CafePress Premium Store Updates

It has been an exhausting week. First off, today is the day of Mongo’s birth…..which I’ve been trying to fly under the radar with but still people find out and wish me a Happy Birthday. Not that I mind, but I try not to be too outgoing on this day because I may not be in a good mood and why dash someone’s well wishes with my wishy washy well being?

That being said, my wife thinks that I am obsessed with the new store. Well, it’s hard to get up and running, especially during a trial period, so that you can maximize any selling opportunities before they start charging you for your premium store.

On a positive note, I sold another shirt. This little number was inspired by those Spencer Gifts tees with 13 different pictures depicting an act or emotion of the character like Anger, Hunger, Happy, etc. Mix that with the Zombie theme and you basically get the same picture for each mood.

I had to include ennui as it is just too funny to think of a zombie that way.

Now, I added that design on March 3rd and within 2 days, I sold one. Again, I don’t make that much off of each shirt, but it helps boost the visibility of the design early on and will maybe generate more sales. It came from the “Marketplace” which means someone searched a keyword that led them to my shirt, rather than they stumbled into my store and bought something off the rack, as it were.

In that regard, I’ve done some rework on the store, finally. I used the basic template and structure to get things up and running, but as I add designs and products for those designs, I find myself having a hard time managing all these products in one place. Now, being in the job I currently am, I am very conscious towards scrolling and clicks to the center of a tootsie pop. If someone searches CafePress for keywords that lead to my items, so be it, but that is only half the battle. You might also get people wandering into your store and the further they are from a selection means the further you are from a sale. If you have some good marketing skills you can drive customers into your store from outside CafePress’ website. In that case, the better your organization is, the better you can fight a two front battle.

When I first opened the store, I wasn’t thinking ahead. Oh, I’ll throw up a couple of designs and add some shirts and that’s it. But what I found was that you need to constantly be thinking and working ideas to see which produces results. If you have a niche store, selling unique designs, you probably don’t have to do as much work. Simply add a new design every so often, throw it on some products and wait. But, if your brain is constantly going, like mine, you want to try and capture everything. Hey, I just thought of a funny design, I need to go work on that. Soon, you have 15 designs. Oooh, I want that to be in different colors for the dark shirts. Take those 15 designs and multiply by that by how many colors you want to display.

Here’s a prime example. I have a store section called, “Insert Coin.” This is basically where I’ve put all my designs that are based on or inspired by video games. Being a child of the Atari Age, I thought it would be cool to capture some of those pop culture kernels of cheesy goodness and “make some shirt.” I had three ideas which I thought were clever. So far, I’ve only gotten to one. The other two are going to be awhile, because my first design spawned three more related designs and three colors for each.

Based off the old Adventure game, I put the dragons on individual shirts. Clean and simple recreations drawn on a transparent background should be easy. Let’s face it, the Atari was not that advanced, recreating a blocky dragon that looks like a duck is easy. However, there are three distinct dragons in the game, Yellow – Yorgle, Green – Grindle, and Red- Rhindle. Now, I have three colored designs on 15 or so shirts. Then, the other two designs I had for the dragons had to be produced the same way. Now, my section was very crowded with all these dragon shirts and my poor Keytar Hero shirts were lost in the shuffle. Rearranging the store to stagger the designs on each style shirt style caused any customer to have to scroll through a lot of dragons to find a Keytar Hero shirt that they may want.

Rhindle, the meanest of all three dragons.

This is where my work experience comes in to play. If I break up the section into designs. I can then have the front of the Insert Coin section showcase the individual design. If they click on that design, they can go to a section of those products and instead of scrolling through multiple designs, now they are scrolling through multiple products with the same design. In essence, I’ve created a basic shop all over again and imported it into a premium hierarchy. Remember, in your basic shops, you are allowed one design per product but multiple products per one design. I can’t believe I didn’t see this concept sooner. If I were to create different basic shops, like I used to, I would follow the same pattern. So, if I follow that model, managing my products will be a lot easier.

Now, whenever I come up with an idea for a shirt, I build the section, first. Add a design to the section and then import all of the shirt styles from another section. This keeps me from having to go through and choose each one the list. Then, I can now check all and change the name, description, and image on the shirts in bulk. With each section devoted to a design instead of a theme, this frees me from having to scroll down through 30 or so shirts checking which ones I want to change. It also makes it easier to manage the markups and color choices. Some designs don't work well on dark shirts, so I have to go back and choose those to change the image to an inverted color scheme so that they'll show up. This came into play with my Wii-knee shirts. Apparently, there is a report that Wii related injuries have been cropping up involving gamers' knees. How could I resist?

The drawn outline shows up OK on a white t-shirt.


But it would have been lost on a dark shirt, so an inverted image is used.


Just in case, I also included a design with just the phrase.

That's all for now. I still have many designs to try and get into the store, but I am just about out of trial time, so the quicker the better. Now, I'm paying $5.00 a month and as of today, I have about three months paid up with sales. Hopefully, soon, a profit will be made. More later.

Are You Ready For the Zombie Apocalypse?

Warning! I am obligated to mention that this article is solely for entertainment purposes. As far as I know there is no Zombie Apocalypse at this time. Were this indeed a Zombie Crisis, the usual sarcastic piece you are about to enjoy would be replaced with actual instructions for you to follow in order to survive. This is only a post…

With the legalities out of the way, I have to pass along my thoughts after reading Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide. Yes, the book was published in 2003, but I’ve read three books since college and that was 15 years ago. If you get a chance pick up this book. It’s an easy read. It got me to thinking, though, as we head further into the recession. “This book makes a lot of sense.” I mean you could totally substitute zombies for anything like pandemic, economic collapse, robots….kidding. While, it reads like a mock survival handbook it offers a lot of good tips for any survivalist. One great thing is that Brooks treats this as science and not science fiction. There is a truly logical explanation for the appearance of zombies and it’s neither supernatural or extraterrestrial. Like I said, the book got me to thinking about how we could end up in a parallel situation and I thought, “What a great television show this would make.”

Now, I’ve thought long and hard about a potential zombie movie as has probably any novice filmmaker in the Southwestern Pennsylvania area. We are home to the Evans City Cemetery and Monroeville Mall, which were locations for Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, respectively. Pretty much every zombie movie deals with an infection back story and subsequent breakdown in society. Survivors make costly mistakes that lead to further infection and reanimation and usually zombies are great for moral object lessons about society.

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Strange we can believe in.

My own movie would actually start after the outbreak and pickup with a survivor, kind of like I am Legend and would detail what happened but it would run two parallel stories about our protagonist and patient zero as their destinies intertwine leading to them both being cryogenically frozen and thawed out a thousand years into the future when society has rebounded and eradicated the threat. Of course, arrogance would rear its ugly head and instead of listening to the protagonist and destroying the zombiesicle, it reanimates and starts the infection all over again. Since this new society is devoid of any historical information about what had happened, they are FUBARed.

Zombies? Future societies? Give me a break, it’s science fiction.

Now, back to the idea about a television show. With the success of such shows like LOST and Heroes relying on a core cast of characters who are basically damaged goods and through flashbacks and metaphorical storytelling, we get a slow reveal, solving some central mystery that keeps the show moving for a few seasons. The same would go for a zombie series. You have a core group of survivors who come together to live in some microcosm of society whether it be a shopping mall, isolated island, or whatever, and through a series of character centric episodes you find out how they survived they outbreak and how they figure into the overall show. Were they fairly skilled with a weapon? Did they cower in a corner until it was safe to run? Did they sacrifice innocent people for their own safety? Are they the one who broke the world? When you’re dealing with heightened tensions and close quarters, trust is a hard thing to come by and sometimes the monsters may not always be reanimated corpses.

As the show progresses, attempts to find a cure present themselves and like shows about displaced characters ala Gilligan’s Island or Land of the Lost, rescue or escape is usually within fingers grasp only to be snatched away. Following believable scenarios survivors attempt to restore society, reclaim territory, defeat insurgency much like a real war, or at least like Red Dawn or Jericho. You’re talking about a very tech heavy society being reduced to coconut radios. I think it’s a fascinating character study. Civilian versus Military rule, run and hide versus stand and fight tactics, and can-you-shoot-a-loved-one-who-is-infected-but-not-turned questions of moral/religious/survival ethics play out over the course of the show.

