Switch Hitter

After being a homeowner for almost six years I can pretty much say I know my house inside and out. However, there are those times where I stumble upon something I cannot clearly say I was fully aware of in the last six years. I’ve either forgotten that it was there or I just never bothered to look. Now, I’m not talking about things I’ve put into the house like appliances or other objects. For the life of me I can’t find a check that I know I left in the kitchen one day and it pisses me off that I haven’t found it yet. Then there is some AA batteries that I specifically bought for something and now cannot find the unopened pack in the abyss that is our Red Room. With a three year old it’s not hard to believe that things could go missing but these are things she wouldn’t have had access to. Perhaps I need to go down and check out the history of the area. I may have bought a house that was built on some old cemetery. “You only moved the head stones. Why? Why?!”

Still, like I said, every once in a while I come across something that totally shakes my confidence as someone with a pulse. It could be a blemish on the hardwood floor in the dining room that I continually look at as if it is a spider preparing to eat me alive. I’ve probably blown at it or gotten real close to it a hundred times in the last six years and still thought it was a bug. It just so happened that a couple of months ago I became baffled by a light switch.

Now, when I first moved into my house I had to go through the whole “This switch does this and that switch does that.” In fact I had to call the previous owner to ask about one in the garage because I couldn’t figure out what it went to. Turned out it powered an outlet just outside the garage which I use for holiday lighting. Yep, Clark Griswold, here, uses one outlet for all his exterior illumination. But this was almost six years ago. Here I am years later and I am just realizing I don’t know what this switch by my front door does. At least I don’t remember what it does.

There are four switches here. So, I do what everyone does. I flip it. I flip it. I flip it. I flip it. Nothing. I open the front door and flip it. Nope. The porch light is on another switch. I look inside the door that goes to the attic which has two switches. One doesn’t do anything and I’ve switched it a thousand times before I realized it went to the attic fan which has a pull chain on it as well. I guess it’s an override. The other switch belongs to the attic light. Back to the front door. I try another switch. The light above the entryway blazes on like a UFO ready to abduct me for some probing. I try the fourth switch. Nothing. What in the blue hell? Oh, never mind. That one powers the outlet behind the loveseat. We only use that during the holidays as well. I continue flipping the unknown switch while looking around the room. Still no clue as to what it does. Eventually, I get bored and stop looking.

A few days go by and I am expecting company. I go to the front door and turn on the porch light. The UFO shows up again. “Dammit! Six years in this damn house and I still can’t turn the porch light on in the first try. I switch off the entryway light and turn on the porch light. But I had to think about it first. Meanwhile that phantom switch stares at me. “Come on, you know you want to try me. I can feel it. You want to start flipping me incessantly because you don’t know what I do. Go ahead.”

“No. I will not be pulled into this insanity. Good day to you, sir.”

Another couple of days go by and I realize that the front porch light is still on. I flip the switch. Nothing. “Oh for the sweet love of Zombie Jesus. That’s the outlet switch.” I turn off the front porch and go on my way. Then I come back and flip that damn phantom switch three more times. Maybe it only works in the daylight or maybe the problem is that it needs to warm up first.

Now, as a tangent taker, I need to tell you this other story. When I was a kid, we had a dusk to dawn light on the back of our house just above the living room window. It was one of those big white lights that took forever to warm up and once you got it going, you didn’t want to turn it off. Growing up, I remember seeing E.T. in the theater with a friend of mine. I went with him and his mom and afterwards they dropped me off at my house. I was about seven years old and I walked into my house like it was a strange and scary place. I couldn’t find my parents anywhere and proceeded into the living room at the back of the house to sit down and watch some television.

The comforting beam from that huge ass lamp outside bathed the room with enough light that I could walk unassisted across the room to the switches by the back door. I reached up and flipped the switch and suddenly I was in total darkness. I flipped the wrong switch and shut off the outside light. I immediately flipped it back but who knows how long it could take to come back on to full power. During that time I was likely to have been eaten by a grue. Suddenly I became a berserk ridden child and pinballed all over the house looking for a room with light. It was if the power completely went out in the entire world and I was trapped in a box. I made it into the kitchen where I found my parents. I don’t know where they were at the time. Perhaps they were out for the evening since I was gone and didn’t make it back in time. Perhaps they… um, never mind. Let’s skip ahead. This memory came back to me as I waited for whatever mythical light that was attached to that stupid phantom power switch to warm up. It didn’t.

