the fallacy of screwing things up on your own

My sort of mantra of late is, "We could have effed this up by ourselves for free!" Technically, that's true. We're real good at effing things up around here. Check out the exemplary job we did effing up the trim for our new window and its adjoining siding:



However, the truth when I admit it is that we're capable of a whole different order of effing things up. I wouldn't put it past us to eff things up in such a way that the entire house falls down on our heads.

I've got a couple of loans this week for things that it is probably possible to DIY. I feel ok with this, because, really, you can DIY anything. The person you hire to do the job that seems intimidating is just another person, and at some point he or she - like you - knew absolutely jack about heating and air conditioning systems or torch-down bitumen or whatever. On the other hand, he or she has been practicing and you have just been sitting at your makeshift kitchen half deep in a bottle of wine reading home improvement manuals featuring photos of people who are suspiciously kempt and five-fingered. So while you may feel like a bit of a failure when you consider all the things you're hiring out, some resigned, less romantic part of you recognizes that this is just good sense.

When this whole renovation thing is done (and I am fully aware, thank you, of the curse I've put on myself merely typing out those words) I may be expert in some aspect of home improvement. Maybe even a couple. But there is no way I plan to be at this long enough to become expert in all of them. Therefore, I am strongly considering paying someone who goes by "Shorty" (no last name) to cut a hole in the ceiling. The attic needs to be enlarged so the furnace can fit up there.

There doesn't seem to be anything really complicated about enlarging the attic. A beam needs to be cut. Some electricity stapled to the beam needs to be moved. A header needs to be attached across the cut beams to the adjoining beams. Simple, non-technical. The reason I am screwing around on my blog at the moment instead of performing this essentially straight-forward task is that IT'S THE GODDAMNED CEILING. And, as previously mentioned, I don't want the roof to collapse on my head. Whenever we get anywhere near structural-with-a-capital-S, my DIY resolve goes soft on me and dudes named Shorty-no-last-name telling me things I already know begin to sound convincing.

Part of me is certain that I will hire Shorty, he will do the work late, and the ceiling will be left noticeably sagging. And that when that happens I will stand underneath a ragged hole with my hands on my hips, looking up and saying, "We could have effed this up for free on our own." And I'll be pissed, but I'll still think it's kind of funny, because when the worst happens, the worst won't actually be that bad.

the insurmountably insignificant

I know I've already said it, but this week has cemented my belief that the DIY impulse is born out of frustration with contractors. We hired the drywall guy on Monday and he began the two-day job on Tuesday. Today he finished up, leaving us to do the final sanding. The quality of the work is far from perfect and he made a huge mess of the brand new tile, but I verified that it'll all clean off and paid him, just so I wouldn't be stuck waiting around for him to finish the work.

The hall bathroom - only shower for the four of us living here - now has walls, and those walls are primered. Tomorrow we paint, and then hopefully I can get the plumber to come install the toilet and sink Monday.

In addition to painting, tomorrow's work schedule includes demoing the 6'x7' area off the kitchen that's been designated the laundry-room-to-be and patching the wall outside the hall bathroom which is still covered in OSB and plastic with legitimate looking siding material.

There's a problem, though, in getting so close with the bathroom. It's a distraction. I need to be thinking about self-leveling concrete and instead I'm thinking about crown moulding. It's hard to move on to the next task because the bathroom is finally at a stage where I can envision how it'll look finished. I want to lay slate tiles down on the seat of the window and trim the door, as much to cover up the places where the paint and drywall are flawed as to indulge any kind of Martha Stewart impulse.

Fortunately, I can't get too dangerously off track because two big tasks are now underway: the roof and the HVAC. I meet with the bank next week to confirm that I have financing for both of these, which should be the last mind-boggling expenses that'll be necessary for a while. They'll also allow us to survive the winter. Even though I'm paying both of these contractors sums in the quintuple-digits, both jobs involve a significant amount of work on my end, both in coordination and in several things that need to go on in the attic.

The attic currently has loose insulation, with a modest R-7 rating. To qualify for the HVAC loan, I have to bring it up to R-38. I could just pile insulation on top of what's there, but there are some ceilings we don't want to drywall, and so it would be preferable to have something in the attic that won't create so much dust. Therefore, the very ambitious plan is to scoop out all the existing insulation while the roof's off. 1,400 square feet or so. I'm trying to look at it as an opportunity to get to know the one part of the house I haven't personally entered yet (I'm scared of heights and especially of ladders), but I think the more realistic view is that it's an opportunity to get insulation all over my yard while simultaneously not actually getting the attic clean.