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Shows like LOST, Heroes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood have proven that audiences are willing to watch shows with fantastical and even horror elements central to the plot. It’s the compelling storytelling and character development that drives the bus and people are willing to get on board if you treat them like intelligent human beings. Not everyone wants a reality show. Now, to truly do a show, about the living dead, justice, you would have to produce it on a pay cable channel like HBO or Showtime, complete with some gore and adult language. I mean who, in their right mind would say, “Oh darn, a zombie” if faced with a shambling corpse in their path? No. They would be, “What the F***?!?” at least three times before the notion to run would hit them. As much as I like FX network’s edgier shows like The Shield and Rescue Me, this kind of thing needs to be able to exist in a real sense. Don’t pander for ratings. Shows like True Blood and Deadwood have proven popular and profitable, even with a reduced audience. Besides, there doesn’t have to be a decomposing zombie or horribly gruesome death on screen every episode. The overall arc of the show is about survival in a changed society. Zombies are just the catalyst.

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Getting back to the idea of a collapse in society, here are a few things that are essential. Now, Max Brooks' outlines a lot of steps based on the severity of the emergency from a local to disturbance all the way to complete and utter apocalypse. As I read the book I saw parallels between his topic of choice and the possibilities for social breakdown in today's reality. Look, you're just going to have to go with me on this.

Don’t Panic!
Ok, panic…just a little. It’s inevitable. Let it in for five minutes and then focus. The best strategy is to ready yourself ahead of time, but if you can’t the second best strategy is to keep a cool head while others panic.

Be Prepared or At Least Be Smart.
No one is ready truly ready for this kind of thing. However, you know how some people tell you to be prepared for a recession or unemployment? It’s an always moving target but the last one I read said that you should have nine months worth of salary saved up in case of an emergency. Anyway, who really has nine months worth of salary saved up, not to mention, who thinks that money is going to matter if there is a true breakdown in society. We’re going to be reduced to a goods vs. services level of economic value. Can you grow food? Can you hunt? Can you build shelters? No one cares if you can run a bank. They’re more concerned if you can handle a hammer or a hoe.

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If you have the room in your dwelling for an emergency shelter, build one that can either be reorganized, moved, and fortified. But be careful to not make it a dead end. If your defenses don’t hold, you have nowhere to run. If you underestimate the length of your stay, you could run out of supplies. Now, as much as I like Twinkies and Doritos, those are not going to fly for long sustaining supplies.

Stock up on the essentials - Not everything can go with you, so be smart on what you take.

• Dry Goods (Flour, Sugar, grains) If you have the essential components to make dishes, you can live awhile. Watch Survivor and see how they live.
• Non perishable items - If you have to ask, check with local food banks that accept donations, copy them.
• Water – Portable containers with plain old water. You can always run some from your tap if you don’t have the ability to buy bottled.
• Mixes – While you probably won’t be making a cake. Simple bread mixes or drink mixes can give you a bit of luxury in your now meager surroundings. Just remember, expiration dates are a bad thing.
• Utensils and plates – Keep a separate set of cooking and eating utensils in your shelter. Depending on the nature of the catastrophe, your usual silverware may no longer safe. While you can stock up on disposable flatware and containers, remember waste has to go somewhere. Styrofoam plates aren’t that washable and garbage pickup might be delayed a few….years.
• Games and Magazines – There’s no reason why you should go stir crazy while waiting out the worst. Playing cards and board games may help to break up the monotony and keep your sanity in check. Reading material can also keep your mind sharp. Now may be a good time to take up Sudoku.
• Toiletries – Does your shelter have adequate facilities or should you pack hip waiters? Remember, space is at a premium, so the less waste the better. Toiler paper is okay to have but be sensible when it comes to brand and ply. If you have plumbing in your shelter, that’s great, but remember that in a total collapse of society, simple utilities like running water and waste management may be limited.
• Communication – Cell phones are nice but if the providers are gone or the cell towers aren’t working you are out of luck. Walkie Talkies are still useful in this situation. Also, make sure you’ve got plenty of batteries for radios, lanterns, and any other devices that may come in handy.
• Power – If you were one of the suckers that bought a Y2K generator. Convinced that the year 2000 would usher in a new dark age, you may still get the last laugh. If you have a good supply of gasoline or can get to some, you can keep the lights on for awhile. Just remember, in the event of a zombie outbreak or any other collapse of society, you may not want to advertise that you have power. Conserve fuel and only use power for essentials.

Speak Softly and Carry a Big Boomstick
If a zombie outbreak were truly to occur you might find yourself the center of attention, depending on your surroundings. If you are the kind of person that can handle leadership and decision making, you might be perfect to rescuing and sheltering survivors. If you aren’t, then either follow or get out of the way. The same would go for any disastrous event. If you brag to the neighbor about having a bomb shelter and years of supplies, you may have a knock on your door when the sirens start wailing. Is that okay with you? Now, of course, you want to ensure the safety of friends and family. Perhaps you already have a Dick Van Dyke inspired escape plan in place if there is ever a fire in your home. Let’s think of this as an escape plan on a bigger scale. Does your family have property, like a camp that could be a meeting place in case of emergency? Does someone in your family have the means to shelter numerous extended family should a crisis arise? Is this public knowledge to Nebby Nancy next door?

As long as civil services like police, fire, and military forces are still operating you shouldn’t have to worry about an immediate plan of action. If a hurricane were predicted to hit, you may want to have somewhere to meet up at a safe distance away from danger and just ride out the event. However, if you find yourself in a national crisis, you may want to make sure steps are taken to ensure the safety of your loved ones. When panic hits the streets it’s easy to get caught up in other people’s problems. Are you able to separate yourself for the sake of survival or is every little lost dog your problem? Speaking of animals, what about your pets? I have pets and they are like family. I couldn’t leave them behind so I would have to take steps to transport and shelter them in the event of an emergency.

Now, let’s say the initial wave of terror has begun in earnest. If you’ve taken precautionary measures then you can ride out the first wave and reassess the situation at a later time. If you aren’t prepared and a crisis hits unexpectedly, you’ll need supplies. As I stated before, with civil services still operating it’s best not to become a nuisance. They’re going to have enough on their hands without having to deal with you looting the local Wal-Mart. If your plan is to take care of your own and not raise awareness, then keep yourself off the radar and just get what you need. If you go guns blazing into the store and start declaring manifest destiny you better be prepared to fight your way out. If it were a zombie outbreak, stealth is a big ally. You don’t want to draw attention to your location or lead a group of living dead back to your base of operations.

Same rules apply for other emergencies. There are certain types of people in this world when dealing with a crisis, those who are prepared and those who aren’t and will try and take by force what they want or need. While it is probably necessary to arm and defend yourself if the need should arise, be sure that you don’t put yourself into bad situations.

• Weapons – Do you have the right kind? Can you use them properly? Will there be enough for your group and situation? Do you trust them?
• Guns are nice but require ammo and proper usage. How many times have people died because of stupidity or carelessness?
• Blades are easy to carry but require close quarters to be effective.
• Long handled weapons or tools serve dual purposes but they require closer quarters combat and enough strength to be effective.
• Safety – If firearms are your weapon of choice do you have what it keep yourself and others safe? You’ve got the guns but where is the ammo? Probably not a best practice to keep it all in one place. If you become cut off from your supply you’re screwed. Worse yet, if some kind of accident involving fire or an incendiary device should occur near your storage you could have a bigger problem than intruders.
• Trust – If you have multiple people in your party, whether they be friend of family, can you trust them? Maybe you shouldn’t give the manic depressive a gun. You might find yourself together for a very long time. If society has gone bye-byes make sure your most level headed companions are in charge of the weapons.
• Time To Go - Your fortification may become compromised. You may have outgrown your surroundings. Perhaps it’s time to poke your head out and see what’s going on in the world. If you must abandon your base, make sure you pack up all your essentials. As I stated before, your shelter should be ready to pack and go at a moment’s notice like military units. Some field survival manuals might give you some good tips on best practices. Just like normal everyday life, turn out all the lights and extinguish any fires. You might be able to return. And in case normal, everyday amenities aren't restored to working condition yet, a leftover supply of fuel or power could be useful.

