going to wonder why I went so crazy with mini cans), every single TV jack location, and every single phone jack location. It took three hours, and I ended up making a number of other decisions in the process! Who’d have thought the electrician and Erik L. would have helped me decide to put medicine cabinets perpendicular to the master bathroom vanity? How many light switches do you need for the kitchen, and where should they go so that you never have to walk into a dark room to turn on the light? And how on earth can you figure out where the TV in The Man Cave should go when you can still see through the framing into the guest bedroom and second floor hall? With help, I answered these and several hundred other questions.

And I have homework. Call DirecTV. Look into ATT U-verse. Find a couple of medicine cabinets (any suggestions about where to shop?). Buy outdoor speakers. Buy an island hood. Figure out tile for the bathrooms. Choose and buy cabinetry for the Penthouse bath and master bath. Choose some wall sconces for the first-floor stair landing. Find a pendant light for the Penthouse stair landing. I think there are more sconces involved, but darned if I can remember. I forgot to bring a pen and paper.

Using your brain. Now that’s green, right?

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Financial meltdown, averted

This is sort of a retraction of my last post. I still feel our mortgage guy, Mike, left us in the lurch, with little communication about what he was up to. And I still feel very much that he left us in a bad spot with Ken, our contractor.

However, he came through, at least in word, tonight. We’re doing a different set of loans that will enable us to move forward with our project in a more straightforward way.

What that means for us is that as of probably tomorrow, Lakeshore is off the market. It’s still for sale; you just won’t find it (at some point) on the MLS listing service. For those of you who are waiting with bated breath for a lovely lake home like ours: Don’t fret. Lakeshore will be back on the market soon.

We just needed to do that for loan purposes.

Larry came home from our meeting with the mortgage guy and, exhibiting much less than Herculean strength, whipped both “for sale” signs out of the ground and stored them in our garage. Then, 10 minutes later, he learned from our realtor Kate that that really is a no-no. Maybe we could plead high winds.

Or elation.

Since life—and our renovation project—now seem to be going on.

Financing fails us?

Fair warning: This post is going to be somewhat of a rant. I have lots of things to tell you, but it’s this one thing that’s weighing heavily on my mind.

I’ve written in past posts about our mortgage guy, who has done loans for someone we know and therefore came relatively highly recommended.

I’m un-recommending him. His name is Mike Basel and his company is Integrity Mortgage. Larry and I first spoke with him about our “unique” loan situation back in July. I say unique because we purchased Sommers with a bridge loan, since we are still waiting for the perfect buyer for Lakeshore.

These days, bridge loans don’t exactly grow on trees, so we couldn’t use our usual bank, the UW Credit Union, which is among the many financial institutions that (smartly) don’t offer bridge loans.

Mike, however, could work some magic and secure a bridge loan for us. He did that, though with almost two months’ notice, we were signing the paperwork just one week before we closed on Sommers.

At the time we talked with him about the bridge loan, we also told him about our renovation plans. Granted, the bid went up about $80,000 from what our contractor Ken Adams initially thought it would cost. But here we are, a full month and a half after closing on Sommers, and no loan.

Mike claims he’s been working diligently on it. But Mike also told me in a phone conversation at the end of September that he’s really busy. And he told me in an E-mail last week that his staff all have been gone for 10 days for some certification purposes. So, you do the math.

I did. And it adds up to what I feel are lies. I think we got lost in Mike’s busy pile.

And as a result, we may have to stop the renovation, because we don’t have a loan. And because we don’t have a loan, we can’t pay Ken. And therefore, he can’t pay his staff or meet his obligations, either.

We meet with Mike on Thursday, but he’s already told Ken it could be several weeks before the loan is done. I am furious and truthfully, will find it difficult to be civil to Mike, who has proven to be both arrogant and condescending. I want out from under his thumb.

Tonight I E-mailed a loan officer at a Chase branch in Madison. Hopefully he can help, or at least point me in a different direction.

Honestly, tonight I had lots of other news to tell you. We went bathroom-fixture shopping on Saturday. I talked with the electrician, Mr. Sparky, today. So much more got done at the house last week. Inside, it’s starting to look like a new-old house. Outside, the tree is still standing—at least, it was this morning. Maybe the wind will knock it down. In that case, memo to Mike: Chop $3,500 off that loan you say you’re working on.

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Sister joists, flooring and the kitchen

Sounds kind of like a good name for a ’60s group, huh?

I learned a few weeks ago what sister joists are. Essentially, when your original joists (those are the horizontal boards that run wall to wall and support your ceiling or floor) aren’t strong enough, your contractor fastens an additional horizontal board to each joist to reinforce it.

That’s kind of happening at Sommers. Truthfully, now that I’m thinking about it, I think Erik and his crew have dispensed with the sister joists and just gone straight into replacing every single joist that makes up the second-floor ceiling/third-floor floor. This, I guess, so that Emily’s monster of a bunk bed doesn’t drop straight through into the master bedroom. (Actually, I think there’s some building code involved in this, too.)

We really have stayed away from the house during the week while Erik and his guys are working. There are holes in the floor and holes in the ceiling. On Saturday, when we did drop by, the new joists were a huge surprise, and they certainly were evidence of a busy work week. But we didn’t go up to the third floor, as the “floor” part of third floor only half existed. (From the second-floor master, we could see through the joists straight up to the roof.)