I forgot about the switch for about a week and then I was doing something in my living room and had to turn on the UFO light above the door. I ended up turning on the front porch light and my wife said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I know, I hit the wrong switch.” I then proceeded to hit the phantom switch because I had finally forgotten that I didn’t know what it did. “Doh!” Finally, I got it together and cued the UFO and looked my wife. “Honey, do you know what the hell this switch does? I can’t figure it out.”

“That’s for the light in the yard. Remember, we went through this when we first moved into the house.”

Then it dawned on me. There were two switches that I thought served no function. The first one was in the garage and the second one was at the front door. When I called the previous owner he told me about the garage and the fact that they installed a gas powered lamppost in the front yard. It’s a pain in the ass because it’s always on. I have to close the valve on it to shut it off and it’s a bitch to relight. Not to mention I have to buy mantles from a certain store at a certain time of day and they’re $10 a piece. I originally thought the switch in the garage powered it but they told me about the outlet and that the switch at the front door that doesn’t do anything was for the lamppost when it was electric. “So, I guess it doesn’t do anything. It’s a dead switch.” I said, and flipped it back and forth one more time. OK, two more times. OK, three.

The next day I got a call from some old guy in Sweden. He said, “Cut it out!”

OK, four times.

A River Floods Through It

Home ownership. It’s one of those privileges that should be a right. It’s a sanctuary, allowing your to push all the troubles of the world aside, draw the blinds and hide under your blankets. It’s a place of worship as you sit in your man cave and pray to the Sporting Gods so that your team can win. It gives you shelter from the elements and ridiculously nutty neighbors withtheir lawn ornaments. It can provide for you if you have a garden out in the backyard. Owning a home can give you countless joys and also countless headaches and heartaches. It’s kind of like marriage.

It can also be threatened and needs to be defended. In Revolutionary times, British troops could just come right in and search your home without cause. Home invasions and burglaries can threaten your belongings and even your person. And in these tough economic times, foreclosure and bankruptcy can cause you to lose your home right out from under you. While all these old and new concerns are dangerous to home ownership, none is as threatening as mother nature. The elements alone can be the most dangerous to your safety. Fires can happen from lightning strikes, the house could be ripped from its foundation from tornadoes, and water can invade a home instantly during flash flooding.

But all of these threats and deterrents should not stop someone from wanting to own a home but it can be cause for some forethought into protecting and securing a domicile. You should be able to make your home your castle. A basement doesn’t just have to be a place for a washer and dryer and other junk. It shouldn’t be an environment only fit for the furnace monster that scares you from going down for your snowsuit when school has been closed and the back hillside is just ripe for sledding. It should be more. It should be a retreat from upstairs doldrums. It should be the rocking underground party that is separate from your upstairs, conservative, button down living room with pictures of Nana and the kids.

We have many names for this retreat of the residence we’ve created or renovated. During the mid 20th century they were sometimes called dens and usually existed on the main level of the home. As the length of hair went down our backs, so did the level of the den, descending into that dark abyss, forcing the furnace monster to look for new lodging. Basements became game rooms and rumpus rooms. They can even be called rec rooms or the secluded man cave. These newly designated living spaces became framed in wood and covered with paneling or dry wall. Flooring choices were built up from dirt and cement to tile and carpet. The lighting moved from dark and dreary to bright and bouncy, yet still maintain a certain level of control to set the mood for family movie night or teenage make out sessions. Yes, the new age of home ownership became a test of creativity and innovation as we looked for ways to incorporate a big screen and a Beermeister into the aesthetic mix of couches and recliners.

But then…lighting crashes and rivers rise. The sanctity of the man cave or game room can be threatened by nature and those long hours we toiled away in our off time laying tile or framing a bar can all be washed away from existence leaving you to lament the loss of your pool table or surround system, ruined by standing water. My family has seen and experienced mother nature’s cold wet wake up call to arms, brooms, and mops and the rec room has risen from the ashes like a civilization built upon the ruins of its ancestors. Here’s examples from both my parents and in laws.