Again, if this is not a national or global crisis and civil services are still operating, don’t assume you can just squat anywhere. The more fair players on the field the better the officiating. If you piss off enough people you may find yourself incarcerated. If things should escalate or progress to full Armageddon you’ll be behind bars with no one to come get you.

Now the odds that something disastrous would occur that would require you take extreme measures is highly unlikely. The odds that you could find yourself without power, water, or other utilities due to weather or human forces is more plausible. You don’t have to be Rambo or those guys North Dakota bomb shelters, but a bit of forethought or planning for an emergency can mean the difference between riding out a rough patch with enough clean food and water to last a few days, and using your phone book to heat a small room in your house while wearing all of your clothes at once.

However, if the zombies do come. I’m going to the mall and I’m taking The Zombie Survival Guide with me.

A Mongo Home Companion

I wanted to share or…ram down your throat the latest home project at the House of Mongo as a Diary Companion to the series The House That Mongo Bought and a sequel, of sorts, to Can’t You Smell That Smell? For time’s sake, I will jump right into the problem. Thanks to one of our beloved cats, we had to do some renovation to our basement/family room/man cave. We decided to redo half of the basement in ceramic tile. The next three months can only be described as either a renovators’ nightmare or a serious case of adult onset ADD. You can click any of the pictures to make them bigger.

Here is what the project area looked like before we began.

Brown shag carpet, 80's style.

I didn't have a picture of the bar area but here is the tile.

September 21st, 2008
We need to do something drastic with the basement. Lucy’s little issue is a bit more than little. The vet says she’s fine, which is good. However, it went so long without being noticed that I think the carpet is ruined. I’ve tried to scrub the carpet and soak it with that Simple Solution, repeatedly. The still the smell won’t go away. There are at least 4 spots around the room where she’s tagged the floor. I hadn’t planned on replacing the carpet until we finished everything else. This was a few years away, in my mind.

The order in which I would have liked to have done it would be to first, replace the ceiling and install new lighting. Second, replace the paneling with drywall and add some insulation. I can’t understand why the previous owners didn’t. The basement is so cold without it. Lastly, I would replace the floor. Unfortunately, those will have to wait. The holidays are almost here and we’ve already lost most of this month from my Mother-in-Law being in the hospital and my wife being in our friend’s wedding.

After going round and round over how to approach this project we’ve decided to replace only half of the carpeting with tile. If we replace all of the carpet and Lucy continues to have an issue then we’ve ruined new carpeting. Also, this will serve as protection against dirty feet. There is a lot of traffic on that side of the room and if we replace with carpeting we again ruin it with tracked in dirt and water. Now, what kind of tile? We’ve had to upend our lifestyle by restricting the cats and their litter boxes to the upstairs. We need to get this done. Self stick vinyl flooring would be cheaper and quicker. Lowes is offering a deal on their credit card which allows you to pay off the balance of your purchase in 12 months with no interest and no minimum monthly payment. After we rip up the carpet we’ll head there to check out the selection.

September 26th, 2008 10:31pm
The removal has begun. I’m making the first cut tonight so that I can have all the carpet gone before the weekend. We’re going to look at tile tomorrow. Then, the little one….kid, not cat, is going to her grandparents for the afternoon while we work on the floor. I should be ready to lay tile on Sunday and have everything back in order by the first weekend in October. I took some photos of the project area for posterity. Also, I figure if we ever sell the house, we could provide a little binder for potential buyers on what we’ve done to improve the place.

September 26th, 2008 10:35pm
You’ve got to be shitting me! Tile?!?!? I’m removing carpet in pieces for easier transporting. Underneath the padding is this ugly tile that’s probably older than my wife. It looks like something from my high school cafeteria. Removing more of the carpet reveals exactly how much dirt has been trapped underneath the padding. To think, I’ve let my daughter crawl around on this carpet. I think I even observed a five second rule on a potato chip once. I’m glad we decided to put down tile. Hopefully, we can get some extra money put aside to do the rest of the room. I can only imagine what I’ll find underneath the rest of the carpet by the wood burner.

September 26th, 2008 11:35pm
Ok, almost all of the carpet is removed from the project area. I may have to trim some from the edge but I’ll do that once we have tile situated. I’d rather leave a little extra than take too much. The room already smells better. The spots that Lucy tagged were really bad. Some of the paneling soaked some of the smell but I don’t know if I can fix that easily. The piano is now in the garage and it has some smell to the wood on the base. Hopefully, I can clean that, too. I’m done for tonight. Tomorrow we shop. Sunday I lay tile. Monday, I go back to work for some rest.

September 27th, 2008 5:35pm
That was not fun. We got a late start today so Lowes will have to wait. I’m already a day behind schedule and it hasn’t been 24 hours yet. We began removing the tile in earnest but I must say it will take us a long time and a lot of Ibuprofen. Both of us are using hammers and putty knives to chip up the tile. After three hours I think we’ve eliminated about 20 sq feet of old tile. I don’t think I’ll be done by next weekend.

September 28th, 2008 6:05pm
Another trip to Lowes proved beneficial. We bought a chipper that looks like a shovel with a bladed end. It made short work of the tile. I can have the floor cleared of tile in no time. We haven’t bought tile yet. Now my wife wants to do ceramic instead of vinyl. I’ve never worked with mortar and grout before. It will require a lot more work and probably some help. Unfortunately, since she wants to have ceramic, we had to pull up the old tile behind the bar. Might as well be consistent. You’ll never believe what I found underneath that tile…more tile. Apparently, the owners had laid the ugly white tile first before they finished the basement. When they put the bar in, they didn’t take up any of the old tile. Instead they dug a trench for sink pipes right through the tile. Then, they filled in the hole and cemented right up to the existing tile. Lastly, they built the bar right on top of the new tile. I should have known that this would be the case when I found old tile underneath the existing ceramic tile in the entryway.

September 30th, 10:00pm
Just got back from Lowes. After looking at all the tile we found some 16 inch, beige colored ones on clearance for $0.88 a tile. I bought 20 boxes. Also got two bags of mortar and a bucket of tools. I should be be finished with the project by the end of the week and life can get back to normal.

October 1st, 2008
This is going to take longer than I thought. My wife had been toying with the decision to go back to work at the farmer's market where we found Lucy. It would only be weekends in October and maybe early November. I know that every little bit of money helps and she plans on using all of her paychecks for Christmas, which is a big help. Unfortunately, that means that I'm responsible for the little one during the weekend when I'm supposed to be working on the basement. Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for relatives. I have a babysitter lined up for the weekend and can get cracking.

October 4th, 2008 7:00pm
I could just die right now. I've been on my hands and knees all day. Luckily, I had the help of my Father-in-Law and Sister-in-Law's boyfriend. They've actually done some ceramic tile work. I bought one of those tile splitters which look like a paper cutter. You put the tile in and score it with a small cutting wheel. The tile teeters on a raised edge that runs the middle of the device and you press down on a lever which snaps the tile in two pieces. We ended up going through three tiles before we learned how to work the damn thing. After we surveyed the work, I was actually quite impressed. We managed to lay nearly all of the tile from the door of the laundry room back to the garage door. We haven't laid the tile behind the bar because we need a wet saw. The tile cutter isn't very adept at small edges and it's hit and miss with the crimper. Some tiles ended up breaking.

October 5th, 2008 7:00pm
Here's a little tip for you folks, playing at home. Clean your grout lines as you go. I spent the better part of the day chiseling out the grout lines that had been filled with dried mortar. My hamstrings are ready to snap. Standing bent over like I was touching my toes, I used a screwdriver and hammer to bang away at the mortar.

