If You Need Me, I’ll Be In The Bath

Tags

bath tub, bathroom, home improvement

I have a new favourite room in the house, and it used to be the one I hated the most.

I have never loved our tiny bathroom. In fact, when we briefly thought about trying to sell our house, the realtor wrinkled her nose and said we would definitely have to renovate it if we wanted to sell.

After all, the electrical socket didn’t work, and neither did the heater, so the towels were always damp. There was no window to air things out, and the fan barely functioned. The cover on the fan was also broken, so you could see it’s rusted inner workings. The hot and cold taps turned the wrong way in the tub. The tiny steel tub was dirty and chipped. The sink backed up constantly. The toilet bowl was cracked and there was a weird smell. When we drained the tub, the toilet gurgled ominously.

We fixed the toilet a couple of years ago but beyond that, nothing changed except that the sink faucet broke so that we could only turn on the hot water, which isn’t great when you have a small child who wants to wash his hands, and your hot water heater produces scaldingly hot water.

Oh, and when we changed the tub some of the linoleum got ripped up and we replaced it with some vinyl that totally didn’t match.

We tried to replace the fan but modern fans don’t fit the housing for our ancient one, and when we got a guy in to replace the housing he took one look at the job and said there was no way it was worth it to him.

All in all, it was not a charming place to be.

  
So my mother’s big gift to me this year, my birthday and anniversary gift with a bit of “I’m sorry your life has been extremely challenging for the last couple of years” thrown in, was a new bathroom if I could find someone to renovate it with a reasonable budget.

When I finally emailed people for quotes I got quoted $15,000.

Um, no.

Then a friend of mine gave me the name of her renovation guy. He renovated her bathroom and kitchen before she sold HER townhouse (she got asking price within two weeks) and when she bought her new house he put up a wall to turn a big bedroom into two small bedrooms, fixed her porch and did some other small jobs. I have seen them, and they all look great. My friend said he was scrupulously honest and strongly recommended him.

He came in and gave me a quote of $5500 which seemed much better. Then followed a stressful few weeks of trying to pick a new tub, new vanity, new fixtures, tiles and so on.

Then, one day, the magic began…

 

 I love, love, LOVE my new bathroom.

The new tub is a SOAKER TUB. It has arm rests and a contoured back for me to lean back and read!

The new vanity is not as deep as the old one so our floor seems bigger and I can open the door without hitting Owl’s step stool.

The tiles are porcelain and the feel both smooth and pleasantly textured at the same time. They have enough roughness that they don’t get slippery when wet.

There is SO MUCH MORE storage in there now.

The best part, though, were the little things our guy threw in.

“Hey, so I noticed that the heater doesn’t work. I picked up a new one – it’s $50. Is that okay? I picked a model that blows the air up and I’ll put your towel rack right over it so you’ll have nice warm towels in winter. Does that sound good?”

“Hey, so, I noticed your socket doesn’t work. I put in a new one and this one has a safety with a reset.”

“Hey, did you know you have rocks in your plumbing main?”

That’s right. ROCKS. For years we have struggled with drainage in our sink and it turns out that was because there were RED LAVA ROCKS IN OUR PLUMBING MAIN.

Our renovation guy just found rocks in our plumbing main. RED LAVA PEBBLES. Wtf, previous owners. WTF.

— Carol @IfByYes (@IfByYesTweets) September 14, 2015

It took him a lot of trouble to clear the blockage but now things DRAIN.

He managed to replace the fan, although it took him a lot more trouble to do that because apparently our crawlspace makes the fan completely inaccessable from above.

So now I can take a nice bath in my soaker tub, then dry myself off with a toasty warm towel, then turn on the nice new COVERED fan, and blow dry my hair.

Oh, and our new giant medicine cabinet has a mirrored back inside so when you open it the light dazzles you and you feel like you are in a glamorous commercial.

It is my new favourite place to be. I go to pee and end up just sitting there, looking around and feeling good.

Oh, and our work guy also nailed some board to shore up our rotten kitchen counter because the faucet was lifting up when we tried to turn on the water. We’ll get that fixed some day too, maybe.

In the meantime, I’ll be in the bathroom.

