|
|
Post by Liz n Dicksgiving on Apr 6, 2023 8:34:50 GMT -5
Oooh, things are really happening around here! The septic guy called this morning to alert me that they'll be starting on Monday. !!!!!
|
|
|
|
Post by Pedantic Editor Type on Apr 10, 2023 12:51:22 GMT -5
Have a handyman scheduled for a week from today to get a few piddly things done around the house that I can't or don't want to handle myself - replacing a light switch and a doorbell, fixing a bifold closet door and getting our big sliding glass door unstuck. And I feel like it'll either take the guy 45 minutes or three hours. (You pay for at least 2 hours either way, which is fine, but I feel like I should have something else as a backup just in case he's done fast, ha.) That said, any other projects I'd like to tackle this year are much bigger projects - painting, new shelves in the laundry room - so not things that can be done in 15 minutes  |
|
|
|
Post by Liz n Dicksgiving on Apr 11, 2023 8:39:44 GMT -5
Well, there's no going back now! This was the view from my deck of the backyard on Sunday afternoon:  Note the stupid rectangle "garden" thing. That's the swingset area that was there when we moved in. We hoped the yard would reclaim it naturally, but 17.5 years later, it's still just as brown and rectangular as ever. About 13 years ago we put up supports in the hopes of establishing blackberries in there, but nothing thrives in there. I'm really glad that it's going to be gone now.Here's the same view yesterday evening after work:  I mean, I'm sorry to lose the daffodils when they were in full bloom, though.And here's a sense of what they're actually digging:  This makes my house look comically enormous. Don't be fooled. It's all detached garage (with upstairs gym)!They are using that smaller digger and a little bulldozer thing and carting out the dirt around the garage into a huge dump truck. Boomer reports that was literally all day yesterday -- just hauling out bucketloads of dirt. I think the other excavator we got a quote from was planning to use heavier equipment, which would have been a lot faster. But would have cost us all our trees without actually costing less money. So slow and steady it is! They were already at work when I left the house before 8 this morning, only today they seemed to have surveyor things and measuring sticks. I think the precision digging portion of the event is beginning. |
|
GumTurkeyles
AV Clubber 
$10 down, $10 a month, don't you be a turkey
Posts: 3,065 
|
Post by GumTurkeyles on Apr 11, 2023 9:20:15 GMT -5
This makes my house look comically enormous. Don't be fooled. It's all detached garage (with upstairs gym)! I think your garage is the size of my house. |
|
|
|
Post by Liz n Dicksgiving on Apr 11, 2023 9:49:40 GMT -5
I think your garage is the size of my house. The garage was almost bigger than my previous house when we moved in, and that's before we doubled it with the upstairs addition!  My previous house was an interior-unit townhouse, so this garage alone also had more windows than my entire previous house. It's... a lot of garage. Honestly, it's got almost as much square footage as the house itself. (It's an extra-wide two-car garage -- in that there was enough room comfortably for two cars plus the width of the stairs leading up to the gym -- with a single-car-width bay running across the back. For, like, a workshop and where you'd park a ride-on mower or whatever. And then we have that same square footage above. SO MUCH GARAGE. We often lament that we'd like one more room inside the house, but whenever we look at real estate listings for houses with that extra bedroom we're always like, "Ugh, but the garage is too small for us now.") |
|
GumTurkeyles
AV Clubber
$10 down, $10 a month, don't you be a turkey
Posts: 3,065
|
Post by GumTurkeyles on Apr 11, 2023 10:20:29 GMT -5
I think your garage is the size of my house. The garage was almost bigger than my previous house when we moved in, and that's before we doubled it with the upstairs addition! My previous house was an interior-unit townhouse, so this garage alone also had more windows than my entire previous house. It's... a lot of garage. Honestly, it's got almost as much square footage as the house itself. (It's an extra-wide two-car garage -- in that there was enough room comfortably for two cars plus the width of the stairs leading up to the gym -- with a single-car-width bay running across the back. For, like, a workshop and where you'd park a ride-on mower or whatever. And then we have that same square footage above. SO MUCH GARAGE. We often lament that we'd like one more room inside the house, but whenever we look at real estate listings for houses with that extra bedroom we're always like, "Ugh, but the garage is too small for us now.") We have a detached 2 car garage that fits a total of 0 cars. It's also so close to the edge of the property that if we ever tore it down, we wouldn't be able to rebuild it (meaning if it needs updating, we have to keep 1 wall up). Also, when I checked the plot layout fro mthe city, it doesn't even show that we have a garage. If we did ever use it for car storage, it would be impossible to get 2 cars in there. 1 is feasible, but we then lose a lot of storage space we're using. |