After that was done we realized we were going to need another bag of mortar, so I made a quick trip for some more. What I didn't realize was that I bought quick set. Sadly, I don't move that fast and some mistakes were made. We finished laying all the straight edge pieces of tile behind the bar. However, since there are hardly any 90 degree angles in my basement, the walls behind the bar aren't square, so my measurements were a little off in some places. That, coupled with the fact that one of the first pieces I set into the quick drying mortar did not have spacers properly placed between it and other tiles caused my grout lines to be off and the corners didn't match up. It would be a costly mistake if I chose to pull up all those tiles. I'd need additional mortar, tiles, and time.

October 11th, 2008 7pm
Another full day of work. A friend of mine happened to have a wet saw and was nice enough to lend it to me for a bit. Today took a lot of math skills. I had a decision to make on whether I was going to all out with the tile or stop short of the pipes under the bar sink. We decided to give it a shot since we had a lot of leftover tile. After all, I didn't want to be lazy like the people I've been cursing under my breath since I bought this place. It took a lot of work and finesse but we managed to finish it off and it looks fairly decent. We managed to get a small bit of grouting done before we had to quit.

Sunday might be a lost cause for work. I don't have any help and I don't know if I feel confident enough to mix and grout by myself.

October 18th, 2008 5:30pm
At first I thought this day would never work out. My friend with the wet saw offered to come over and help finish the grouting. He recently redid his kitchen floor and he has all the tools for the job. However, he was late. My Father-in-Law needed a break from the work and while I think he's nuts, he considers a break to be babysitting. After dropping off my daughter, I waited for my friend. I told him to be there around noon and by 1:30 he was a no show. I felt that I was wasting weekend, so I tried to mix up some grout by myself. Here's another little tip for you playing at home. Use just a little bit of water and then add to the mix. I had a soupy mix and pretty much wasted a half of a bag of grout.

I made a trip back to Lowes to getting matching grout and called my friend to let him know I would be right back. I ended up leaving a voice mail which further angered me. He did end up calling while I was in line to buy grout and I told him I would be back in 20 minutes.

After returning home and with everyone present, we started grouting. Either he was really good at this or just in hurry, because we were done in an hour. He was cleaned up and gone by 4:30pm. Now, all I had to do was get some baseboards, lay the carpet back down and finish it. I might be done by Halloween.

November 9th, 2008
In case you've been wondering what happened, there's been a work stoppage. Buying baseboards for the project proved rather annoying. We pretty much destroyed the existing, wooden baseboards, so we had to buy new ones. All of the wood boards were not the right color and I didn't have the space and patience to stain them. We opted for pre-finished fiberglass base boards but there was a lead time of two weeks for the order. I also bought carpet strips for the edge of the tile. They are kind of work like anchors. You drill the holes into the concrete and slide these plastic pins along a channel in the underside of the strip. You place the pins in the holes and use a rubber mallet to sink them into the holes. Then you have no hardware showing. Once I get the baseboards I should be able to finish this in a couple of days. Unfortunately, the wife has continued working weekends which limits my free time to finish the project.

November 30th, 2008 8:00pm
The baseboards finally came in and if I couldn't get any free time on the weekends to do the work, until after Thanksgiving. I took the week off and had plenty of time to work while the little one was being watched by the wife. My Father-in-Law lent me his miter saw so that I could cut the baseboards. Unfortunately, the plastic guards on the saw arm were lower than the top of the baseboard. I ended up carving out a notch next to my cut which really pissed me off to no end. I had to do some fancy cutting to make it work including cutting through the top half and then flipping over the board to cut through the bottom half. If I was lucky, the angle of the cut would meet. Again, my walls are not square and some angles weren't exactly 45 degrees forcing me to shim behind the baseboards along the bar.

The whole bar was a catch 22 situation. In one aspect, I was glad we had that previous water damage from the overflowing AC drip pan. It made the old vinyl tile very brittle and was easy to remove. The bad part was it warped the paneling creating uneven lines for both the new tile and the baseboards.

Another lousy site to see was four out of the seven baseboards were splintered on the one end. I lost an entire eight feet and had to make do. I managed to have just enough to finish the project area but am going to return the broken pieces for a new one in order to replace the last bit of baseboard on the other side of the room to make it match the rest.

Behind the bar, I cheated in one spot. Between the sink and the brick wall, behind the bar, I didn't do angle cuts. I just nailed two pieces side by side and you can sort of see the seem between them. I didn't have enough left for one piece so I had to use two smaller pieces. The upside is that the refrigerator sits in that space an will cover the screw up.

I could also shoot myself for screwing up the carpet strips. I had wait another few days to get a hammer drill from my Father-in-Law. This thing nearly killed me. First off, I ended up drilling twice as many holes because I couldn't drill deep enough in some spots. At times, I leaned on the drill with all my weight which resulted in a weird sensation in my chest. The percussive motion of the drill acted in a manner that I can only describe as a negative pressure In-exsuffaltor. The continued pounding on my chest made me short of breath and anxious. I did produce some great coughs from the experience which cleared my lungs of all the dust from the drilling. Secondly, I didn't properly evacuate the holes of all the dust and debris which led to a warped appearance in one of the strips. The plastic pins stopped short of the bottom of the hole and bent in half leaving a gap between them and the tile. I'll have to go back and fix that after the holidays. We skipped decorating for Halloween because of the delay in completion and I'm not about to deprive my daughter of full on Christmas decorations this year.

December 7th, 2008
Well, we're done....for now. I still need to get another piece of baseboard and fix the carpet strip but we've managed to get it usable for the holidays. Once we take decorations down and begin to get things back to normal I will finish the few loose ends. I did a tally of what I actually spent and I must say, for the amount of work, it's not bad. The bad part is how long it took. From start to finish it took two and a half months to do what should have realistically taken two weeks.

As a weekend warrior, I have a lot of work ahead of me on this house but I'm in it for the long haul. I only set one stipulation with my wife. Any big projects need to be scheduled between the beginning February and the beginning of June or the middle of July and the end of September. That gives me four months in the early part of the year and two and a half months in the later part. This avoids all holidays and my daughter's birthday. This is all in accordance with planned renovations. If the cat pisses somewhere, well then we need to jump on it right away.

TOTAL COSTS FOR PROJECT
$670.95

$364 - 20 boxes of 16” tile, 3 bags of mortar, 2 bag of grout
$30 - Tile scraper
$23.95 - Tile Cutter
$21 - Case of Beer
$80 - Help
$10 - Additional bag of grout.
$142 - for baseboards and carpet strips.

Result

The House That Mongo Bought: Joy and Annoy

We conclude the Home Ownership series with Part Three. An additional entry will serve as a Diary Companion to this series as well as a continuance to the entry, Can’t You Smell That Smell?

I put way too much into this series. It was supposed to be a quick history of the trials and tribulation of buying my house but it ended up being a long winded opinion on what I think you should do. I apologize. Maybe my wife is right. I do go to Erie to tell a story. In any case, we’re here now and this is what the series was supposed to be about. The joys of home ownership and the issues that make me want to reach for a flask.

Power to the People.
Prior to moving into our home in 2004, the original owners had to replace the 100 amp fuse box with a 150 amp breaker box. When we toured the house, the breaker box was in the corner of the basement behind a small, latched door. From the picture below, you can almost make out the huge surrounding cabinet, adorned in wood paneling.

The cabinet door blended into the entire panelled wall

When they replaced it, they had to make the opening bigger for the larger breaker box, thus leaving a gaping hole in the wall, exposing some pipes and the breaker box. The first real project I started on the house was to mask the breaker box without having to change three walls. My Father-in-Law and I built custom cabinet doors out of regular plywood, routed the edges and installed some nice handles. We hung the doors on the existing frame with an overlap cutout to eliminate any gap in the doors. You can see a closer shot of the newly installed doors, highlighted, in the shot below.