It's daunting, especially because financing the very crucial heating system depends on it and because this all probably has to happen by the beginning of December. I have the beginning of next week off, though and, although I cringe at the thought of hiring anyone else, I know where the day laborers hang out.

week one

I think it's pretty telling that the last thing in the Google search box in my browser's toolbar is "austin pan am recreation center." Apparently a recreation center isn't something with a pool and showers, but I didn't know that and, a week ago, was searching desperately for the latter.

The shower is usable now and that fact alone makes the day before Halloween feel like it happened a month ago. The same bathroom's now been rewired, we've put a new faucet in a sink from Craigslist, and the plan tomorrow is to install a new insulated window. Once there are boards in the wall to support the medicine cabinet and sink, the drywall guys will come, followed by the plumber (because - having just replaced that room's rotted subfloor - I'm not taking any chances with leaky toilets). Once completed, that room will be worth something like six grand, and it's just one room. It's not an HVAC system or a new roof, things that have been bumped up to Emergency Status since we moved in and nearly froze to death overnight.

The list of things that need to happen before the new year is staggering. The next full room to tackle is the laundry room/master closet. That may sound like a trivial thing to be worrying about, but we're going through a lot of clothes. Tonight, while the rest of Austin is downtown at Fun Fun Fun Fest kickoff parties, we pulled down the drywall on the living room ceiling, which started to collapse during the last heavy rain. As with every other room in the house, the ceiling had been wallpapered with foiled linen, which had been containing the bands of dust that seeped through the cracks between the ceiling boards over the years. The carefully aged and sifted dust permeated everything by the time we were done, and now the hallway to our glamorous new slate bathroom is an air quality hazard.

I can't remember ever being this exhausted. I've been through difficult housing situations, but there was never any responsibility attached to them. I can't run away from this, and so it consumes my every waking thought. Each day that passes that I don't hear back from the roofers or the bank leaves me more frantic and distracted, and I do stupid things like buying two plates of tempered 3/8" glass of Craigslist (which I hope can somehow be made into shower doors).

Despite all the complaints, though, something feels weirdly right. The neighborhood's great, despite the high crime and the stray dogs everywhere. Living with roommates again is surprisingly comforting. And this house, and discovering everything I've discovered about it just pulling down drywall and ripping up floors, makes me feel connected to history in a way I never have. That right there may be the only reason I haven't lost my mind. The evidence is here that someone else went through all of this before. Whole generations of someones. And we haven't pulled their bones out from behind the shiplap, which means they made it.

a good surprise?

The bathroom is probably as gutted as it's going to get without the aid of a plumber and an electrician. A plumber because we can't figure out how to disconnect the pipes from the bathtub, and an electrician because the medicine cabinet has about forty wires running to it with no apparent way to disconnect them that wouldn't leave them exposed. (Exposed wires in an increasingly soggy room just doesn't sound awesome to me.)



The first thing I did this morning was to tear down the cardboard that was behind the cement board that held the tiles that were hidden behind the cultured marble in the shower. (Aside: This house is at least 50% cardboard. If it ever catches fire, it's gonna go up in seconds.) Behind the cardboard? Beadboard. All over the bathroom. It's the horizontal kind, but if you need proof that can look as dope or doper than the vertical kind, check out these pictures of a renovation in Connecticut. I find this sort of hilarious, because the ceiling of the entryway is covered in those cheap faux beadboard panels you can get at Home Depot. If the walls are beadboard, you'd think the ceilings would be as well. I guess if I go and buy a ladder, I can find out. I'm hoping for the absolute best sort of irony: beadboard over plaster over beadboard. But anyway, the bathroom.



The beadboard's been patched in numerous places where doors and windows used to be, and carelessly broken away in places behind the shower to make room for the pipes and to allow a recess for a nasty old shower shelf. Below a wainscotting rail, it had vinyl-veneered cardboard glued to it, but what's above the rail is just covered with drywall. I'm thinking the stuff below the rail is probably not worth trying to save, but the stuff above, given a good paint job, could be nice.

I found the same beadboard behind the gaping hole in the master bedroom and I'm curious now whether the beadboard walls are all throughout the house. If so, I'm really tempted to blow in some insulation between that and the siding and paint them instead of drywalling everything.

where we left off

"Livable" is the word everyone kept using. My realtor, my friends, even me. I'd describe the foundation, the plumbing, the electricity, the roof, and then offer or be assured, "...But it's livable!"