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Dear Canadian Tire. I have money. I would like to exchange it for goods and services.

Tags

bad customer service, business, Canadian Tire, climbers, play sets, Step 2, Toys R Us

Now that our yard is almost habitable (there’s still the ant problem, but we’re working on it) PH and I are beginning to dream big – like, maybe, we could put something out there for Owl to play on.

We’ve talked a lot about what that might be, but we are constricted by two things:

1. Our yard has the dimensions of a postage stamp

and

2. Our yard is built four feet up on a retaining wall, and the fence blows in the breeze:

So we need something that will fit in our yard without giving Owl the opportunity of tumbling directly into or over our fence.

Everything we have looked at has either been not awesome enough, or FAR TOO AWESOME for our yard.

Got Mulch

Tags

back yard, gardening, mulch, weeds

Last long weekend, I found myself with two consecutive days in which I was neither working at the vet clinic, nor training dogs. And the weather was beautiful.

What should I do with all this time?

When a friend offered to take Owl for the morning to play with her kids, I realized what I finally had time to do – MULCH THE BACK YARD.

Last year, after yet another fruitless assault on the weeds in our lawn, PH and I decided to just mulch it all. We could cover the weeds and the bare patches alike and leave little green islands of decorative plants, which were currently being choked out by the monstrous dandelions.

Thus having made such a monumental decision, we proceeded to do absolutely nothing about it for a year.

In the meantime, our back yard was basically unusable, except as a back-up place to put the dog when he needed to pee.

The weeds, fed by Vancouver rains, grew so high that we were afraid to walk out there, lest we step in a hidden dog turd. Weed whacking would tame things temporarily, but leave the yard looking rough and patchy.

Basically, given the combination of too-well drained soil and living in a rainforest, our choices were either a bald yard, or a yard that made me feel like a character from Day Of The Triffids.

So I hied myself to the gardening centre, and picked up bags and bags and bags of mulch. I brought them home and we laid down newspaper and cardboard (supposed to be a biodegradable way to block out light and prevent weeds from regrowing) and covered them with mulch.

It took two days of sweating in the sun and three trips to buy more mulch before we finished.

But it was totally worth it. Check it out:

In Which I Fret About The Chance That Things Might Change In The Nebulous Future, Because, Hi, I’m Me.

Tags

anxiety, change, generalized anxiety disorder, homes, life, living far away, moving house

PH likes change.

It is one of his most baffling but also more endearing qualities. He likes to visit new places, try new things, and basically expose himself to all kinds of potential for disappointment, regret, and other things that I avoid as if they were herpes.

Change me no likee.

Well, that’s not quite true. I like GOOD change. Really obvious, risk-free, guaranteed-to-be-positive change!

Most change doesn’t fit that criteria.

It was his love of change that sent PH out to Vancouver in the first place. He sold all his possessions, up and moved.

Making the decision to move out there with him several years later was probably one of the riskiest things I have ever done. I was leaving friends and family behind and quitting a job I liked. But on the other hand, I was heading to a place with much better job opportunities, I was young, and I had my fiancé with me.

It was fun, and exciting, and difficult. I had trouble finding a job, I had trouble making friends, and I had a lot of trouble putting down roots. I suffered depression. I lost two jobs.

But I’m finally getting settled in.

And now, Perfect Husband is starting to get bored of Vancouver.

I think he is also getting tired of sharing me with three different jobs – my vet clinic job, my dog training business, and my occasional Elance work.

Even though he knows we need the money, and he is supportive of my dog training business in general, he doesn’t like me disappearing for half the weekend on my dog training appointments. And if my clinic job asks me to work a Saturday? There is definite grumbling to be heard.

But at the same time, we want a second child and have no idea how we will be able to afford it. The math just doesn’t work.

If we didn’t have a $220,000 mortgage plus monthly condo fees, we wouldn’t be feeling the pinch so much. It doesn’t help that we know that if we outgrow our current place, we’d need an even larger mortgage. Our current one is tiny by Vancouver standards, because our complex has so many repair issues.

For a larger place, we’d be looking at $600,000 or more, very probably. And that just ain’t gonna happen unless I suddenly become VERY famous and rich.