|
|
|
Post by Liz n Dicksgiving on Apr 11, 2023 10:36:22 GMT -5
We have a detached 2 car garage that fits a total of 0 cars. It's also so close to the edge of the property that if we ever tore it down, we wouldn't be able to rebuild it (meaning if it needs updating, we have to keep 1 wall up). Also, when I checked the plot layout fro mthe city, it doesn't even show that we have a garage. If we did ever use it for car storage, it would be impossible to get 2 cars in there. 1 is feasible, but we then lose a lot of storage space we're using. Oooh, an illegal, not-to-code garage! I actually think that's sort of what happened with ours (and every modification that was made to the house between its initial build and our moving in). The garage is WAY too big for the lot, and we're basically grandfathered at this point into having so much impermeable area on our property. Like yours, we absolutely would not be permitted to build this garage again if something happened to knock it down entirely. |
|
Baron von Costume
TI Forumite
Like an iron maiden made of pillows... the punishment is decadence!
Posts: 4,684
|
Post by Baron von Costume on Apr 11, 2023 15:04:47 GMT -5
 I sadly am garage-less. It's on the list for this house but heh, I don't know if I'll ever get around to it given how much I desperately want/need a kitchen reno first. |
|
|
|
Post by Pedantic Editor Type on Apr 11, 2023 15:15:29 GMT -5
Liz n Dick's garage looks roughly the size of our townhome, honestly, maybe minus the attached garage. Which is just your basic two-car garage, but was something we really wanted in a house. It's funny, we all have garages (because they're townhomes!) but only the end units have two-car garages, and it seems like about 70% of our neighbors do not use theirs for car storage. Even though it's Chicagoland and we have winter.
|
|
|
|
Post by Liz n Dicksgiving on Apr 12, 2023 8:23:10 GMT -5
Liz n Dick's garage looks roughly the size of our townhome, honestly, maybe minus the attached garage. Which is just your basic two-car garage, but was something we really wanted in a house. It's funny, we all have garages (because they're townhomes!) but only the end units have two-car garages, and it seems like about 70% of our neighbors do not use theirs for car storage. Even though it's Chicagoland and we have winter. When we bought stately Dick n Hisses Manor Boomer basically dropped everything and moved from Arizona back east. Like, we were driving around looking at open houses just for shits and giggles, saw this house, and called Boomer from the driveway, "How soon could you move out here?" And her answer was, "Two weeks." It ended up not being quite that quick, but it was close. And she hired a moving company to pack up her entire house, without doing any culling of anything or coordinating with us what furniture we'd keep or not. She's a bit of a packrat and a compulsive buyer (tendencies that were much more pronounced when she was living alone), so there was SO MUCH STUFF coming from her house. And most of it ended up in the garage. So for the first 12 years we lived here we also couldn't park in the garage. It wasn't until we did the renovation on it that we got all of her crap sorted and emptied out of there. Our winters are nothing like the severity of Chicagoland ones, but even so it's been such a luxurious life-changer to be able to park indoors! |
|
|
|
Post by Pedantic Editor Type on Apr 12, 2023 8:31:07 GMT -5