The problem with that is that there are people who live under overpasses. Those people aren't hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

Upon seeing the house again after several weeks of stop and start foundation repair, any pretense of livability has evaporated, like the puddled remains of a storm let in through new cracks in the walls and roof. The walls have shattered, the doors no longer close, a window has cracked, and the yard is a mess of mud and spilled concrete. The electrical connections outside the house bend up and out at crazy angles, the gas and water pipes hang exposed over giant holes filling rapidly with water from the past few days' nonstop downpour.

In just over two weeks, I'm supposed to vacate my apartment and move into the house. The hall bathroom - which was filthy, but working - is pretty well demolished, needing only the tub and toilet removed before the walls and floor can be torn out. This should be a piece of cake, since the walls in the bathroom have benefited from the same delicate touch the foundation guys used in leveling the rest of the house and are now begging to be ripped down.

I hoped to be at this point at the beginning of September, but.. I hired the wrong foundation company. They told me they'd be done in a week and a half, and they've been under there now for four. They still have to do skirting, assuming the work they've done will even pass inspection and they don't have to spend more time adding piers. I'm not hopeful about the inspection, since from what I can see the old piles of cinder blocks and spare wood have been replaced with new solid concrete blocks and scraps from the new beams, with a couple sonotubes thrown in at the corners to keep up appearances. What was supposed to cost $15K is now costing seventeen, which is actually a minor triumph, as they were trying to raise the price to twenty-one. I would have fired them, but I kept hoping that if they kept working they'd be done faster than anyone else I could bring in to replace them.

Right now I'm wondering whether to contact my landlady and ask if the lease can be extended another month. I don't want to spend the money, but I don't feel like I have enough time. I need to get the house back to at least the standard of livability I convinced myself it was at when I bought it. To do that in two weeks is gonna take a miracle.

the floor that wasn't there

I had some time to kill this morning while waiting for the fourth and final foundation estimate, so I did some more work on tearing up the flooring in the bedrooms. It's become apparent that this is no easy task, as the 2-3 layers of linoleum (depending on which room you're in) have a subflooring beneath them that appears to be really thick, dense cardboard. This left me frustrated with the master bedroom, so I moved into the smaller second bedroom.

As I worked on the corner I'd started previously, I was surprised to find that what I'd assumed was deteriorated linoleum was actually honest-to-god plaster. There's a spot in the master bedroom where the linoleum had been covered in a thin layer of putty, or possibly concrete, so I didn't think too much about it, just got the crowbar down under the linoleum and pulled it up.

You probably recall from Physics class that the crowbar functions by harnessing the power of the fulcrum to multiply the pressure you apply to the lever it transforms into when correctly employed. When I applied pressure in this particular instance, I noticed that my fulcrum felt decidedly.. squishy. But I am no shrinking violet, so I pressed down anyway, tearing the linoleum loose along with a large chunk of plaster.



Turns out the plaster wasn't just a spill that got smeared around or protection against drafts. It was there to even out the floor, since that corner of the room is about 4" lower than what it should be. Looks (and smells) like the oak there is rotted.

I guess it's lucky that the wall over the bad spot will probably have to be replaced. It looks like I'll need to try and insert some new boards in that spot, if such a thing is even possible.

contractors

I'm coming to understand the true beauty of Do It Yourself renovations, I think. It's not the romance, or the assurance that everything will be done exactly as you want it (or as near as your skills allow you to approximate). It's that Yourself, unlike a contractor, will not come to your house, spend two hours giving you an "estimate" that involves a lot of time spent telling horror stories about other contractors and explaining why is costs $40,000 to do the job "to code," only to immediately drop off the face of the earth. You always know where Yourself is and do not have to call Yourself every single day to stand a chance of ever getting a final bid. Yourself is extremely capable of holding up work in myriad ways, but refusing to return your phone calls is not one of them.

I've had three companies come out to estimate foundation repairs. I have a bid from one. One sent a bid that involved putting new piers in the middle of the yard and I'm waiting for that to be corrected. One has become simply unreachable. Apparently these guys don't need my business, which works out well because I'd probably never hire them now, but I'd still like to see the estimates to better evaluate the one bid I do have. There's another company coming out on Friday. Having learned my lesson, I am not letting the guy leave until he puts the bid in my hand.