In 2004, Hurricane Ivan did more than just devastate the Caribbean and Gulf States. It continued on as a weakened but still dangerous remnant carrying torrential downpours on into the Mid Atlantic States, including my home turf. Long after Miami survived the monsoon, Pittsburgh got plunged into the rising waters of Ivan’s leftovers.

20 years before a single drop of Ivan invaded I-376, my parents had built the home they live in today. For nearly two decades we lived in a two story home with an unfinished basement. It served as a laundry room and a mud room. The damp smell of wet cement and dirt permeated the dark cavernous nature of our cellar and the décor was worthy of Buffalo Bill’s chamber of horrors as described in Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs.

When my parents decided to build a new home out in the semi-rural / semi suburban area of Southwestern Pennsylvania, they left the option open to finish the basement. The new construction was a departure from the old days of the cellar dweller furnace monster. The basement was well lit with an outside entrance up to street level and three to four windows on the back side of the house where the sun sets into the West.

A year after we moved in they made the decision to finish the basement into a game room. Plush red carpeting flowed down the steps to a landing giving you the option to go right into an area with the furnace, refrigerator, freezer, and door to the outside. If you would rather, you could turn left from the landing and head into the living area with a television, couch, and chair as well as a hearth and wood burner on the far wall, extending the brick along the entire length into an area with the love seat and pool table. One of the support poles made it difficult to make some shots but it was carpeted as well like a human sized scratching post. This is where we gather for Christmas as a family, opening presents as the Christmas tree gleams in the corner of the room.

But when Ivan hit Southwestern PA in September 2004, the drain outside the basement door could not handle the rushing water and my parents’ rec room got wrecked. The carpet rippled like Aladdin’s mode of transportation across the Arabian sky as the water sloshed underneath it. Eventually, they redid the flooring and now a deeper wine colored carpet adorns the scratching post by the pool table but as my father, my insurance agent will tell you, “Insurance doesn’t cover Mother Nature.” The expense to fix up the room was all on them.

Get Three Rivers One Drain on a shirt
from Mongo Angry! Mongo Smash! The Store

Five years later, I am reminded of Ivan’s wrath as I stand in my garage squeegee in hand, keeping the water at bay. A hellacious storm rolled through our area this past week, reminding us that Mother Nature is a cold hearted bitch. My gravel driveway acts as a plug in the drain that sits just off the garage floor slab. The collection of dirt and stone inhibits the drain from removing a bulk of the water that pools outside the door in bad storms. The shoddy masonry on the side of the house allows water to flow underneath the side door of the garage and another drain in the cement on that side is so clogged with dirt and rocks that it cannot carry enough water away before I am forced to get into the thick of it. I had taken a few peeks into the garage to make sure it was still dry, but as the storm neared our home and the rains picked up, it was too late. When I finally noticed that the side door was leaking on Wednesday evening, we had already heard the bad news, my In-Laws were under water.

Sometime around the middle of the 90’s, my Father-In-Law had a vision. The walls of his small ranch home along the busy pavement of Rte 130 in Harrison City were closing in on him. Three children, two at time living, in the house with him and his wife confined the family to the upstairs level for comfort and shelter. By nature, they were entertainers and tales of their parties are still recalled throughout the years.

In order to truly feel comfortable in a setting with friends or family, they needed to expand, and the only direction was down. Ever the crafty craftsman, he took an open floor plan and turned it into an almost separate studio residence. Coming down from the steps along the Eastern side of the basement he put in a wet bar with cabinetry and tile flooring. If you were to turn left, you’d see a pool table and gas fire place, complete with a hearth and mantle.

Along the Northern wall three closets for storage lined the wall with an office area on the bar side and an entrance to the fruit cellar under the porch on the other side. As you move past the warmth of the gas fireplace you headed into the living area with a love seat and two recliners positioned around a coffee table, antique looking tea cart, and flat screen television.

