I got up really early yesterday morning because I had to make sure that my house was ready for our contractor: The Wizard of Wood (I’m sooooo not lying about that name). Why do we need a floor contractor, you ask? Because like my previous post said, Mr. TCIWY and I purchased a condo that was rehabbed by a shitty ‘flipper’.
It’s a nice condo – garden unit; 2 spacious bedrooms, 2 full bathrooms, ample closet space, and parking included! It wasn’t too far below ground level – in fact, the windows sit mid-torso when I’m standing next to them (I’m 5’2”.) Even though we’re in the garden, it’s a sunny condo in a small, 6-unit building. It really appeared to be our dream condo when we bought it a year and a half ago. It’s a starter condo, but really – the finishes are great and there wasn’t anything that a trip to Home Depot couldn’t fix; we were convinced that we wouldn’t be “house poor” like so many of our friends. We took meticulous care with our finances to make sure that we could live in this dream condo and still live in the style to which we had become accustomed – the average urban DINK (Double-Income-No-Kids) household. I should have known that the place was cursed just because of the vibe we got from our real estate agent – let’s call her Sarah.
Sarah is a middle-aged, single woman who is one of the most miserable human beings to walk the planet. Everything was a challenge or struggle for her. Her menopausal physicality made sure that she was always hot, or “thermostatically challenged” as she’d say. She was the crazy bitch that would walk into a department store and loudly demand that the shop girl turn down the heat because she was sweating like crazy – completely oblivious to the fact that a $7/hour shop girl can’t just turn down the heat in a 500,000 square foot department store.
My first clue to her complete incompetence should have been her total lack of knowledge of Chicago neighborhoods. Yes – Chicago’s famous neighborhoods was something Sara failed to grasp. She lived in Bucktown – but beyond 3 zip codes (60622, 60614, and 60657), she had no idea the real estate treasures that existed beyond the usual ‘Trixie’ neighborhoods.
Mr. TCIWY and I were looking for a deal – a spacious condo somewhere on the outskirts of the “hot” neighborhoods, where we would get maximum bang for the buck. We wanted closets; we wanted realistic street parking; we wanted an immigrant neighborhood with ethnic grocery stores and restaurants, not $15 martini bars and Asian-fusion restaurants.
After looking at a number of listings on the internet, we decided to look at 5 properties on a Saturday afternoon. Sarah insisted on driving. She was to pick us up at our apartment in Lincoln Square and then drive us to the handful of properties that we had picked out. She was almost an hour late for our appointment (“I’m really sorry, but I got stuck in traffic.”)
She’s also an impossibly shitty driver. She would drive down Western at a whopping 15 – 20 mph, only to inexplicably floor the accelerator right before a red light. We had so many close calls in that span of 2 hours that I wonder which of the driving gods delivered us back to our apartment without having been the lead story on the 6 o’clock news (“if it bleeds, it leads…”)
After a number of very sad incidents over the course of 3 consecutive weekends of fruitless condo viewing - on our 2nd time out she told us a story about her mother hitting a jogger with her car and she didn’t realize that she’d hit him until the police knocked at her door a few hours later – we were ready to have the “talk” with Sarah and cut her loose. No second chances, no more white knuckled afternoons in the back seat of her car, no “come to Jesus” conversation: we were done.
The last condo of the afternoon was scheduled for 3:30 and when we walked in we knew it was the one. Damn. We’d have to deal with Sarah just a little longer. We closed a couple months later and lived in relative satisfaction for the next 9 months. Sure, there was the special assessment here or there (it was a self-managed building and nobody was paying over $200/month for assessments - specials were to be expected occasionally.)
Over the course of the next few months, we noticed our hardwood floors cupping a bit. The condo association concluded that we may eventually need to put in a sump pump as the developers cheaped-out on the item when they originally rehabbed the place.
Then, in January of the next year, our unit flooded when the pipe that leads to the garden hose spigot froze and burst. What proceeded was our belongings packed up and moved into storage, 2 months of living in a hotel, our condo ripped up and “dried”, and a series of building deficiencies uncovered.
Now that pipe shouldn’t have burst. It ran along an exterior wall and was not insulated. There was fiberglass wall insulation between the drywall and the pipe, effectively cutting off the pipe from the flow of heat from the inside of our living room. There was no shut-off valve installed from the main water line to the building, so that pipe bared the full force of water from the main through 4 previous winters. We just happened to have a REALLY cold winter this year. It was all the ingredients needed to produce the evil frozen pipe.
Burst pipes are nothing new in Chicago during our arctic winters – usually you hear of water mains breaking in some far away neighborhood, flooding houses and streets. You see displaced residents and pets on the news walking around with bewildered looks covered in blankets, while Jackie Bange benignly reads the laundry list of pipe-freeze “prevention” tips to the rest of the warm, dry Chicagoland audience. It’s like a Chicago winter tradition – right up there with Alka Seltzer commercials and the Bears deplorable offence.
Dealing with State Farm was a treat. The claims rep that was handling our claim could not have been more useless - more than 48 hours after the flood he still hadn’t returned my call. And don’t get me started on how late he was to our first meeting. I found out 2 weeks in to the whole mess that he was quitting his job at State Farm and the claim would be turned over to someone else (AWESOME!) I guess that explains why he didn’t give a shit.
We had a number of contractors during this time tell us that “whoever rehabbed your condo shouldn’t be in the business…they did some really dumb stuff.” Now I wasn’t born yesterday - any contractor is going to tell you that the “other guy” did a sub-standard job. But in our case, the deficiencies were so glaring, that a layperson like myself was instantly able to see the folly of our situation. The stud walls didn’t start at the concrete, they started at the sub-floor; the sub floor wasn’t planked like you would normally do for a hardwood floor in a garden unit – it was one big piece of plywood; there was no sump pump or drainage tile system under the concrete; there was a perimeter of cracks where the slab met the foundation so water could leak through when the water table rose high enough. We had taken on enough moisture under our floor that the flood was just a happy coincidence that exposed the totally inept rehab.
Now – none of the things in our condo were part of the city building code so the developer didn’t do anything illegal. But our problems were such that the developer obviously threw “best practices” in to the crack of doom when doing our place. Needless to say, we had some of the issues taken care of, but we were clearly not thinking about digging a trench while the floors were ripped up to install a sump pump….nooooooo, we just figured we’d have them fill the cracks between the slab and the foundation and that would fix the problem. This was the biggest mistake we’ve ever made.
More tomorrow.
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