Plumbers, if possible, seem to be even worse. I'd heard that about plumbers. Even the guy who was recommended to me won't set up an appointment. I had an appointment to see another company "sometime today," and had asked for about two hours' notice. When he called today, he asked when I'd like to do it. "This afternoon?" I asked, confused. "Or tomorrow morning would work, I guess.." I added after a brief silence.

"Let's do tomorrow morning," he responds.

"Ok. About what time? Around eigh-"

"I'll give you a call around lunchtime, ok?"

I don't equate lunchtime with morning. Nor, I suspect, does this guy. Within the space of a single 30 second phone call I got rescheduled twice. I'm very curious as to whether I will meet this plumber tomorrow. My money right now is on No.

The one group who seem to be reliable are the electricians. No no-shows, no rescheduling, they've been there exactly when they said they would both times so far. Maybe this is a sign that I should start with the electric and wait for the foundation guys to figure out how to operate their telephones. Unfortunately, foundation really needs to come first. I hope that on Friday, I'll be in a position to schedule something.

keeping clam

Off the topic of remodeling and terror, check out what I just saw. There's a new seafood restaurant opening in East Austin. Lovely timing. I have my qualms about Gulf Coast seafood (if you have crossed that bridge you take to get to Port Aransas, maybe you understand why), but I was under the impression that my only options within a mile of home were Long John Silver's or McCormick and Schmick. This place sounds kind of rad.

I hope they actually have clams. And langoustines. And crawdaddies.



Incidentally, I like the pizza on the Eastside a lot better, too.

spark of hope

After feeling all doom & gloom most of the weekend due to some reactions to the home inspector's photos (which it was possibly unwise to share in the first place), I got some good news today. An electrician from Duhon Electric came out for an estimate and it turns out that the "drop" to my house is just peachy. It's not mammoth by any stretch, but it'll give me at least 100 amps, which should be good enough, especially considering that I need to use less electricity anyway.

The electrician said that, contrary to what the home inspection indicated, the house had no immediate or dangerous issues, and that the voltage should be just fine for powering the tools that'll go into renovating. He gave me a ballpark of about $1,800 to replace the panel, which is old and not labeled. It's also not grounded and has a lot of open slots which are not useful for much except an expedient suicide. Then, as I stood inside relaying the good news to my boyfriend, we decided to take a look inside the mystery box the previous owners had left us on the kitchen counter. Contents: one spankin' new, totally modern electrical panel.

I'm getting a second estimate from my real estate agent's electrician on Thursday, but it's going to be a tough sell at this point. The electrician I talked to today was what I hope every contractor I work with will be like. He was friendly, earnest, smart, and didn't talk down to me. (You have enough people refuse to explain things to you - presumably - because of your gender, you get kind of sensitive about it.) Moreover, he made a clear delineation between what building codes required and actual safety hazards. Though he agreed that the electrical for the whole house should be updated, he seemed to be on board with my proposal that the house go up and down before replacing the panel, and then we go room by room, modernizing the wiring as walls came out.

I would love to think all of the house's needed repairs are going to be this smooth to plan, but I kind of doubt it. I've been rereading Gutted: Down to the Studs in My House, My Marriage, My Entire Life to make myself feel better about my comparably simple remodeling job. It's also good for short little factoids that are at least giving me a basis for further research into construction and stuff. (That and HGTV, which is actually probably doing me more harm than good.) One of the pieces of wisdom it contains is that electrical is the last thing you do because you can put it anywhere. So I can get the panel installed, but any serious rewiring is going to have to wait until I get a plumber to return my phones calls and plan out the central air and heating.

Still, knowing there are good contractors out there who I will get to work with if I can just get the foundation and everything else finished gives me hope.

dig here

One of the big questions I had in buying this house was what was under the floors. The inspector's pictures of the underside of the house showed oak floors, seemingly in decent shape. I've been really looking forward to getting in and taking up the carpet/linoleum/laminate to reveal that..

This is what we found we we pulled up a corner of one of the bedrooms:


If you've seen Beetlejuice, maybe you get the reference in the title. If not, suffice it to say there's a scene in the movie where the Maitlands have to dig through several layers of flooring and padding that look very much like what our short investigation today revealed. Except that I didn't notice any unidentifiable rotted black substance in the movie. I'm freaked to think what the stuff beneath the carpet, pad, and two layers of linoleum may be. All I know is that it ain't oak.