We have a weekly meeting with Ken, and that happens on Tuesdays, so maybe I’ll have more to say tomorrow about what we’ll see in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, I have kitchen design on my mind. I spent nearly two and a half hours with Leland of the McCormick Lumber Cabinet Center, who is absolutely fantastic and totally patient. We redesigned the kitchen about four times before finally settling on a layout that I think will be really fantastic. We’ll have a nearly 7-foot-long peninsula that on one side will house our induction cooktop and oven and on the other will have a breakfast bar-style counter that can seat three people comfortably. Behind the peninsula will be upper and lower cabinets and one solid stretch of counter that runs somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 feet. The kitchen sink will stay roughly where it is, under the kitchen window, while the fridge will move into the space our back door now occupies (the back door is moving west, into the rec room). We’ll have tons of cabinet space; the tops of the upper cabinets will be 8 feet off the floor, with yet another foot to spare before the ceiling!

We have chosen beautiful, simple maple cabinets with completely flat fronts. Our appliances are stainless steel … and I’m hoping to to work in a tile backsplash. I ordered some gorgeous glass tile from Amazon, but then had a change of heart (orange, red and yellow glass tile + black countertops = Halloween year-round), so I think the tile will find a home in Emily’s shower.

I’m really looking at some metal tile, like this stuff , which we found at Madison-based, woman-owned Eco Friendly Flooring. But it’s $35 a square foot! So, I may head back to Amazon—and reluctantly, at that, as I’d love to support this fantastic local business. Or, I may leave well enough alone and use (what else) paint to jazz things up. We found some economical no-VOC paint in gorgeous colors at Green Builder Supply in Madison. This paint line is called Sally Fretwell Paints, and this is a woman after my own heart. She loves color, as do I.

Oh, and by the way: I’m taking suggestions on the exterior color scheme, too.

Photos of … nothing!

Well, OK, I’m going to show you the yard. I guess that’s something. Particularly since we spent a sunny, crisp Sunday afternoon weeding and found that we have actual perennial plants growing in the yard. So there’s that. At present, the huge tree in the center of the yard is still there. We’ve gone back and forth about cutting it down. Now that it’s lost its leaves, we’re definitely cutting it down. And that’s with the blessing of our very nice next-door neighbors, Jan and Nettie (I’m not sure yet how to spell Nettie’s name).

Then there’s the house. Truthfully, there’s nothing left inside except patches of flooring and some ancient studs. The house is completely gutted and, after nearly two weeks of remediation (during which there were huge orange “Poison” signs on all doors), it’s lead-free.

I’ll tell you about our plans in another post. In the meantime, take a look!

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Second house, unlivable

To all of you who expected me to post regularly, huge apologies! I really mean to post more often, and hopefully that will be the case going forward. It’s just that there’s a lot going on right now.

Let me tell you about some of that. On Sept. 15, we closed on the house. We were supposed to have a final walk-through the evening before, but the tenants asked that we wait until morning because apparently they had “a whole group of friends” coming over to help them finish moving.

Most likely, those friends were imaginary. When we pulled up at 7:30 a.m. on Sept. 15, our jaws literally dropped. (I know this because Jan, one of our wonderful new neighbors, saw me get out of my car.) The tenants’ stuff (read: junk) lined the length of the curb in front of our house and the other neighbors’ house and the driveway!

There was stuff in the house, too, and I worried the tenants would never leave. Let me digress here. One of the tenants, Ben, grew up here. His grandmother owned the home and his aunt and uncle, who live in Texas, were taking care of the estate after the grandmother’s death. I think Ben wanted to buy the house, but couldn’t scrape together the money to do so. Thus, he blamed his uncle and dragged his feet getting out of the house. It wasn’t quite a hoarder’s home, but certainly it was filled with more stuff (read again: junk) than you’d reasonably expect to find in somebody’s house. From Texas, the aunt and uncle insisted Ben get going. Let the family feud begin.

OK, so back to Sept. 15 a.m.: We left and went to the closing with even bigger knots in our stomachs. Ultimately, Kate, our realtor, called 1-800-GOT-JUNK, a service that showed up at Sommers at 9:15 to start hauling away the, well, junk. And the tenants were still moving out!

I went to work, the JUNK guys took more than two truckloads of junk, and our pockets were nearly $1,000 lighter as a result. We did, however, get a $500 credit at closing and another $500 check in the mail the other day from the aunt and uncle.

We had a great party to show off the house “before” to many of our friends the evening of Sept. 15.

Now, the place is heading toward gutted. I’m not entirely sure, because there are signs on the doors that read POISON, and we’re not allowed in the house. I can tell by peeking into the windows that Ken’s crew, led by Erik Lincoln, has taken the first floor down to the studs. Because of all the lead paint used in a turn-of-the-century home, the crew not only is demolishing the interior, but doing lead abatement, too.

There are two huge dumpsters sitting in the driveway. They’re not full, which probably means there’s much more demo to go. We’ll have to wait … and likely, you will, too.

For my next post. (I’ll try to make that a photo essay.)

And one more note: I may be moving this blog to WordPress. I’ll give you some warning, hopefully, when that happens.

We’ve been blogging a good deal at work (and when I say we, I mean mainly my colleagues) and we use WordPress. It’s a much more robust blogging tool. Google’s blogger has served me well, but it’s time to get with the times. So, new URL coming soon! Again, I hope.

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