Now, the entire cabinet is covered by the doors

Now, when they upgraded the electric to 150, I thought I would be safe from power outages. Unfortunately, the holidays have proven to be a challenge. My daughter loves having the lights on all the time. She’s not even two, yet. She walks into a room and says, “Light! Light!” For some reason, whoever wired the house put all of the outlets in the basement on the same breaker as most of the upstairs ones. We didn’t start having major problems until we got one of those electric stoves. It looks like a fancy stove with fake logs and uses a light bulb and a blower to heat the room. A spinning shade gives the effect of flames against the background. It does a good job and brings the temperature up 5 degrees in less than an hour. Because the basement is not lit very well, having only two glass block windows in one wall that receive no direct sunlight, lamps provide much of the illumination. The dark paneling and brown carpet make the basement extremely dark. So, with all the lamps on, and the electric heater running, the breaker gets overloaded due to the upstairs lights, television, and Christmas tree being on at the same time. This really gets my goat because my digital cable box resets and I have to wait an hour for the guide to come back.

The reason we have that stove, other than aesthetics, is because our basement is notoriously cold. The door to the garage and what I call the pantry under the front porch are poorly insulated. Also, the paneling is hung on stud walls with no insulation behind it, throughout the room. We have a wood burning insert but that’s usually up to me to take care of and during the day she leaves it alone. There is one other peculiar fixture in the basement. On the wall, next to where the hearth, is a gas heater It’s very small and functions like a gas grill. It only serves to heat the ceiling and the stairwell up to the main floor. It also uses a lot of gas, so I try not to use it. To make matters worse while simultaneously improving the living space, we recently replaced the half the carpet with ceramic tile. It’s a long story that will be covered in the Diary Companion to this series to follow. While a definite improvement to the overall décor, it decreases the temperature in the room by almost 10 degrees in the colder months. This is why we opted for the stove.

AC Idiocy
Here’s a lesson in checking out your air conditioner before firing it up. We bought our house in January. We didn’t have to start using the AC until nearly July. That’s one of the perks of having a lot of shade from two big oaks and two big maples. When we finally did get the thing going it worked really hard to cool the house for the first time. I mean it ran constantly and it never seemed to make an improvement in the temperature. We have an attic fan which helps, but you have to keep the doors open throughout the house because we fear the pilot light on the furnace could blow out. It could be an urban legend for all I know, but I’m not taking chances. In any case, I didn’t trust something about this AC unit and I didn’t find out why until we had 50 people at our house.

We had a 4th of July BBQ our first summer and the added body heat and the constant opening of doors to the outside worked the AC harder than ever before. So much that we flooded in the basement. I know that seems rather impossible but hear me out. In what I like to call the Man Cave bathroom, there is a flimsy shower which we never use. It’s basically three wobbly plastic walls with holes cut out for the handles. It also serves as a runoff for the drip pan in the furnace. The bottom of the shower has a lot of sediment and looks a little rusty. However, that’s not what caused the flooding. Apparently, the drip pan overflowed down through the furnace and onto the floor. It then proceeded under the stud wall into the family room behind the bar. There is a sink behind the bar, so it took me a few hours to figure out where the water was originating. I kept checking the pipes underneath the bar, looking for a leak.

Once we figured out where the leak started, we called an HVAC technician to make sure our furnace wasn’t damaged by the water. He said everything was fine, but that someone had inserted the drip pan in backwards causing the water to improperly drain. It just filled up and overflowed. It was an easy fix, but caused the first of some lasting damage to the tile floor behind our bar.

Water, Water, Everywhere, but None, Hot In the Sink.
My second and third experience with water wasn’t so easy to fix. After almost two years, we had to replace the hot water tank. It was late, one Friday night, around 2 AM and after a long week, I was looking forward to some much needed sleep I fell asleep on the couch before bedtime and my wife was doing some late night laundry. From within the deep recesses of my sub consciousness I could hear my wife calling out to me. As I began to wake from my slumber, the calling became yelling. “GET IN HERE! YO! GET IN HERE, NOW.” In my groggy state, I had no idea where the noise was coming from because the walls are only as thick as the paneling. After asking for my wife’s location, I found her standing in the bathroom which was filling with water. We both stood there looking dumbfounded at the hot water tank which was spewing water from the top like Old Faithful. Coming to my senses, I shut off the water. We spent the next two hours sucking up all the water with a Hoover Floor Mate scrubber and a Bissell Carpet steamer. Once again, the water flowed underneath the paneling into the bar area, warping the paneling and destroying the vinyl tiling. We got lucky because we were five minutes from going to bed. With the washer running, the sound of the water from the tank was muffled. It was just by chance that my wife happened to go in to the bathroom and found the problem. We could have had some major water damage after a few hours.

From what I could figure out, the tank had cracked and needed to be replaced. My second big home project was to replace the hot water tank and I used after getting a few hours of sleep from the big clean up, I went tank shopping on Saturday and installed it on Sunday. So much for recharging the batteries from the work week. Installing a hot water tank is fairly easy but there is some pipe fitting involved. Until now, the only pipe work I had done was removing and replacing old traps under the sinks. Loctite became a good friend. In this case we weren’t working with drains. We were working with pipes that were carrying hot water and Flux became my new best friend.

Once the tank was replaced, operations resumed as normal until we started experiencing a weird phenomenon. The cold water taps in our sinks dispensed hot water. My Father-in-Law and I started looking at each other thinking we installed the hot water tank wrong. For weeks we couldn’t figure out what was causing the problem. The exposed piping in the basement didn’t give us any answers. How could we have screwed this up? The cold water pipe doesn’t even go into the hot water tank. How could hot water be coming out of the cold water taps? Short of calling a plumber we thought we were going to have to disconnect the hot water tank and start over.

Then, one night (why do these things never happen in the morning?) my wife went into the garage and found the garden hose, that was hanging on the wall, broken away from the threaded end and the taps were gushing hot water everywhere. Here’s a quick overview of the setup in the garage. There is a hot and cold water tap in with shut off valves right above it. For some reason they continually drip, which is a problem with the taps I suspect, yet it still drips with the water turned off at the pipes. My quick and dirty solution was to hook up a garden hose with a spray nozzle and leave the water on at the pipe and the taps open. Somewhere along the way, I turned on the hot water only, probably to wash a car and when the hose broke, hot water came flying out. Luckily, there’s a drain in the floor and we didn’t have too many things other than rugs get wet. Oddly enough, that fixed the problem. I guess hot water had been back building into the tank and somehow made its way into the cold water main, heating the water coming through those pipes. Once the pressure from the pipes that had been relieved from the garden hose, everything flowed normally. Who would have thought that a simple garden hose could cause so much trouble.

Standing Water, Hidden Problem.
By now, I thought my water woes were behind me. Unfortunately, I have a reoccurring problem that needs to be addressed every couple of years. The house was built while Kennedy was still alive and President. In those days, they used terracotta for the sewage out to the street. Remember I was praising those 4 big trees in my yard? Well, they just became my worst enemy. The root systems from those trees have been feeding off my sewage line for decades. The pipes are in sections and the roots creep their way into the pipes looking for water. They often break the pipes open but also occlude the opening causing water backup when its coupled with solid waste, washer lint, and toilet paper….as well as some other objects. Certain hygiene products are no longer allowed to be flushed in my house. After we started noticing water backing up into the basement from the laundry room drain, we asked our neighbor about it since their house was almost identical in design to ours. They told us of their problems prompting them to replace the pipes under the driveway. They also gave us the number of a guy who could help with the short term. He came over with a big auger and snaked all the drains removing the immediate problem for about $60.00.

Unfortunately, the long term is a little more expensive. Our driveway is gravel and I would like to eventually pave it. In order to do that, I am going to have to replace the pipes. If I do it myself, I run the risk of taking a long time because of my schedule. I also, deprive us of a driveway. If that wasn’t enough, it won’t be a final solution to my problem. The guy that did our drains said that the terracotta pipes also run underneath the garage flooring towards the back yard, where my two big maples live. Maples are voracious drinkers and they will go far to find water. Much to my wife’s dismay, the more cost effective solution would be to get rid of the trees rather than dig up the garage to replace the pipes.