The second bedroom was different but equally nasty. The linoleum in the corner there had disintegrated into a white, plaster-like paste. I had to pull the carpet back about two feet to discover that it used to be vinyl with a fancy fleur de lis pattern.

The plan was to remove the carpet and stuff to determine whether the floors were even worth trying to save or whether, in the process of leveling the foundation, it was irrelevant if some were cracked. Looks like the answer will be the latter, but we're still going to try. I have this fear, though, that it's only going to get worse as we keep going.

a glass of champagne and a phantom limb

It's been an intense week. I've been going to bed with certainty and waking up to uncertainty. But I sit here now with a glass of champagne in one hand and several sets of keys in the other (you know, figuratively). As of about 4pm today, I own the house.

Yesterday, I was dubious this would happen. I met with my real estate agent to talk about contingency plans, plans we were both pretty sure we'd be forced to choose among. We talked about proceeding, accepting the sketchy property lines as-is, and deferring the question of property rights until the neighbor decided to sell. We talked about buying the four feet, but later that morning my real estate agent went to see the city and discovered that to partition the lots that way would make both illegal. It seemed that the best course of action was to have the sellers ask their neighbor for a permanent easement, allowing the fence and roof of my house to sit on his land.

Late in the day, though - after countless phone calls between my agent, my mortgage broker, and I - we got the new survey. It had a big bold line drawn right around the fence. The surveyor had gone back to the monument, the neighborhood's point of origination, and determined that the center itself was incorrectly located. By about four feet.

I went this morning to get a cashier's check and, at noon, handed it over after signing a huge pile of paperwork (which I now own both hard and digital copies of). In addition to my many sheets of paper and a good quality pen, I got a laminated copy of the triumphant survey that pretty much saved my ass. I got several other copies, as well. I think maybe I should tea-dye one of them and frame it.

Now my boyfriend and I are taking our dogs over to check out their new home. I'm wishing I had some graphing paper and could start mapping out walls and cavities where things like new bathroom fixtures will need to go. For now, though, I'm satisfied that I'll be able to walk across the threshold of a home that - philosophically - I've been pursuing since February knowing that I can write my name on a wall, or paint it silver, or knock it down if I want to.

Truthfully, I may not even need a map. I remember crazy details about the floorplan and can recall them instantly. I'm sure I'm not the first to say it, but it feels like I've acquired a phantom limb. A 2,000 square foot, 109-year-old limb that is going to ache until I attach myself to it. I don't know if I'll be able to wait to get the foundation frozen.

I have a hell of a lot of Angie's List recommendations to write. Tomorrow, the planning begins.

four feet of grey area

The plan was to close today. Papers had been drawn up and everything was all set until yesterday morning, when we finally got the survey back from the title company. The size is right, exactly what was described going as far back as the MLS listing. However, the eastern edge of the property - turns out - is four feet inside the east fence. The footprint of the house is within the actual property line, but part of the roof overhangs it by about a foot.

In Texas, something called adverse possession means that because the four feet have been used and assumed to be part of the lot I'm buying for over 25 years, it's owned by the sellers. It's basically squatter's rights. Which is all well and good, but I know a little something about the difference between how things are under the law and how they play out in reality. Some dude owes me two grand, for example, but the law's agreement that he owes it to me hasn't gotten me any closer to collecting it. And while involving the law when a client rips you off is expected and just about the only thing you can do, going to court with your neighbor to settle property issues is far from desirable.

We have a new closing appointment scheduled for Friday, and a second survey due that day, as well. The second survey will start at the establishing point of the neighborhood to determine whether the rest of the neighborhood is also off by four feet. Given the age of many of the homes, it certainly seems possible that eighty years ago some dude doing measurements with a piece of knotted rope or something measured incorrectly. It's probably too much to hope for, though.

Given the situation, I'm wary of going through with closing if the survey comes back the same. I'm meeting my real estate agent tomorrow to talk about strategies and timelines. I'm inclined to put my foot down, however. I've asked for no repairs, despite the condition of the house, and didn't push back at all on price after getting the inspection or the appraisal. It seems reasonable to me, then, that the sellers should purchase this strip of land from the seller prior to closing and include it in the price I'm paying them. I guess we'll find out soon enough whether they agree..

unattributed quotes

I had a pretty good homeowner's insurance quote from my normal insurance company, which I assumed meant the policy was mine. It turns out it doesn't work like that. When I tried to firm up the purchase of the policy, I found out that because Texas law prevents the insurance company from making stipulations about things getting fixed (such as the fusebox and roof), for their purposes my house-to-be is uninsurable. Why a national company can't do this but a local one can remains a mystery to me.