Liz n Dick's garage looks roughly the size of our townhome, honestly, maybe minus the attached garage. Which is just your basic two-car garage, but was something we really wanted in a house. It's funny, we all have garages (because they're townhomes!) but only the end units have two-car garages, and it seems like about 70% of our neighbors do not use theirs for car storage. Even though it's Chicagoland and we have winter. When we bought stately Dick n Hisses Manor Boomer basically dropped everything and moved from Arizona back east. Like, we were driving around looking at open houses just for shits and giggles, saw this house, and called Boomer from the driveway, "How soon could you move out here?" And her answer was, "Two weeks." It ended up not being quite that quick, but it was close. And she hired a moving company to pack up her entire house, without doing any culling of anything or coordinating with us what furniture we'd keep or not. She's a bit of a packrat and a compulsive buyer (tendencies that were much more pronounced when she was living alone), so there was SO MUCH STUFF coming from her house. And most of it ended up in the garage. So for the first 12 years we lived here we also couldn't park in the garage. It wasn't until we did the renovation on it that we got all of her crap sorted and emptied out of there. Our winters are nothing like the severity of Chicagoland ones, but even so it's been such a luxurious life-changer to be able to park indoors! We spent our first 4 years of marriage living in apartments and parking in communal lots and scraping ice and snow off in the mornings (I even managed to lock my keys in my running car once) and let me tell you, the first winter we didn't have to do that was glorious. |
|
|
|
Post by Liz n Dicksgiving on Apr 12, 2023 8:37:24 GMT -5
For the curious, here's what the second step of our septic installation looked like at the end of the day:   After laboring for eight hours on the first day to dig a giant hole, yesterday they spent eight hours filling that hole back up with sand. I have a very faint idea of how a septic system works, and this sort of jibes with what I was expecting. And for the first time since return-to-office, I was really glad not to be at home -- Boomer reported that the process for getting all this sand into our yard was to have it delivered by a steady stream, literally all day, of giant dump trucks. The truck would come, back into the driveway (BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP!), dump a mountain of sand into the driveway, lower the bed of the truck down again ( BANG!!!!!!! goes the flap at the back of the truck), and then repeat. The banging was colossally loud and startled her every time, about once every 20 minutes for the entire day. Anyway, then the little bulldozer thing would carry the sand around the back of the garage. The trucks went faster than the scooper, though, so the driveway was still occupied after they'd finished up for the day:  I talked to the dude this morning and it sounds like that might be the last of the sand. I don't know what today's adventure will be, but he was asking about a garden hose, so there's that. Apparently tomorrow the electrician is coming, and that is surprising me a bit, because I didn't realize the septic involved anything electrical? As always, the moral of this story is to ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS buy a house on public sewers. |
|
|
|
Post by Liz n Dicksgiving on Apr 13, 2023 8:05:59 GMT -5
Yesterday's progress: Well, the sand pit now could be a reflecting pool; we like that idea!  But everything else was really depressing to see when I got home from work. For reference, this was the view of our most common approach to the backyard (the view as you go in to or out of the gym or garage, so what I see every time I come home):  There is a septic tank/distributor box/whatever it's called under that grass, and the drainage field is... somewhere out there, too... ::waves hand airily:: It's hard to say, because it's wholly concealed by being underground!This is now:  Those three green tank lids remain aboveground when this is all done. We'd been hoping they'd at least be a bit, I don't know... closer to the garage? At least trying to be a bit less obtrusive? But no, they're kind of smack-dab in the middle of that focal bit of grass there. ![]()  What's annoying me the most about this is that when our house was built there was a septic system installed totally flush to the ground, completely covered-up and invisible. And it worked for nearly three quarters of a century. And now we've got a new-fangled septic system going in... that can't be fully covered and will involve a large mound across the back (the reflecting pool) with white pipes sticking up out of it. You'd think the technology would have improved in 70 years, but apparently it's all just gotten clunkier and clunkier. The sewer lines in my town end two blocks up the street from me. Why did I have to fall in love with this stupid house?! |
|
|
|
