I know - I'm a slacker...

I know - I haven't posted in a REALLY long time. Our floors have been finished since the 2nd week in November. People keep asking me, "So, how are the new floors? Did that sump-pump job work for you?" and I keep avoiding answering. I'm really afraid I'll jinx the whole thing and just as everything seems ok there will be extensive floor-cupping, floor-rippling and general unhappiness. Fuck. The floor looks great and I'm still a total head-case about it.

Construction Hell, Pt. 2

The nice folks at Servicemaster finished mitigating the flood damage in mid-March. We had been living at a Mag-Mile hotel for the previous 2 months. As the hotel staff informed us, this kind of thing happens all the time: family has some kind of home disaster, insurance company puts them up in a hotel until the clean-up and construction is finished, clean-up and construction takes double the estimated time, family commits suicide by eating at the Cheesecake Factory…

Upon our return home, we were greeted with a lovely new hardwood floor, beautiful and flat, no sign of previous water damage or any other developer shenanigans. We blissfully ignored the floors until sometime at the beginning of May I noticed the floors cupping a bit. I called the guys from Servicemaster who came out to check the floors. They said that it was probably ok and we should just set up a dehumidifier. We bought two. I was hoping for a miracle – but I knew deep down that our floors were just as fucked up as before the flood.

By July our floors were insane. I called Servicemaster and got no answer for 3 weeks – I had to keep leaving sheepish voice mails on the guy’s phone. By the middle of August I finally got a hold of him again and he came back out to look at the damage. We were screwed.

I freaked out. WTF? We just had the floors put in a mere 6 months prior and they were worse than they were before the flood. I began calling basement waterproofing contractors like a mad-woman. We saw 3 different contractors, and an independent inspector. The answer was the same – “you need a sump pump m’am.” Even better: these guys didn’t do anything but the sump pump…We needed to arrange for a floor guy to help us too. I had become a general contractor in less than an afternoon.

The endless parade of contractors and quotes came streaming in. The damage was going to be around $15,000. Not good. Making matters worse, my next-door neighbor came to me and mentioned that she’s having water issues with her hard wood floors too. Fuck. Having a sump pump installed in both units was going to be upwards of $30,000. Monster Special Assessment here we come!

I broke the news to the condo association board (of which I’m a member, btw.) They took it better than I thought. We also made the executive decision to take care of our unit first and then we’d revisit my neighbor’s unit next year…the association just didn’t have the dough to do both units, and nobody wanted to ask the residents for a special assessment that was almost $5000.

Arrangements were made, checks were cut. And here we are. I’m hoping that this is all over by the beginning of November. We’ll see.

Construction Hell, Pt. 1

So here's the long story that started all of our construction pain.

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.

I Slack...Therefore I Blog

I FUCKING HATE CRAPPY REHABBERS!

I live in Chicago. My husband and I purchased a condo in May of 2007...and over the last year and 4 months we've had nothing but issues. It makes my head spin and I get queezy thinking about it.

I'll have to tell you more once the throbbing in my head stops. The entire situation is so FUBAR, that it's almost comical...

But It's Awesome

My husband – Mr. The Cat Is Watching You – and I spend way too much time in the consumer-palace that is Target. It’s one of those stores that has done a really good job of making you want to buy something when you walk in. There are other dens of consumer-iniquity, but come on: do you really want to shop at Wal Mart? When was the last time you walked into a Wal Mart and said, “Gee – all these toothless folk really want to make me want to buy that Nascar T-shirt.” Or, “This depressing florescent lighting really makes me want to pick up a home pregnancy test to see if Cleetus and I are havin’ another bundle-a-joy!”*

Mr. TCIWY and I got in the car on Saturday afternoon for a trip to Target. We were headed to the Target in the South Loop as we wanted to swing by Binny’s and check out the plentiful beer selection (I read a piece during the week in New York Magazine about a guy who made a milkshake out of Kondike bars and Amber ale…needless to say I was intrigued and wanted to create some luscious “adult-milkshake-alchemy” of my own.)

I was somewhat apprehensive about another trip to Target. Usually we can’t get out of there for less than $60 or $70. But I figured since we needed garbage bags, a quick stop wouldn’t hurt.

Once inside, Mr. TCIWY wanted to do his usual cruise by the toy department. Mr. TCIWY is a Star Wars toy collector. And our house is filled with all things Star Wars: toys. vehicles, action figures, collectable cups from various fast-food chains, store exclusives, and other minutiae from a galaxy far, far, away. We have somewhat limited storage space in our condo – in fact, we moved in to our condo because we wanted more space. Mr. TCIWY has filled our largest storage closets with hundreds of Star Wars toys. So much so that if I want to purchase that extra-large pack of toilet paper, I have to get permission from Emperor Palpatine to store it.

On this particular day, Mr. TCIWY was excited as the new toys for the Clone Wars 3D animated film had just been released to an unsuspecting public. We perused the isles.

Now – something you might want to know about the cash cow that is George Lucas’ “space opera” is that with his ownership of the merchandise licensing, his initial investments in his movie creations are a gift that keeps on giving. There are countless millions he’s made on marketing dolls action figures for boys. And one of the more obvious but no less dirty tricks for the toy-collecting-otaku is the “Malibu Stacey” program: it’s got a new hat. In other words, some figures end up being repainted and marketed as something brand new just so the collectors who have to have everything must reach in their pockets and purchase an additional piece in order to have the complete collection (“But come on! I know this is the 7th variation of Darth Vader…and I know he just comes with a different color chest plate, but it’s different! Really!”) Never mind that in all reality – the thing looks exactly like all the others.

True to form, this particular wave of toys is a mix of new figures and “new hats”. Mr. TCIWY noticed an end cap stacked with a Millennium Falcons. This one seemed like a one of the proverbial “new hats” (I should know – we have 2 of the re-issues in our house).

“No honey, this one’s new – it’s bigger!” Mr. TCIWY explained.

“It’s bigger? That’s it?” I asked, skeptical about the new hat that was sitting on the shelf in front of us.

“You know we already have two of those. We don’t have room for another one.”

“Yeah I know – I wasn’t going to buy one. But it’s awesome!”






*I know I’m being an elitist snob, but really – this is my blog. Tough.

No Really, He is Watching You.

Boeuf really is watching you. Always. Sometimes he ignores you. Sometimes he's all over you (however this happens significantly less than the the 'ignoring' part.) Everything seems to revolve around the Boeuf, our cat. And really - would we have it any other way? No.