So whenever a job pops up at PH’s company in a place with lower housing prices, even if it’s a job that he is totally unsuited for, he applies for it and starts browsing houses. I’ll get a text saying ‘Hey, want to live in Memramcook?” or “Who wants to move to Burns Lake?”

Of course, since he’s largely unqualified for most of these jobs, and because he lists moving costs as a condition of getting the job, the chances are remote… but there have been some close calls.

And every time he does this, I have to think about how I feel about moving.

The problem all comes down to change.

I’m actually HAPPY right now, which, to quote Marlin from Finding Nemo, is a big deal, for me.

I like the vet clinic where I work. I like my boss, and my coworkers.

My dog training business is picking up. We actually have a minor TV celebrity on our training roster right now. If we get permission to use her name on our website, that will look AWESOME.

I have friends who have little boys of about Owl’s age. Our neighbour dropped his two sons off to play with Owl for a couple hours yesterday and the house got so much more peaceful with to toddlers to occupy Owl’s attention. We have another friend’s tot coming over for a babysitting session tonight, so Owl will be happier than a pig in muck.

For all of the issues we occasionally have with Owl’s daycare, he loves it there. He talks constantly about the other kids, he hates to leave, and they love him. They tell him “I love you, baby” constantly.

Daycare Lady’s daughter even painted a large (and slightly Uncanny Valley creepy) portrait of him which now dominates the playroom. It is the Temple of Owl over there.

So why on Earth would I leave?

Oh, right – the fact that we are a $4,000 flight away from our families at Christmas time.

Oh, right – the fact that our parents aren’t getting any younger and are missing Owl’s toddlerhood.

Oh, right – the fact that we have no idea how we will be able to support a second child.

Oh, right – the fact that we definitely have no idea how we would ever afford a larger house than we have now.

If you had asked me three years ago if I wanted to leave Vancouver, would probably would have said yes. I was unhappy with my job, my friendships still felt uncertain, and I was lonely and feeling damaged by years of workplace bullying.

But now I don’t know.

I want to be closer to my family, but I don’t really want to start over in a new city – make friends, put down roots, go through all of that again.

I REALLY don’t want to have to hunt for a new job. My job experiences have been so fraught with stress that I just can’t face it again.

If we moved anywhere, I would want it to be either such a massive promotion that PH could mostly support us on his own, and I could just write or train dogs for extra money on the side, or it would have to be a place with such cheap houses that it amounted to the same thing.

And when it comes to moving back to the Maritimes, well, I have a lot of conflicting feelings.

On the one hand, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are home to me, and probably always will be.

The clapboard houses, the drifts of snow, and the shabby corner convenience stores are real to me in a way that Vancouver has never been. I see Vancouver as shiny and soul-less by comparison.

Besides, if we moved back there I wouldn’t be facing the making friends issue – I still have friends there, although they don’t have boys Owl’s age the way my friends here do.

But they’re old friends who would pick up with me as if I never left.

On the other hand, I’m a massive snob.

I went through the public school system in Nova Scotia and I shudder at the thought of putting poor Owl through it. Even though I know there are good teachers and bad teachers everywhere, and it’s all just a crap shoot.

I also feel like being a professional dog trainer from Vancouver means something, whereas if I ever wrote a dog training book, the fact that it was written by a trainer in, say, rural New Brunswick wouldn’t do much for my reputation.

Everything in the Maritimes is small, and expectations are low. Businesses tend to have shoddy signs, and websites that use comic sans. People “from away” are looked at with suspicion.

I feel like moving East would be a huge step back for my career, even if it were a step forward for our finances and family life.

This is the stuff I torture myself over. 

I’m happy right now, but like it or not, change is coming – either we have a second child and things get really challenging, or PH actually gets an offer from one of these jobs he applies for, and my entire life will be uprooted, with good and bad consequences mixed right in.

I DON’T LIKE CHANGE.

Us: 1 House: 0

Tags

cleaning, dehoarding, organization

The first step in the very long list of messes to be eradicated has been completed.

BEHOLD OUR LINEN CLOSET:

IT'S SO TIDY

BEHOLD WHAT WAS THROWN AWAY/DUMPED AT VALUE VILLAGE:

to PH's disappointment, I decided against donating the cat.

MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Now we just need to repeat this with every room and closet in the house.

…

…

Fun.

Well, That’s That, Then.

Looks like this will be a Vancouver blog for a while yet, at least.

Here’s what happened:

PH’s company said they couldn’t afford the full transition package (guaranteeing our house, covering realtor and legal fees, providing supplemental money for my having to quit work, us having to buy new groceries, etc etc etc) but offered us 10,000 bucks towards such costs.

PH worked it out and found that it would cost us between 16,000 and 25,000 in moving expenses, legal fees, taxes, travel costs etc etc etc.

He decided that we could probably do it for the minimum amount if we agreed to take on some of the travel expenses and realtor fees and such, if we got a realtor who took a low cut, like 1 or 2%, if we bought a house in the neighbouring county without land transfer taxes, etc etc.

So he emailed the company back and said if they offered us 6,000 more dollars, we could swing it.

But then we heard back from the realtor.

Now, we knew we’d be taking a loss on the house. This house was a speculation when we purchased it: It was selling for $50,000 less than similar units in nearby complexes due to maintenance and legal issues. So, once assessments and such are paid, and the outstanding issues are fixed, we should be able to come out ahead.

That hasn’t happened yet. Or at least, it’s started, but won’t be complete for three more years. Also, the people who couldn’t afford the assessment have foreclosed, which means that there have been a lot of court-ordered sales in our complex.

The upshot, according to the realtor, is that if we wanted to try and sell now, we could expect to make maybe $160,000 on our house.

We paid $215,000.

So… that’s that.

It seems ironic that we wouldn’t be able to afford a $100,000 house in Nova Scotia if we sold our current property for $160,000. However, it would mean that we would need a mortgage of $150,000 or so on a house that was worth only $100,000.

And no bank is that stupid.

We told ourselves that we would go if we could afford it, but wouldn’t if we couldn’t.

If we tried to sell now, we’d end up with nowhere to live on the other end, and an outstanding debt of $50-60,000 bucks.

Yeah, the saving on daycare wouldn’t be THAT good.

So here we stay.

For now.

I hope that an opportunity like that comes up again some day, when our house values have recovered.

In the meantime… we should buy Anton’s and celebrate getting to stay here with all of our friends.

We have a pool!

"Mmm, yes, more sushi please!"

"Do they have these in Nova Scotia, Boob Lady?"

…I’ll try not to think of the picture of working from home and saying goodbye to my job.

And hope to GAWD that our housing values improve… eventually.

My faith in humanity rests on tonight. No pressure, Mankind.

Tags

human stupidity, leaky condo, strata

Do you remember this exercise in mass stupidity?

Well, somehow, it’s happening all over again.

As a basic recap, my condo complex is in desperate need of repairs.  There are drainage problems, electrical problems, roofing problems, foundation problems, the windows and patio doors need to be replaced (mine are grayed from captured moisture and my patio door only opens half way), and some of the units are uninhabitable due to mold issues.

Oh, and the sauna has been broken for, like, seven years.

If these issues, totally over 6 million dollars in required repairs, are not addressed, then several things will happen:

a) housing values will continue to decline – already, townhouses in our complex are selling for $50-100,000 less than similar units in nearby complexes.

b) Some units will continue to be uninhabitable due to mould issues, while other units, like mine, will be left with foggy windows, broken patio doors, and rotten fencing (the wooden slats on my fence actually blow in the breeze, like a silent wind chime).

c) Someone will eventually lodge a formal complaint, in which case the government would intervene: we would be declared a “leaky condo”, and all owners would be order to pony up all of the dough immediately. Perfect Husband and I could not afford to do that. We would be forced to foreclose.

So instead, the strata council (owners like ourselves, who have taken over handling the finances, etc) decided last year to propose a levy to cover the most urgent repairs (about half of the total list of issues), in installments over 5 years. So each unit would pay $4,000 a year and the big issues would be resolved.

For some reason, the vote BARELY passed. Because people are morons. 

Still, it passed. We payed our money last October, and major repairs were begun immediately. Already most of the drainage issues have been solved and almost all of the roofs are redone.