Turning left from the living room you could access a full sized kitchen with an old style refrigerator and range oven. Floor to ceiling cabinets and counter tops framed in the small but functional kitchen with a sink on a diagonal in one corner.

Continuing left you passed through a small entryway and down a level into the laundry room complete with half bath and another two freezers. Out of the laundry room you were back to the steps where a tile floor curves around to the garage with two big folding door pantry closets were stocked with goodies. On your left was the bar back up a level by the steps with more built in cabinets underneath.

He did all the work himself and it took almost three years to complete at the cost of his muscles and joints. Now 70, he spends a good portion of his days there with his family eating dinner and enjoying the warmth of the fireplace while watching television. Now, it was filling up with water.

There had always been the threat of flooding into the home. Their driveway slopes down from the road into their garage and only a trench drain at the base protects them from disaster. Over the years, the busy road has been built up and the path of which water flows now comes down the road and into his yard, ponding-up on the side of the house before moving over the hillside into his driveway and hopefully the drain. The driveway itself offers another obstacle as the poor drainage system installed by the township only has loose gravel covering the top portion next to the road. Rainwater pushes the gravel and dirt down into the drains blocking them, turning his driveway into a bathtub.

When my wife got the news about her parents’ home, I ran into our garage and saw the similar invasion happening to us. Water had begun coming underneath the side door. The drain on the front of the house had clogged. I opened the main door and a wall of water fell into the garage and rushed towards the back wall. Dirt and gravel carried by the current settled on the floor drain stopping the water from leaving the room. I grabbed my pry bar and ran back into the house. The only way to keep water from getting in was to clear the drain and I could only get there from outside. I ran out the front door and into the wading pool of water in front of my garage. I stabbed blindly into the water with the pry bar looking for the iron gate that sat on top of the drain. Once removed, I could fish around for the PVC lid covering the drain proper. Tossing it aside, a whirlpool formed and the water level receded.

Heading back into the house, soaking wet, I now had to get rid of the water on the side of the house, as well as the interior part of the garage. With the water now gone in front, I could squeegee water out of the garage and into the drain. I pulled water from the side entrance, that had pooled up, and kept more from coming into the smaller door. Finally realizing what was going on with the interior drain, I cleared the debris and water fell through the floor and away from my feet.

My wife appeared in the doorway telling me she had to go over to her parents’. I told her to get the baby ready and I would make preparations to shore up the garage from future flooding this evening. I grabbed any and all towels and shoved them into plastic bags. Running the handles underneath the bottom of the interior door, I could create a barrier against the inside by pulling the handles of the bags which would push on the inside of the door, shutting it. I lined more bags on the outside as well as the exterior door.

In the car, my wife attempted to start the car and the familiar sound of a dead battery rang in my ears as the car wouldn’t turn over. With no way to push the car towards the entrance of my driveway, I had to figure out a way to get out other car to the dead one. I ended up driving through my yard and nearly into the wall of the house. Sitting a good foot higher than the driveway, I worked to get the hoods open on both cars in order to run jumper cables between them. Lightning flashed in succession like a strobe light as I hooked the positive wires to both cars. I hesitated on connecting the negatives as I wondered what would be the likelihood of being electrocuted in the process. My second question was which would get me first, the battery or the lightning?

After connecting the last clamp, I yelled to my wife to turn the key. The car sputtered into life and I put all my toys away, before leaving. Rivers of dirty rain water rushed down our hill and the main part of our town was already flooded and closed off from travelling. A creek runs through three towns with us in the middle and we had to get to the other end. Turning onto the next road, we could see mudslides above us onto the road. Hydroplaning was a threat as the flowing water moved from one side of the street to the other and soon, downed trees offered a chance to practice serpentine movements in the car.

Upon reaching my In-Laws, the rain began to slow up. We made our way down into the basement, yelling at my Mother-In-Law to get herself upstairs. She is diabetic and has no spleen. Not a good combination for someone standing in dirty water with cracked feet. She headed upstairs to watch our daughter while my wife, her father, and myself stayed downstairs to remove water. The smell of fuel wafted through the air from the garage. An overturned heater had spilled kerosene into the garage which was now being carried into the rest of the house.