For the FHA loan, I have to pay a year's insurance in advance, which means I need to have a policy and a premium. The agent at the local insurance company I called after my normal insurer turned me down expressed surprise I was getting a loan at all, having been denied non-contingent insurance. This worries me. Maybe I'm not, in fact, getting a loan.


Photo by drspam

It seems upside down that fixer-upper homes should be out of reach to anyone but the very wealthy, people who can buy a home outright instead of needing a mortgage, or those who can easily put down 20% for a down payment. You'd think FHA loans would encourage rolling up your sleeves and building sweat equity, rather than paying extra for nonsense like granite, bamboo, and travertine. Not to get all sentimental, but what does allowing only the wealthy or lucky to get their hands on old homes do to the character of a neighborhood? I see very little chance that someone accustomed to the good life is going to move into a home in disrepair - hopefully they'll restore, but I bet it's more common for the homes to be leveled and turned over as investments once their character-less granite et al has been installed.

It seems like a shame to me. If you're willing to put in the labor to save a home, it seems like someone should be helping you instead of everyone involved trying to bar your path.

inspections and appraisals

The house was inspected last Monday and appraised this Monday, and we're still moving forward. Every category in the inspection was scored "Deficient," but this wasn't really a shock. Despite the house's obvious problems, the inspector still walked us around and detailed everything he'd found and how to fix it (instead of just writing it off as a tear-down). He had a couple of good surprises, for instance that some of the plumbing had already been replaced and the roof can probably make it another year.

I didn't know anyone in the area, so I found my inspector on Angie's List. That worked out really well for me as sort of a test run for using the service. I was able to comparison shop between inspectors with good reputations and saved about $100 off of what the other companies wanted. I got another $50 off the estimated price for agreeing that he could send me his photos of the home separately, instead of embedding them in the report PDF.

The appraisal I had no control over. The appraiser called me up when he was done and asked for $400, which was the first time I'd heard of him. Sadly, his appraisal wasn't the same figure as what I'd been told the house appraised for in April. This appraisal is about $20K less, so I feel less as though I'm getting a good deal. However, the price is still below the appraised value, so the loan should go through.

the lucky doorknobs

It's my philosophy that you should stock up on what you need before you need it, especially when it means getting a good deal. This makes me kind of a terrible packrat, but when it pays off, it really pays off. I was at the antiques store down the street looking for something completely unrelated, when I came across a set of white porcelain doorknobs. I'd just seen these mentioned in Remodelista and had been thinking how nicely they'd fit my vision for the house I don't yet own. So, even with no doors to put them in, I went ahead and bought them. I also picked up two cut glass knobs and one mercury glass knob, which the cashiers totally oohed and ahhed over.

I came home and decided to check eBay to see if the mercury glass knob was really all that, and whether I'd gotten a good deal in general. eBay led to Craigslist, where I found a huge lot of vintage doorknobs - some porcelain - selling for $25. I went to pick them up today and now I have enough doorknobs to replace all the generic knobs in the house. All in one weekend, for about $50!



The ones that look usable are on the right - two cut glass, eight white porcelain, six black porcelain, and the lone mercury glass knob. Of course, none of them are exactly pristine. The gentleman who sold me the lot told me his wife's father had been a carpenter and he'd found the bag of mismatched hardware in with his old tools. Most of them are rusted to some degree, and many have paint spots. Luckily, I found an awesome description of how to clean rust off old doorknobs and I'm very excited to see how much of the current "No" pile can be restored.

radiators!

We did a second walk-through of the house last night, to make sure I want it before throwing down money for the inspector, and discovered something we'd missed the first time through: the rooms have gas pipes for radiators. This is very interesting for two reasons. The first is that I prefer radiator heat to almost every other kind.

In Seattle, I loved the apartments I lived in. Seattle has tons of prewar apartment buildings with all the charm (right down to the milk doors) kept intact. One of the most disappointing things about moving to Austin was realizing that those basically don't exist here. Most of the places I rented in Seattle had radiators and I thought they provided the perfect amount of heat. Plus I find the sound comforting.