Bugs in the Bathroom, Mice in the Bedroom, and Stars On the Ceiling.
Here’s a little tip for you people looking to sell your home. Actually, let me back up a step. My wife’s favorite show is Designed To Sell on HGTV. Personally, the show sometimes irks me as I will attest to in the Diary Companion detailing our basement renovation. The premise is a fix for sellers who can’t get any offers on their house. They work within a budget of $2000 and a lot times their solutions are cheap gimmicks that disguise a bigger issue. My point is, I do recommend watching the show for the do’s and don’ts of home ownership in regards to selling. I wouldn’t replicate their solutions. They are effective, but your ears will be burning for years as the new home owners will curse you when they undo your work in order to do their own renovations. It’s personal preference really. I would rather do something the right way instead of just covering up someone else’s mistakes.

Three areas of my house have ridiculous enhancements that would have probably turned away a lot of buyers. In the bathroom there is standard wallpaper. It looks like a pond theme with lily pads and associated flora. The previous owner’s wife was a bit of an artist and decided to add the fauna with a paint brush. To be scientifically correct, it’s not all fauna. It’s mostly insects. There are all kinds of bugs and reptiles painted into the background of the wallpaper as if it was one big Where’s Waldo book. Open up the medicine cabinet and there’s a bug lounging at the beach on a chair. Above the vanity is a bus load of ants heading to the shore which makes me laugh because it looks like a tragedy about to happen. There are alligators poking out of the water, spiders in the shower, and ladybugs above the toilet. Whenever we have guests over, we tell them to play a game when they use the bathroom. Try and find all the bugs, reptiles, and amphibians. In addition to eventually removing the wallpaper and painting the bathroom, we also need to replace the fan. At one time, the bathroom had a window that opened onto the back porch. It was bricked up and a shower was installed cutting off the natural light and ventilation. The fan sounds as if the bearings are shot and it grinds pretty badly. Because the lack of good ventilation, mold and mildew become an issue.

The master bedroom is another experiment in anthropomorphic artistry. It was converted into kids room with bunk beds. Red shag carpet was installed over top of the hard wood flooring and the walls have paper depicting infant Mickey Mouse and friends in various states of sleepiness. This room is primarily a junk room known as The Red Room as depicted in Behind the Red Room Door and also serves as a guest room. The master bedroom was moved to the small corner bedroom. We’ve repainted the room in peach and I added a hand painted leafy vine border on all the walls. When we first moved in, we did not have a bedroom suit for it. My wife and I slept in separate full size beds, side by side on the floor. We didn’t take into account the size of the room when we purchased a sleigh bed, tall dresser, night stand, and long dresser with vanity. We literally have to turn sideways to get around the bed. We would like to eventually redo The Red Room as the master bedroom and turn that one into our daughter’s room. I, for one, do not want her to have a bedroom closer to the front door from me. I want her to have to walk past my room to sneak out, or in, when she’s older. A common theme between all three bedrooms is another no-no for home sellers. All the ceilings have glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to them. While fun in a dorm room, they don’t exactly shout class when potential buyers look at your home. Still, we’ve become used to them and our daughter looks up and says “Stars!” when the lights go out in her room.

Her room is the best looking room, in the house to date. When we first moved in we nicknamed my daughter’s room, The Pooh Room. It was a bedroom that was converted into a play room for the owner’s kids and it had two walls painted yellow and two painted mauve. I have no idea why. This room served as a pseudo guest room/second junk room prior to my daughter’s birth. The year before my wife got pregnant we repainted it white but still called it The Pooh Room. Ironically, when we converted it into a nursery, we painted it green…..actually called “quaking grass,” and decorated it in a Classic Winnie the Pooh theme. After all that it is technically, still, The Pooh Room. I changed the light fixture and we added a couple of framed pictures of Classic Pooh Scenes that I printed off of the Internet.

The Pooh Room redone as The White Room with green curtains

The Pooh Room redone as the nursery

What Were They Thinking?
To this day, I continually find quirky little annoyances with the house. Things that make me go, “AWW DAMNIT!” I know I’m not the smartest person in the world but the people that originally owned our house really screwed things up. Granted, at the time they probably weren’t thinking in terms of wanting to sell the house down the road but there are a few things that they just did lazily. I dread having to make improvements because I’ll have to undo whatever band aid they put on the problem. The biggest head scratcher was the basement. That whole project is being covered by the Diary Companion to this series which is to follow.

How to Build Equity in Your Home from ezinearticles.com
Designed To Sell from HGTV
10 Recession-Proof Home Improvements from Forbes.com
10 Smart, Low-Cost Home Improvements from Interest.com

The House That Mongo Bought: Rent vs. Buy vs. Build

We continue the Home Ownership series with Part Two.

Take Off Your Shoes….There’s Math Involved.
The decision to stop renting and start owning is a debatable topic covered in full elsewhere on the web. What I will say to this is that prior to buying a home I saw my monthly payments increase while my living space depreciated. In 1999, I was paying half of $375 plus utilities. In 2000, I ventured out on my own and began paying roughly $360 a month plus electric for a one bedroom apartment. By 2003, I had upgraded to a two bedroom townhouse for around $450 plus utilities. As 2003 turned into 2004 I slowly realized that I could keep moving and pay a substantial amount each month for more square footage or I could plateau and remain where I was at for a small incremental increase. I started doing the math and realized that I could make a onetime jump to a 30 year mortgage and be able to own my home, make improvements and not have to worry about someone else being responsible for the state of my place.

People will say, stop throwing money at rent and get equity. What exactly does that mean? It means that after you pay rent for 3 years on an apartment, you have no ownership of that property. If you wanted to get a loan you couldn’t use your apartment for collateral. If you’ve been paying off a house for those same three years, your equity is the difference between the fair market value of your home and the unpaid balance of the mortgage and any debt over the it. Equity increases as your remaining loan amount decreases or the property appreciates from improvements. You could use your equity to get a loan, using your home as collateral. While, this isn’t always a safe or smart venture, depending on your financial savvy you could use it to your advantage.

The other thing I will tell you is that don’t let anyone bully you into buying a home. This is probably the single biggest investment you will make, outside of raising a child. There is a lot of risk, especially because of what happened in 2008.

Be Smart!
We all want to blame Wall Street for what happened to the housing market. Some even want to blame the government. Ultimately, we are responsible for our own actions. Don’t get sucked in by attractive loan packages or promises of unimaginably low rates. Talk to someone you trust about finances like an advisor or even a relative or friend who has been there. While the sub prime mortgage crisis was brought on by fuzzy math and invisible money, the fact remains that a lot of people simply tried to live beyond their means. First time home buyers or even people on their fifth house need to be cognizant of the bottom falling out of everything. “If I lose my job, will I be able to still make my mortgage payments?” “How long can I go without income and still meet all my fiduciary responsibilities?” “What if my lender gets bought or goes bankrupt?” If you think just because you got a low rate you may be able to play the odds today you can buy a million dollar mansion then you are destined for failure. In my opinion, the object is to buy low and sell high. If you want to own a home, begin to figure out what you exactly want in the end before signing your life away now.

Be Patient.
In 2004, I took the plunge and bought my first home. From the previous October, I had looked at about 100 listings online and actually toured about seven in person. We worked with a real estate agent who happened to be a friend of a friend. We asked her to do one thing for us. Tell us her thoughts like we were her kids. Now, not every agent is going to be that honest. In fact the life of a real estate agent is tough. It’s a very proactive career. Some companies don’t pay you a base salary. In fact, some charge you for resources such as desk space, use of MLS (Multiple Listing Service) systems, etc. After that, consider that the real income occurs only after the sale. Let’s say a $150,000 sells and you are the buying agent. Standard commissions are about 7% in most places. There are some that advertise 2% but you get what you pay for there. That 7% commission on a $150,000 comes to $10,500. That is then split between the buying and selling agent. Now, the agent gets $5250. Once they pay off all their fees, the take comes to probably half that. If they sell 20 houses a year for that initial price of $150,000, they’ll make roughly $52,000 before taxes. That’s not bad but not great. You could see why an agent is more interested in selling high and not being completely honest about the house in question.