A half hour ago, the water had not been that bad. A small stream had trickled under the garage door and into the laundry room where it left via a drain in the floor. My Father-In-Law stood in the entryway with a broom, pushing the water towards the laundry room while his wife spoke on the phone to my wife. The they heard this loud pop like someone had slapped a wooden paddle across a child’s corduroy covered ass. Before she could tell my wife about it, another noise that sounded like a wave crashing broke the air and water spewed out from under the interior door to the garage. Quickly, the level rose over the top of the raised platform and flooded the basement. A broom was no longer going to cut it as they just realized that the garage door had buckled. At that moment, my wife’s face drained of color and she looked at me as if to say, “All his work. All the pain and sweat he put into that downstairs was now being washed away.” That’s when I headed into my garage.

But now, the water had leveled off and we began sweeping it from the kitchen into the laundry room. We took the carpet steamer and began sucking water from the run as a friend stopped by with a Shop Vac. As we tried to remove water from the rooms, mud and silt remained on the tiled portions. Dinner, which had been set on the table, stood untouched.

At 12:30 AM, nearly dead tired from dumping a full vacuum of water out again and again, the standing water had been vacated, leaving only the soaked carpets and flooded root cellar left to clear. We headed into the garage. Confined and cluttered, most of the items had been pushed to the back of the house, beyond the interior door. An outside door could have served to divert a lot of the flooding out of the back of the house, but it was now barricaded by everything that had been in the front of the garage. We could see the bottom panel of the garage door had broken free from its track, flipped up and onto the back bumper of their car. Pots and planters full of dirt in the garage had been toppled, clogging the floor drain, adding to the problem. A water and debris line stretched across the car above the tires, inside a Father’s Day present soaked up water that had come inside.

We worked to fix the garage door, to guard against any additional rainfall throughout the night. Down the road in town, others were still battling the waters as people had to be rescued by emergency services from local businesses and an apartment building. Fighting our own battle earlier, my wife instructed her parents to call 911 but they could not say when they could get there. Additional attempts to call 911 met with busy signals. We considered ourselves lucky.

After fixing the garage door, we finally sat down to dinner at 1:00 AM. By 2:30 we had finally left for home. The road home was littered with more mudslides and even we could even see the creek cresting its banks as it rushed alongside the road in the dark.

We arrived at our house to see little if any more water damage than when we left. By 4:00 AM I had taken a shower and gone to bed. My wife told me in private that her Dad had been seen wandering around the basement just devastated at the damage. While it was confined to mostly a structural nature, it was apparent that there was a lot of work to be done, ripping up carpets and the flooring as well as getting into all the cabinets and closets to remove any remnants of this disaster. At 58, the renovation of their basement, by himself, was taxing on his body. At 70, it would be near impossible.

While I have the good fortune to live on top of a hill, I know my home is not free from the threat of rising water. Poor drainage and poor design leave me open to a similar fate I had recently redid half of the basement floor in ceramic tile and it does offer an easier clean up than carpet, it doesn’t give me any more comfort in knowing that the hard work I put into it and any future projects down there could be gone in an instant. For now, I’m just happy to be drifting off on the river of dreams, letting go of the pain of sore muscles. Tomorrow will be another day of cleaning up, but right now I’m headed out to a sea of sleep, dreaming of…..

HONK HONK HONK HONK

Damn that car.

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?

Playing House of Cards

Christmas is right around the corner and my daughter has one gift already bought for her. It's a kitchen set for her to play house. The miniature set of cabinetry and appliances is one step away from the building permit that will be required to erect a scaled down version of a home in the backyard. If I were any sort of carpenter, I'd have the ability to build her the ultimate dream house. It would be the kind of place that any kid would be proud to put on the annual Christmas Play House Holiday Home Tour hosted by the imaginary historical society. If we're lucky, we can get a home loan without having to jump through many hoops. The imaginary world may not be facing a financial crisis, but kids are savvy enough to know that when their parents are sitting down at the table with receipts and a calculator, they're not planning a big blowout vacation to Disney World anytime soon.