The second reason this is a big deal has to do with FHA loans. The house currently has no heating. The sellers, who've lived there 18 years, say they've never needed it and this isn't hard to believe since Austin only gets a few cold months. They've put in new windows that, even in what should be an exceptionally drafty old house, were keeping the temperature comfortable on 107° days with only three tiny window unit A/Cs for 1,900 square feet. But these are not facts the loan people care about. The loan people insist that a home must have a heater, and this home has none.

I was dreading spending $500 to install a wall-mounted heater to satisfy the loan requirements, because I knew I did not want that at all and when I'm spending a quarter of a million bucks, the last thing I want to do is waste any of it. I'm hoping that I can put in a radiator instead, making both myself and the bank happy (and making use of pipes that right now offer nothing except a place to stub your toe).

We finally got some pictures of the interior on this tour, too:


The front porch and the back yard.


Living room and dining room.


Entryway and master bath vanity (which is outside the bathroom - nice).


The kitchen and the addition off of it. I guess you call that a bonus room. If your definition of "bonus" is pretty loose.


The full bathroom in the hallway and the giant master bedroom.

where have you been all my life?

In a buyer's market, it's hard to believe you could spend five months looking for a house, but I have. I saw probably forty houses and made four offers. Today, I'm finally "under contract."



Is it a perfect house? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. It's down in a family neighborhood blocks from the lake, instead of up on the hill blocks from the clubs, where I wanted to be. Though it was built in 1900 almost all of its original character - save its high ceilings - has been remodeled over. It needs leveling, a new roof, appliances, bathrooms, a kitchen, central air & heat, electrical, plumbing.. And that's just to make it inhabitable. Once that's done, it needs the various linoleum and laminate substrates that have been layered over (hopefully) the original floors removed. It needs paint. It needs crown molding or something to make the high, featureless walls feel more stately and less institutional.

But it has good points, too. The lot is big, on a corner with alley access. It's four blocks from downtown and right around the corner from any number of bouncy castle outlets. The windows are new. There are three porches, two in the grand Southern style you'd expect in Texas. At 1,900 square feet, it's more than twice the size of my current apartment. And the price is $30,000 less than the appraised value. It may not be a perfect house, but it's a hell of an investment.

Being realistic, though, for the next year I expect it to be simply a Hell.

Five years or so ago in Seattle I was approved for a $600,000 mortgage. I was making less than I make now and my expenses were more, but that was the market then. The broker I met with explained all kinds of exotic loan options available for someone like me, who just woke up one morning and decided she wanted to buy a house she hadn't saved up for. You could get money at that point just for showing up. Now it's different.

My current broker advises me to be very cautious about how I even apply for home equity loans to fix up this house. He says almost no one is doing them in the first place. In the second place is what everyone already knows, that the market for those secondary loans is highly unstable right now. I'm lucky in that I have family who can act in a bank's stead, should I need that assistance. Still, few 30-year-olds want to borrow money from their folks if they don't have to, so I plan to investigate my options once the mortgage is in place and I don't have to worry about hits to my credit report from inquiries.

After all this searching, after offering and being turned down or told I'm too late, this feels both sudden and not. With very little to hope for in an inspection, I'm ready - even anxious - to get to the part where I pull my work gloves on and finally begin.

dressing rooms and man caves

I've been giving a lot of thought to my clothing problem, and the inordinate amount of influence it's having on the process of buying a house. Vintage homes charm and delight me, but when I begin to consider the amount of closet space they tend to have (not very much), I shy away. I have a ridiculously large wardrobe of my own, and also the remaining stock from a vintage clothing site I used to run. I can fill a generous walk-in closet with those things alone, but there are also several large tubs of fabric, trim, patterns, and the sewing machine that will one day turn them all into something more useful.


Photo by abbyladybug

My husband has a similar problem with ugly electronics (he owns five computers, by my count) and their messes of cords. He also refuses to buy an actual dresser for his clothes and insists instead on hanging most of them and transferring the remainder between two mesh laundry hampers.

We both have things that I wouldn't want anywhere near the public areas of a home because they'd be in the way and unsightly. I don't them to be the first things I see when I wake up in the morning, as they are now (our bed faces the closet, one of the more depressing views I've ever had). I want them confined and organized in spaces designed to accommodate them, not sheepishly shoehorned into what pretends otherwise to be an orderly home.

I'm considering that a vintage home with scant storage could work out perfectly if it only had one room big enough to be carved up into a dressing room and a man cave. I've been getting inspiration for my mini-domain from these photos from decorology on Flickr:



The nice thing about my husband having his own private space is that I don't have to care how he decorates his.

can a condo have a garden?