With our agent being someone we trusted, we started out looking at houses. The third house we looked at became our favorite and the litmus test for all other houses. It was a three bedroom ranch with a finished basement, integrated garage, and big backyard. The view from the back was pretty good. Tall pine trees on three sides blocked out most of the surrounding yards. Two big Maples in the back and two big Oaks in the front provided ample shade. Hardwood floors throughout most of the main level was an added plus. The downstairs had a bricked hearth with a beam mantle above a wood burning insert. A wet bar with a brick wall and counter top that spanned most of the room was all I needed to buy. The downside was that everything was a little dated. The roof was fairly new, but the flooring in the basement was a brown shag carpet and wood paneling on three sides. The back porch, while enclosed, served as a place to keep their dog and the tile flooring was ripped up and scratched overall. The electric was 100amp and the box outside had frayed cabling. More on this, later.

Now, you may ask, “This house seems like a lot of work. How could it have been your favorite?” I never said it was our favorite house. It was however, the favorite in our price range. There was one house, a split level roughly 10 miles away, that was our favorite. My wife toured it with her father while I was at work. It was gorgeous and very spacious. Multi level decks and a very neatly landscaped yard were to die for but the price was about $60,000 above our price range. Granted, we probably could have talked the sellers down $5000 for something, but even still, the taxes alone would have put our mortgage up over $1000 easily. We still talk about that house even though I never saw it. It was probably a good thing, too.

This what you need to consider when buying a home. Do I want to buy a home that is ready to move into and then have a little work to do renovating it? Do I want to sell the house for a profit in less than 10 years? Do I want to buy a cheap house and fix it up? Do I have the skills to do so or the money to pay someone else? Can I live in the house while doing restorations? The answers to these questions can decide your course. I have very little experience in home restoration. At the time I bought my first house, I had only done light plumbing on sinks and toilets, some landscape work, very little electrical work by changing a light fixture, and no structural work whatsoever. For me to be a big fixer upper might take me years to do and more than one try to get it right. I needed a structurally sound roof over my head with aesthetic work to be done on the inside. I don’t intend to sell this house for at least 20 years and by then I should have it where I want it. It will also be where a buyer will want it. I’m learning as I go and fixing a lot of issues that the original owners left behind.

Why Not Build?
There is not a thing wrong with building your dream home. But, can you afford it? Today’s construction costs are well into the mid six figures and that doesn’t get a lot of bang for your buck, depending on where you live. Not to mention, you need to do the interior and landscaping as well. If you are an accomplished carpenter, electrician, and plumber you can cut costs by doing a lot of work yourself. If you’re not, you are at the mercy of the men with the calculators. It can get expensive and the more people you deal with, the harder it is to keep track. A lot of contractors are working on multiple projects and can’t devote all their time to finishing your place on time and under budget. I would never suggest this as a first time homeowner venture. Just like people say with car ownership, buy someone’s mistake. You can find lists of homes for sale due to foreclosures, back taxes, or sheriff’s sales. If you’re dead set on having your dream home from day one, do the research.

Now, I would eventually like to build a home. I have a lot of ideas in my head for how I want my dream home to look. I will probably never be able to afford it unless Ed McMahon or the Powerball people show up at my door. But, I am willing to work at making my current home the best I can possibly make it. It may take me the length of my mortgage but once that’s been paid in full, I can start planning for the future. Small moves. That’s why I have been trying to pay down personal debt in order to pay off a house early. The quicker I get the principal down the more I’ll save in interest. That’s what the 13th payment is all about. If you make a plan and are disciplined enough to follow it, you can make anything happen, economy be damned.

Anyone who is in a hurry to buy a home is crazy. Yes, it’s smarter to pay mortgage than rent. Yes, it’s better to have equity. No, it’s not mandatory to own a home as soon as you graduate college. Look, I admit, we got caught up in the whirlwind romance of home buying back when the housing market was booming. Low interest rates and incentives to buy courted us like we were royalty. I never thought I would buy a home when we started looking. I figured it would be a lesson. Something to use in the near future. I was getting married and the timing just worked out. That house we kept coming back to became more and more attractive against all the others. I also relied on the opinions my family as well as our agent. That is a big plus. Look to the people who you trust for help. Especially parents or friends who have been down this road before. Advice is free. Mistakes are costly.

Final Thoughts on Buying.
Look at your lifestyle. Are you someone who likes to entertain or are you someone who just likes to curl up on the couch at night with a glass of wine and the remote? The biggest problem I had with both my townhouse and my current house was spacing. Furniture was not an option. I already accumulated living, dining, and bedroom suits from various sources. Every Christmas in my townhouse was an exercise in ridiculousness. There was one window in the living room and the tree would go in front of it. This meant my love seat had to go somewhere else. For two Christmases I had to live with a love seat in the dining room up against the sliding glass door to my patio. Being winter, we didn’t use it. But it did cut down on space for having people over for dinner. The dining room wasn’t big to start. The same occurs in my current home. Every year, I have to put the love seat in a spare bedroom to make room for a Christmas Tree. I have take the feet off just to be able to fit down the hallway and I have to take the door off the spare room to fit through the door way. This is an annoyance but I wouldn’t let my furniture dictate the house I was buying. That’s the tail wagging the dog. Now, of course, being a man, there is some thought put into whether or not the television is visible from every possible seating arrangement. We used to joke about the first house I lived in when I rented with a friend. The owners took a closet in the dining room and converted it into a powder room with a folding door. You could sit on the toilet with the door open and see the television in the living room. Of course, it wasn’t always ideal if you left the front door open and someone popped in unannounced.

Spend the money on home inspection. Because of the type of loan we had and the home owner’s insurance, there was a lot of work to be done before we could submit an offer. I mentioned that the cabling on the electrical box was frayed. In order for us to secure the loan and insurance, the head had to be replaced and the covering for the cable had to be upgraded to code. Since I had an electric dryer and the house was only 100 amp. I offered to front the difference in order to upgrade to at least 150. It was either pay for it then or more later. The house had the screw in fuses and a breaker box was a better choice. The owners also had to pay for a radon mitigation. Unfortunately, we had no say in the installation of the pipes and fan. It will be hard to renovate the second full bathroom in the basement with this huge pipe coming out of the floor and going into the exterior wall.

Plan for the worst.
My wife has been bugging me for a pool since we bought the house. One, I can’t afford it. Two, I CAN’T afford it. Three, I can’t AFFORD it. I’ve already told her that at least three things have to occur before that pool can even become a thought in my head. One, the furnace will have to be replaced. The thing has got to be like 30-40 years old. Hell, it might even be original to the house which was built when Kennedy was still alive. The air conditioner will have to be replaced. I think it might be 20 years old, but I’m not sure. Lastly, the hot water tank will have to be replaced. The thing was ten years old when we bought the house and within the first year, it went. I’ll never forget it. I was snoozing on the couch one night when my wife began screaming for me. I ran into the bathroom where the furnace and hot water tank were kept to find a geyser. Water was just spewing out of the top of the tank and onto the floor. Now, the sales folks in the big box store wanted me to buy a huge tank. One even tried to turn me onto an electric hot water tank. I thought he was nuts. I have a budget plan for my gas bill. The cost to my electric by adding in a hot water tank would have been crazy. So, we went with a middle of the road size for a tank and I installed it myself. This was my first real plumbing experience. We got lucky. Had we already gone to bed before finding the mess, our basement would have been flooded by the morning, ruining everything thing we owned. We got lucky. I always tell my wife if she wanted a pool so badly, she should have left the tank go. We would have had an indoor pool for free.


Useful Links:
Rent vs. Buy Calculator from Move.com
Build vs. Buy from HGTV
Making the Decision to Custom Build or Buy Your House from associatedcontent.com
Building Costs Calculator based on area and features.
Bargain.com Foreclosures

The House That Mongo Bought: Grumble Beginnings

This is going to be a multi part series detailing the trials and tribulations of first time home ownership. Call it an anecdote, long winded trip down memory lane, or a cautionary guide to those heading out on their own. The choice is yours.

Part One: Rent, Rent, Rent, BUY!
In 1999 I moved into a two bed/one bath house on a quiet street in an older part of a burgeoning city. It was built by the owners and for half of $375 a month, plus utilities, I made my first foray into living on my own. I had no furniture that didn’t belong to my parents and jumped feet first into this venture on the advice of a friend who had been bunking on another friend’s couch for two months after his apartment was gutted by fire due to a faulty clock radio.