Post by nowimnothing on Apr 13, 2023 8:17:30 GMT -5
Yesterday's progress: Well, the sand pit now could be a reflecting pool; we like that idea! But everything else was really depressing to see when I got home from work. For reference, this was the view of our most common approach to the backyard (the view as you go in to or out of the gym or garage, so what I see every time I come home): There is a septic tank/distributor box/whatever it's called under that grass, and the drainage field is... somewhere out there, too... ::waves hand airily:: It's hard to say, because it's wholly concealed by being underground!This is now: Those three green tank lids remain aboveground when this is all done. We'd been hoping they'd at least be a bit, I don't know... closer to the garage? At least trying to be a bit less obtrusive? But no, they're kind of smack-dab in the middle of that focal bit of grass there. ![]() What's annoying me the most about this is that when our house was built there was a septic system installed totally flush to the ground, completely covered-up and invisible. And it worked for nearly three quarters of a century. And now we've got a new-fangled septic system going in... that can't be fully covered and will involve a large mound across the back (the reflecting pool) with white pipes sticking up out of it. You'd think the technology would have improved in 70 years, but apparently it's all just gotten clunkier and clunkier. The sewer lines in my town end two blocks up the street from me. Why did I have to fall in love with this stupid house?! Maybe you could hide the green tubes under some raised planting beds. I am in the process of trying to kill a large patch of grass on the hillside in front of my house. Grass is hard to get rid of, so I would view your predicament as an opportunity. You are going to have a lot of bare dirt just asking to be turned into sections of native plants/meadow with very little work or expense. Plus you don't have to mow it! |
|
|
|
Post by Liz n Dicksgiving on Apr 13, 2023 8:35:01 GMT -5
Maybe you could hide the green tubes under some raised planting beds. I am in the process of trying to kill a large patch of grass on the hillside in front of my house. Grass is hard to get rid of, so I would view your predicament as an opportunity. You are going to have a lot of bare dirt just asking to be turned into sections of native plants/meadow with very little work or expense. Plus you don't have to mow it! Yeah, we've talked about doing that. I collected a ton of milkweed and thistle seeds last fall, actually, in the hopes of getting them established in the back now. Also, I ordered about 10,000 dandelion seeds because I love them. YOU'RE WELCOME, NEIGHBORS. (The yard is really shady, especially in the back where most of this was torn up, so I'm not sure what will even grow there. We're having to take down the mostly-dead maple in the middle of the yard when this is over, and then we're going to talk to a landscaping professional about getting some more trees again* and maybe doing a little hardscaping with a path back around to the compost bins behind the garage. And then line the path with hellebores and daffodils. Maybe make a little patio thing with crushed oyster shells -- so it's permeable -- around the green circles and then put a bench and a table over them?) * The tree situation was SUCH a crusher. Without exaggeration, that tree was why we bought this house. And then about three years after we moved in, a good third of the canopy fell off in a storm. Then another half of what was left came down in another storm about three years after that. The second storm managed to break off part of the main trunk of the tree, so it's been dying by inches ever since. We were too afraid of what the septic project was going to require cutting down to include the maple in that round of tree removal (we ended up losing just one pine tree and a lot of branches off everything lining the back of the yard), but now that the dust has settled on that we've admitted it's time to say goodbye. The plan has been, all along, to just get another maple exactly like it, as large as we can afford. But the tree guy informed us that it's a Norway maple and they're invasive and now we can't replace it. GODDAMMIT!!! So now I have no idea what's going to happen in the yard and what kinds of tree(s) we can put in, and whether there will ever be a nice canopy again in my lifetime. Likely no on that last point. |
|
|
|
Post by ganews on Apr 13, 2023 15:44:58 GMT -5
Today I learned that it is possible, that people could need, to buy dandelion seeds.