Recently, I reconnected with an old high school friend of mine on Facebook. In between saving the rain forests and making flair for the masses we got into a conversation about our childhoods. She, the daughter of a dentist, and I, the son of an Insurance Agent, both grew up in middle class suburbia. Every year they went to Florida for Christmas and I wished I could. Yet, I never went without the essentials, and on occasion we took a family vacation at the beach. While, the contrast in our lives may have seemed great, the end result was the same. We both knew nothing of what our parents had to do in order to give us those lives.

Now, we both have spouses and children and mortgages and everything that comes with it. In the middle of all this we, like many other Americans face the doom and gloom of the current financial crisis with uncertainty and trepidation. While I can't speak for her I can tell you that there are times I wonder if I'm not scared enough for my solvency. I'm sure my wife can worry enough for both of us, but I don't seem to be too afraid of the next down day on the Dow. Why? Because I didn't get in over my head when the glass ceiling was as vaulted as the half million dollar homes bought and sold on the sub prime mortgage market.

I spent a month jumping through hoops to get a first time home buyer's loan from the state in order to secure a lower interest rate. I have a 30 year mortgage at a fixed rate of 4.55%. We bought our house in 2004 at the height of the housing boom. Left and right people were getting those pie in the sky brick homes in tightly spaced, treeless, housing plans where you measure success not only by the size of your bank account but by the height of the grass on your lawn and the rules governing it. While salivating sellers were being lead around by Realtors touting over inflated listing prices and blinded buyers were convinced that they could afford any price based on the mythical mortgages offered, I was looking at a middle of the road price tag on what could be a starter home without the structural deficiencies that would be beguile a budding buyer. In short, I went vanilla.

Vanilla's not so bad, looking back now. My mortgage gets paid every month on time with no worries and by my calculations, I'd be paying the same, if not more, in rent for my townhouse where I previously resided. We have one car payment and are slowly chipping away at one credit card that has followed us around since our engagement. I'd say vanilla tastes pretty good about now.

In terms of employment, I'm still on the fence with that one. I want to believe that my job is secure, but I see the signs on the wall. It may not be tomorrow or next week, but eventually my position may be eliminated. The problem with being owned by a bigger corporation, based in another country, is that even though we meet or exceed market expectations for 20+ continuous quarters doesn't mean we don't have to suffer when the economy tanks. Workforce reductions and spending freezes affect us all and I'm still actively searching for another job. But the work is there and it's keeping me busy, which is probably a good thing when "The Bobs" finally come around.

The trick has been not to show signs of weakness, anywhere. I'm the sole income stream. I'm one half of the decision team. The world can come crumbling down around me and I have to remain calm for my wife, and more importantly, my daughter. She's still too young to comprehend any of the issues going on in the world but she picks up on stress and negativity very well. It was that conversation about my childhood that got me thinking. Perhaps things weren't that great. Perhaps my parents were just real good at hiding the truth. In the 80's we had that little problem called the S&L scandal and the economy tanked in August on Black Monday. If everything is indeed cyclical, we should have seen this coming back around. I had no clue what happened but heard from friends and saw on the news that the economy was in trouble. Maybe my parents' vanilla lifestyle kept us out of danger or maybe they just hid the problems and managed their finances in such a way that we rode out the worst with little effect.

Regardless of how things happened, I went about my business playing video games and baseball with my friends. Now, 20 years later I'm in the same boat as my parents were. Yet, here I am making sure that my daughter's second Christmas is one for the books. She'll have her kitchen play set and they'll be no need for her to reenact the struggles of the middle class around her small kitchen table with her Winnie the Pooh filling in for Suze Orman and Rabbit, the collection agent, calling her on her PlaySkool phone, looking for delinquent credit card payments. I intend for her to not worry about the issues we face as adults. She's a kid and needs to be a kid for as long as possible. Childhood doesn't last long enough and is only a fraction of our lifespan. Besides, if she's really hell bent on helping out, we'll set up a Snoopy Snow Cone Starbucks and she can make biscotti with her Easy Bake Oven. We'll even put put out a tip jar to help dear old Dad pay for her convertible power wheels. It's the least we can do to help the cause.