The most important tip my parents gave me about buying furniture was, be frugal but be smart. It is better to spend good money on a quality bed than it is on a big screen television or game system. So, I did. I bought a mattress and box spring and that was it. The accompanying frame was the only hardware that I used with the bed. Now, because my friend had been out on his own for awhile, he had all the furniture we needed outside of my newly purchased bed. I supplied a $5 microwave I bought from someone and that was about it. We had a pretty decent setup but things soon spiraled into madness about six months into our first year as roommates. Not going into details, let’s just say I moved out and into my own apartment. My reservations against living with someone else have now become hindsight and I caution anyone on moving in with a good friend because you will be tested.

In 2000, I leased my first apartment for roughly $360 a month. It was a one bed/one bath 2nd floor unit with basement storage in what looked like the kennels from John Carpenter’s The Thing. By now, I had accumulated an entertainment center from Ames and a bedroom suit including head and foot boards, chest of drawers, and dresser with a mirror all finished with dental style molding which I inherited from a deceased relative. (I still have the bedroom suit) My then girlfriend introduced me to the magic that is the dollar store and I soon had a kitchen full of utensils for cooking and eating. The Goodwill store provided a nice set of ceramic dishes and I now had the full use of my surroundings.

I spent two happy years in that apartment and only moved due to a rise in rent and a depreciation in the quality of the environment. The Realtors claim that the carpets were new but there were troughs in the carpet where the padding had been trampled time after time. My longest residing neighbor was a nice elderly lady who lived next door but the surrounding apartments began to be occupied by unsavory characters. We used to joke about the apartments further up the hill being considered “Crack Row” but now, the denizens of those places were filtering down into the nicer apartment buildings. It was time to move. Usually in these types of situations you will lose money on moving because the “security deposit” will most likely be added to the owner’s wallet instead of the apartment in terms of renovation for the next resident. However, because I took great care of the place and cleaned it up before I left, I got a full refund on my deposit.

I managed to snag a choice end unit townhouse in 2002 off the main highway. For a $100 more, I gained a second bedroom, garage, personal laundry hookups, and a quiet back patio with grass and wildlife. I could now use my grill and park my car off the street during the colder weather. Again, for two years I had a great run. But it took some doing. First off, from the moment I moved in I saw problems. The leasing company did not show me the actual townhouse I’d be renting but a model in their office. I made sure to ask them questions that more or less guaranteed that they would be responsible for issues that I felt they needed to take care of upon my occupancy. For instance, the floor in the bathroom had considerable water damage and had even curled up around the edges of the walls, shower, toilet, and vanity. Not more than five minutes into my residency I had them on the phone making plans to replace it. Their initial solution was to come out and glue it down. I said that was impossible as the flooring had become so brittle it would crack before it bended. Also, the kitchen tile was that commercial style flooring you find in schools but olive green. Now, the model had a neutral color to it which prompted me to buy towels and other items in a particular color, blue. The aesthetic deficiencies were not enough for them to replace what was considered good condition flooring so I took it upon myself to spend $50 on self stick tiles and replaced it myself.

The only other drawbacks to the townhouse was that the garage was partially below ground and on occasions of heavy rain, the concrete blocks leaked water into the garage/basement. It also washed away grass from the side of the driveway leaving unsightly clumped dirt at my curb and back patio. On a tip from a former resident, I put items in the back of the garage up on palates to guard against water damage. I also took some time to do a little landscaping for another $50. I bought lava rock, a PVC drainage pipe, and stone pavers and did the work myself. I dug a hole alongside the driveway and placed the pipe inside. Covered it with the lava rock and landscaped it down to the curb. The holes within the pipe allowed for rain runoff to seep through the lava rock and be carried away to the street instead of running down on the surface wearing away the turf. Newly planted grass grew in and erased the blight. The overgrown rock garden that served as a divider between mine and my neighbor’s units was unsightly, so we I dumped the rest of the lava rock on top of it and created used three pavers to hold planters. The back patio was more for aesthetics as I wanted a larger area in which to hold my grill and some chairs. I dug around the slab and placed pavers along the perimeter. Filled in with matching sand and soon I had increased the size of my patio by a two square feet. My, now, fiancée supplied me with flowers and plants to spruce up the joint.

In late 2003, I felt the walls closing in on me but still enjoyed my surroundings. It was pretty quiet and there were no bad elements around. The leasing company was a little more selective in who they allowed to rent then the near Section 8 housing conditions I faced at the apartment. A friend of my fiancée was close with a real estate agent who wondered if she was looking to buy a house. She referred her to us since we were engaged to be married and thinking about the future. I was quickly heading towards $500 in rent and thought that maybe a mortgage would be smarter than a lease. Also, since our wedding was in late 2004, having a house before the ceremony meant less to move in the way of wedding gifts. I was already at max capacity for storage at the townhouse as it was. For Christmas, in order to use my $70 tree that I bought three years ago, I had to move my love seat out of the living room and into the dining room, blocking my sliding glass door. It wasn’t such an issue as I wouldn’t have been using the patio anyway, with the cold weather.

What started out as a whim to satisfy a favor became a full blown search for a great deal on a house. We toured seven or eight houses and searched dozens of others online over the course of three months and finally settled on the third one we looked at. We kept it as a comparison by which all others had to compete. It was a three bedroom ranch with a big yard and huge trees. Hardwood floors sprawled throughout the upstairs while brown late 70’s/early 80’s style carpeting furnished the finished basement that came complete with a wood burning insert nestled among a huge bricked in hearth and mantle, and a full length wet bar complete with wall tap. I was sold on the place. There was one other house we would have jumped at but the monthly payment with taxes would have put us at nearly $1000.

The housing bubble was just reaching its end and we could have been tempted to buy above our means but our grounded upbringing kept us from putting us into a bad situation. The sellers were looking to unload the house as they had built another one in a rural setting just outside the suburbs. Knowing a little history about the house helped in haggling over price. Since the house was built by his parents, we knew that he didn’t have a huge mortgage to unload as he inherited from his uncle who inherited it from the uncle’s brother. Any renovations done to the house were at least 10 years old and, while pretty nice, were done half-assed. Our agent suggested doing a FHA loan which meant a interest rate at a higher amount of scrutiny by the lending company. It was a fixed rate at 4.55% and would be owned by the state which meant we wouldn’t be affected by the credit crunch still unforeseen at the time.

Next to an audit, I suspect there is no more exhausting process than this type of loan. The lending company required so many minute details and it really makes you reevaluate your practice of filing bills/paychecks/etc. I had to account for nearly every nickel of my past as did my fiancée. Paychecks, bank statements, bills, everything was examined under a microscope. In hindsight, I recommend the process as a way to ensure a solid loan for first time home buyers. The stress is worth not worrying about foreclosure. The only issue is that you are at the mercy of their system and in this particular situation, I had already made arrangements with my leasing company to get out of my lease, penalty free at the end of January 2004. On the word of the mortgage company, I was told that the closing date would be the middle of January. That would give me two weeks to move. Due to clerical errors and miscommunication, the closing got pushed back to the end and I now had three days in which to move my entire world and still go to work all three days.

With everything finalized we also managed to get some upgrades to the house and lowered the offer from the listing price. So, in January of 2004, I became a home owner of a house that was listed at $114,000 for which I paid $103,500. With 20% down thanks to a generous donation by my parents in the form of $22k spread over the course of two payments in December and January, I managed to get my monthly payment to $454 plus $149 for taxes and insurance. And because of the improvements to the kitchen and yard of my townhouse, along with a good job at cleaning and filling in the holes on the walls, I got my entire security deposit back. That’s even with ducking out of my lease 6 months early. I made the important 13th payment right off the bat.

Coming up in Part Two, I’ll delve into the joys and annoys of buying a home versus building.


Useful Links
Where do I start
Mortgage Calculator with extra payment options.
How effective is a 13th mortgag payment?