Some owners foreclosed because they couldn’t find the 4 grand, other sold, and others just refused to pay.

Then one of the twits got a lawyer. They claimed that his ballot, an absentee ballot, wasn’t counted. They lodged a lawsuit against the strata council.

The strata lawyer replied that he had the sealed envelope of votes, which he had now opened and recounted, and the count came to the same number as before AND OH LOOK, HERE’S THE PLAINTIFF’S BALLOT.

The Plaintiff took it to court anyway.

HE WON.

Not because there was a miscount. No.

It just so happens that a recent court decision regaring union voting methods had just happened, which set a new precedent for voting lawsuits. The judge decided that our vote applied, and so we lost, because our vote wasn’t “secret” enough, because there was no ballot box.

So basically, we lost on a technicality and the plaintiff got REALLY lucky.

The upshot is that we have to do this vote all over again.

The twits (the ringleader of which is a woman with a face like a hatchet, who blew cigarette smoke in my face when I was pregnant after the last meeting, because I politely disagreed with her “let’s fix things with no money” stance) have been papering the neighbourhood with their little newsletters, which claim that the buildings are all totally fine and that the strata council are just fabricating all the issues to make us pay money for no reason.

Sure, that makes sense, considering that being owners as well, they have to pay too, and the money goes into a communal pot, so no individual actually profits off of this.

this is what our windows look like

And this fence looks fiiiiine, right?

Clearly the issues are totally fabricated, yeah.

Revote tonight – PH is over there. Wish us luck. 

Appreciation and Anticipation

Tags

bookcases, decorating, home improvement, Ikea, torches

The close-call on the house, and the prospect of actual repairs occurring some time in the next five years, has given me a new appreciation for our home.

Lately when I’ve looked at it, I’ve only seen the stains on the carpet, the dog fur in the corners, the papers on the coffee table, and the grey mist in the windows. But the last few days I’ve been concentrating on the glowing colour of the walls, the wood floors that are the exact shade I have always wanted, and the plans we have to improve it – baseboards, for example – and how great it will look when those are done.

Yesterday, Pefect Husband and I spent a lot of time online trying to figure out a solution to our living room.

Currently, Moby (our CRT 32 inch widescreen HD TV), the cat tree, an extra coffee table, a small black two-shelf bookcase double-stacked with DVDs, and our various Nintendos (from NES to Weslii, our Wii) are stuck in a jumble at one end of the living room, which ends in a kind of niche. Perfect Husband and I have been talking about getting a proper entertainment unit that fits perfectly into the niche, and displaying our torches on top of it. On Thursday evening we finally put the torches into their stands and sprayed them with hairspray to keep the soot on them. It is time to get a place to display them.

In our Internet search through Ikea, Sears, The Brick, United Furniture Warehouse and many more stores, we discovered something:

• Most Entertainment centres these days don’t have a shelf which goes over the tv on which we could place two torches.
• Those that do are too high to have room for two torches at the top.
• No entertainment centres actually have a space deep enough for something as startlingly enormous as Moby. They are all built for slim, sleek little LCD flat screens, not massive whales like Moby. In fact, most of them intend you to HANG your tv.

So we made a new plan. We decided to get two tall book shelves to place one on either side of Moby and a matching shelf to stretch in between, OVER Moby, and we could put the torches on this. We made a foray to Ikea, which was a madhouse. Apparently, we weren’t the only family to celebrate Dead Jesus Day by going shopping at a Swedish furniture warehouse and eating hot dogs and cinnamon buns for 50 cents each.

We found two bookcases that we liked, and their little living-room displays made me realize that I wanted to get little bookcase lights to shine classily down on our shelves’ contents, so Perfect Husband patiently hung around the lighting section for 20 minutes while I hemmed and hawed over that selection. We grabbed the two bookcases, which weight 100 pounds per box and were so long that we had to tie the trunk down with twine (which made for a harrowing trip home given the ridiculously high gales that Vancouver was experiencing yesterday). But… we couldn’t find a shelf that would fit between them.

