The Next Mid-Century

Tree Wars

Finally, the cracked tree branch – a nagging reminder of the storm – has been sawed off and removed from the roof. After what seemed like a million calls to tree services and arborists, one company (Tree Company A) quoted us a fair (“pre-insurance jackup”) quote and indicated they would be out on Monday to do the job. When Monday came and went and the albatross of a tree branch was still with us, I began another round of calls. When I spoke to another service (Tree Company B), they were also fair in their quote and promised a crew out the same day. I told them great. Turns out when Tree Company B got to the house, Tree Company A was already there sawing off the branch. When we got home and saw that the branch was gone, we assumed that Tree Company B had done the job as quoted earlier in the day. It looked great, although we wondered why they hadn’t trimmed a second branch as promised during our conversation. I was in the midst of drafting a report for Angie’s List on how fair and considerate I thought their quote was and how pleased I was with the work when I checked cell phone messages and discovered what had actually happened. I initiated a call to Tree Company B and started going on about how sorry I was that things had gotten messed up and how fair and fabulous I thought they had been with their quote when they asked whether I would be willing to call up Tree Company A and ask them to cut off $100 so that I could compensate Tree Company B for the trouble of bringing their crew out. What??? So this is how all this works?? I managed to broker a deal that would not require me to ask people to cut their quote and I think all is well.

The Contractor Game

First off, apologies for shirking my blogging responsibilities.  The task of working through issues related packing/moving/job changing/child rearing/life living has proved to be a bit time consuming.  Last week, however, I was given a gentle nudge by my husband in the form of a formal re-invitation to author this blog and so here I am.  Part of the difficulty in getting back to this (after an admittedly feeble start) is that so much has happened, I feel overwhelmed at the thought of trying to backtrack through events to keep people up to date.  Although truthfully, I'm not sure that the details of the day to day are all that interesting even to us and so recounting all of that has gone on may be an unproductive task.  And believe me I am working hard to try to be as PROductive as possible these days. 

With all of this in mind, let me see if I can quickly summarize with the following list of events and descriptions:

The Move:  A 9 hour ordeal that included 1 moving crewmember walking off the job 2 hours into it (I guess he wasn't much of a reader and was resentful about having to haul boxes marked VERY HEAVY down 3 flights of stairs) and another being taken to the hospital by paramedics after tangling with a bed frame and receiving a gigantic gash to the head.  

The Initial Rehab Burst:  An exceedingly productive period of about a week wh en my parents swept into town and kept us moving for several hours a day in order to make critical changes necessary to sustain life in the house and to prepare for our son Ben's 3rd birthday party (admittedly insanity overcame us when we agreed to host this 1 week after moving in).  In addition to simply moving in and getting things put away, we also tackled other projects.  Examples of this included removing approximately 9 bags of yard waste, taking down the green bottle bottom shutters on the kitchen window and door, installing new overhead lights in the kitchen

and dining room, painting the kitchen, and much much more (see pictures).  There were numerous shopping trips to IKEA, Lowe's and Target involved as well as shifting adult supervision for the kids. There were also some happy discoveries such as hard wood stair treads!

The Birthday Party:  After an exhausting push to make the place presentable, I was reduced to tears when my 7 year old niece asked me why we had purchased the house and following the adult response that we liked the bones of the place, she matter of factly and rather insightfully informed me that the place smelled like a combination of old lady and dirty baby diapers. 

The Storm:  A once in a 50 year experience (according to our backyard neighbor Lou) that resulted in fallen limbs, a flooded basement and crawl space and a 3 day power outage.  The novelty of the candles wore off very quickly with the kids.  It also seemed to have been some sort of exercise to validate much of the information the inspector provided with respect to a history of water seepage and leakage.  At least we didn't get backed up raw sewage rushing into the house like many of our neighbors experienced.  For over a week, giant panda bears, sombreros, sofas, rugs and other remnants of people's basements and lives lined the street.

Through all of this, we've had a steady stream of emails, phone calls, and visits from contractors in an attempt to get some picture of how on earth we are going to get beyond initial rehab burst and get the place into some kind of shape.  So far we've met with an HVAC contractor, roofing company, window replacement rep, waterproofing expert, crawl space finisher, duct cleaner, and talked to countless tree services.  Mostly what we've learned is that NOTHING is cheap and when people hear the word insurance, the ballgame changes dramatically.  Who knew that to remove a branch off a roof could range in cost from $500 to $2,400!  I mean, I'm no arborist, but it seems to me there is probably not a signficant amount of variance in how this task is executed.  Start the chainsaw, cut, yell timber, and start feeding pieces into the chipper.  Maybe the more expensive ones have a better treeside manner.

Handyman

George (no known last name), the guy Sarah contacted to be our general contractor based on glowing recommendations from Angie's List, never showed up last night. Later in the evening he sent a sheepish email in which he told us that he wasn't really a general contractor and he has no ambitions to be one. He recommended an excellent GC named Linda or something like that. She also got good reviews in Angie's List. We're going to contact her. We're not sure yet if we're going to mention George's no show to Angie's List, but it seems relevant.

We were really looking forward to our meeting with George. We were feeling overwhelmed by the list of repairs and remodeling projects, and the recent storms have only compounded the problem. We were hoping to present a GC with our list of things to do and, we figured, he (now she, I guess) would know exactly how to proceed. We really need somebody to tell us what to do instead of arguing about it between ourselves.

But George is merely a handyman, which could come in handy, since between the two of us we have exactly two home repair skills: Painting and drilling holes in the wall. We have a number of tasks that don't easily fit into a master project list. First and foremost is the hole in the soffit, which began as a bit of rot from moisture dripping down from the drain spout and, while Shirley was watching television, eventually developed into a nice little gateway into our attic for wintering squirrels. Sarah suggested I could fix the hole by dangling from the roof. That didn't sound like fun, so maybe we'll call George the handyman for these little one-offs.