The seller of the second house I'd offered on was not so impressed by the price I was willing to pay. This is too bad, but fair. I don't believe that goods or services have a single "market value". They're worth different amounts to different people. In this case, the house is worth more to the seller than it is to me. The main reason for the discrepancy is location. While the house is a block from a good elementary school and four blocks from the lake, it's a mile and a half from downtown. For a lot of people this would be a great, but for me it's a compromise.

So, trying to take some sort of lesson from the experience, I thought about whether I wanted to live right downtown. There are condos for sale in my price range, and one of them even appeals to me (the track lighting would have to go, but otherwise it's nice). But in making the offer on the other place, I'd done a lot of fantasizing about outdoor spaces, and I find it hard to let that go.



When I think of a perfect backyard, I inevitably think of Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. I like gardens to be overgrown, with leaves spilling everywhere, swallowing up moss-bitten statues and crumbling structures. I like 'em romantic, suffocatingly so. I see plants everywhere that survive Austin's dry winters with and remain stubbornly bucolic in appearance, and I can't imagine it would be hard to build a wild backyard of my own. In a condo with no balcony, I'd be giving that up.

That doesn't mean no plants, though. It probably means no climbing plants, unless I want to ruin my walls, but there are plenty of plants that can grow indoors, including palm, citrus, and fig trees. I think it would awesome to have a staged forest behind a beaten-up velvet or leather sofa.

The reality, though, is that I'm slowly killing the only houseplant I've ever owned, a philodendron. This means any kind of indoor garden I might substitute for the traditional kind needs to be undertaken with immense caution, lest piles of dead leaves and broken branches take the Miss Havisham effect further than I'd intended.

conception

There's a scene in the movie Pandora's Box when Louise Brooks is dancing across the landing of a great stairwell. The windows behind her are at least three times as tall as she is, plants are everywhere, and the setting has a feeling of epic permanence, like something that would have existed for hundreds of years and will continue to exist for centuries to come. You can see what it would be like with dust accumulated in the corners and the windows clouded with years of metropolitan soot. You can see that it would still be beautiful. When I think about my own home, that's what I want it to be.



Windows twenty feet tall, however, are an unrealistic goal at this point in my life. Even if I could afford a grand-ceilinged townhouse, I'm aware of none to be had in Austin, Texas. The most beautiful old buildings here all seem to belong to state government and it seems unlikely they'll be relocating any time soon. There are plenty of squat, utilitarian houses in what used to be the bad neighborhood just east of downtown. When I decided to put down roots, it quickly became clear that's what I'd be settling for if I were to do so in Austin.

With a very patient real estate agent, I've seen at least thirty of these houses. Most were in pretty bad shape, any charming features that had survived their ownership by unabashed slumlords in such poor repair that, were you to remodel them, all you'd be able to salvage of their vintage pedigree would be the year built on the title. A few were mostly gorgeous, but these were smaller and, frankly, seemed to have had all their potential realized.

A big part of the reason I decided to buy now is the same reason most other people I know who are doing so have: you want to buy low and sell high. At the very least, you want to buy low instead of waiting until the next bubble to get ripped off. I decided that the smartest decision I could make would be to buy a cheap house with good bones and put a lot of work into it. A lot of what's involved in home ownership, I loathe. I hate debt, and I hate not being able to control my debt. I bought a car once and paid it off in a year, skimping on everything else, because the thought of owing money haunted me and I was terrified of just paying the minimum and letting the interest snowball. If I'm putting equal parts money and labor into a home, at least I can exert a little control over its value. Given market conditions of late, that small amount of control is the only reassurance I have. That means potential's a big deal. I was looking for a house that needed more work than money to become amazing.

The pictures above are what I'd hang over the mantle, if the house I've made an offer on had one. In the late Domino magazine, I saw a lot of inspiration boards. I'd make one of those, except there's no way I'm going to print off a bunch of pictures, wasting paper and ink, just to pin them on a board. Better I begin with a single concept, a single goal, and store the bulk of my resources online.

As of this moment, I have nowhere else to store them. I currently have offers in on two houses. Probably that's a little sketchy, but the first is a short sale and I've all but given up hope of ever hearing back from the bank. I only hesitate to withdraw the offer in case things with the second offer go south, or something untenable comes up during the inspection. I'm waiting to hear a response to my offer from the seller of house number two. It may come today, and I'm hoping it does. The sooner it comes, the sooner I find out exactly how terrified I should be.