They seem to have standard shelf sizes. 32 inches is too short to comfortably fit two torches onto, and 46 inches is four inches too wide to fit between those bookcases. Our niche is about 104 inches wide. The bookcases are 31 inches wide, each. The 46 inch shelf would make the entire width 108 inches, which doesn’t fit. We need a 40 inch shelf, and those don’t appear to exist.

So that will be its own odyssey, apparently. But in the meantime, we have 200 pounds of bookcase in boxes lying in our hallways, and I can’t wait to have them up and looking all new in our living room, with their fancy little bookcase lights.

DOWN WITH THE JUMBLE!

In which a surprising number of people fail at grade one math.

Tags

leaky condo, people are idiots, real estate, strata

We knew when we bought this place that it was better than we could afford.

Three bedrooms, two stories, multiple pets allowed, with a yard, several playgrounds and an indoor pool.

I hear there’s  even a sauna, although it’s been broken for years.

We knew there was a catch.

The reason our place was so cheap was because the place had been slowly falling down over the last 30 years. Some units (not ours) had mold. Some (not ours) had roofs caving in. The windows leak. The drains don’t drain.

In 2002, the owners were told by several different companies that the problems amounted to 2 million dollars in repairs… They voted to fix less than a quarter of the issues. When warned that the problems would snowball if ignored, they dismissed it as fear-mongering.

Estimated repair costs are now close to 6 million dollars. It would take 3 million just to get the place up to code. We knew this, coming in. It’s how we could afford it.

What we didn’t fully know, didn’t fully consider, was the sheer idiocy of human beings.

An owner has requested that the courts come in and intervene. If they do, and we don’t have a decent plan of action in place to remediate the issues, they’ll declare us a Leaky Condo, force us to cough up all 6 million immediately plus legal fees and such, or they will foreclose our homes. Today the strata council held a big meeting. We needed to make a decision. Did we want to…

• Pay the 3 million dollars to fix the really urgent problems (leaky windows, mold, drainage problems, collapsing roofs etc) over 5 years… (about $4,000 a year per household)?
• Or… did we want to fix all 6 million dollars worth of repairs in one big lump sum (as much as $60,000 per household)?

You’d think this would be a no-brainer.

But noooooooooooooo.

Asshats with the patience of two year olds were constantly interrupting the council’s presentation with “That’s bullshit!” and “I can’t afford $20,000!”

Oh yeah? Can you afford $60,000??

They wanted to know why THEIR unit wasn’t on the list of first year repairs, in front of the people whose units are uninhabitable.

They wanted to know why they had to pay when THEIR roof had already been fixed.

They wanted to know why the council was asking for money before the repairs were made.

They accused the council of trying to steal their money.

They wanted their units fixed now, and they wanted to know why the repairs weren’t being paid for by a magical money tree.

To be fair, there were rational people, who talked about our property values, and basic math. But mostly, in a crowd like that, you notice the morons. Like the weepy lady who said she didn’t dare vote at all because the council hadn’t made it clear whether this money would pay to fix her stairs. Or the guy who said “shut the fuck up!” to a weeping mother describing the black mold growing behind her son’s bed.

Ultimately, the question comes down to this:

What is more affordable, $20,000 spread over five years, or $60,000 at any given moment?

We needed 75% of people to answer this question correctly. There were 102 votes cast. 10 people abstained.

We needed 76 “yes” votes to pass the motion.

They counted, and recounted, and recounted, and recounted. Perfect Husband and I began to talk about declaring bankruptcy and showing up on my parents’ doorstep, because if the courts intervened, there is no way we could get a loan for a sum that large.

The votes were in. There were 77 votes in favour of not being morons.

Thank gawd only 24% of people are complete and utter idiots.

Staying positive

Tags

Christmas, floors, home

The three best pieces of news in my current life:

1. It looks like Perfect Husband might get another torch relay when the torch swings back this way.

2. Only 14 more sleeps ’til I go home for Christmas!

3. The damn flooring guy finally decided to show up and put in the correct linoleum, transforming our kitchen from an ugly festering mess to a delightful and rather Tuscan looking haven.

As a reminder, this is the wrong floor:

FINALLY, the right floor:

Of course, the floor guy said he had to come back to put some kind of sealant on the linoleum where it joined with the laminate, and then he never showed up, but that’s a minor thing, surely…