In my own very minor lawn work, I was incredibly pissed at myself for dropping my lawnmower battery pack right before I was going to mow for the first time this year. I had to buy and install replacement batteries again. At least now the place doesn't look uninhabited.
|
|
|
|
Post by Floyd Dinnertime Barber on Apr 13, 2023 18:41:02 GMT -5
Last night Mrs. Floyd and I went to a "free" dinner promoting what turned out to be a company that we had already bought insulation from. I did speak up about how good I thought their product was, and it is. I don't get paid anything by them (except maybe an accidental free dinner every year or two) but I will say again that I really like their product. My folks built the farmhouse we are now living in around 1957, and the fiberglass insulation had never been replaced or updated until a couple of years ago when we had this outfit put in their "NASA invented Multi-Layer Insulation", which is a fiberglass layer sandwiched between thin aluminum foil-like reflective material, in our attic. We had been having a lot of trouble keeping the place warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and our energy bills were outrageous. Since we had this stuff installed in the attic, our heat and cooling bills are reduced by around 40%. If anybody is interested in this stuff, PM me and I'll look up the name of the company. I think they are nationwide, I know they cover several midwestern states. Again, I don't sell this stuff or make any money off of it, but I think it's a good product, and it saves us money every month.
|
|
|
|
Post by Liz n Dicksgiving on Apr 14, 2023 9:41:18 GMT -5
Day four of the septic adventure: I bottomed out today. I have no idea how Boomer dealt with being home during all of this earlier in the week; I was working from home today and it was relentlessly distractingly noisy, messy, and stressful to look at. Plus the electrician was in the house most of the morning, hammering on the ceiling (which means the floor of the living room where my "office" is). More trenches were dug to accommodate the wiring and the final pipe that connects the tank to the field. I reached the point where looking out the window I just couldn't conceive of the yard ever looking whole again.   But hey! That was the final pipe. Which means they're done digging! And by mid-afternoon they were done with the connection -- the old tank is out, the new tank is operational. Now it's just a question of passing inspection with the Township and then covering this all up again. The owner of the excavating company stopped by to talk about it (he's the one who's been driving the loud dump trucks all week), and his comment was that he and his crew treat their jobs as if they're all their own yards. Which is why he was willing to do this whole project with smaller equipment, so it would minimize the impact on our yard. I found that whole spiel actually very sincere and reassuring; he also explained that all the white pipes currently sticking up all over the yard will be cut down to grade, the black tank lids will be covered, and the only things showing when this is over will be those hated green circle lids (which have to remain above ground and totally uncovered because it's an aerobic system, and I have NO idea what that is and don't care to find out). So it sounds like we've got a couple more days left, and once they're gone it'll be like they were never here. There's a lot of work left to make that happen!  |
|
|
|
Post by nowimnothing on Apr 14, 2023 10:36:22 GMT -5
Last year I replaced the hell strip with native plants. This year it is the hillside. I ran out of cardboard so one side is plastic, we will see which kills the grass the fastest. I am a little worried about erosion before the natives are established so I may have to add some kind of terracing but I am trying to avoid that much work/expense. Either way at least I don't have to mow the stupid hill any more. Luckily neither of my neighbors will care. The guy to the left only mows like once a year and the family to the right are hippie artists. Next year I should be able to finish off the last of the front yard and it will be grass-free.   |
|
|
|
Post by Liz n Dicksgiving on Apr 14, 2023 11:12:34 GMT -5
That is a very cool project, nowimnothing! Please keep us posted on the progress! Your yard is going to look fantastic. What sort of native plants are you putting in? |
|
|
|
Post by nowimnothing on Apr 14, 2023 19:13:14 GMT -5
That is a very cool project, nowimnothing ! Please keep us posted on the progress! Your yard is going to look fantastic. What sort of native plants are you putting in? Purple coneflower, black eyed susan, clover, goldenrod, some sedges and a bunch of others. Our soil and water district has a sale every spring and fall and I pick up 1-2 of just about everything. This year I went with the ones that survived the hell strip last year. |
|
|
|
Post by Dr. Rumak on Apr 15, 2023 17:27:32 GMT -5
I didn't do a good job of getting a before picture, so the one here is from Zillow, but here is the before and after on our final bathroom renovation (at least for this house).   |
|
|
|
Post by ganews on Apr 15, 2023 21:43:24 GMT -5
Is there a renovated bathroom from the last 20 years in this country that doesn't have the band of colored tilework in the shower?
|
|
|
|
Post by Dr. Rumak on Apr 16, 2023 16:48:28 GMT -5
Is there a renovated bathroom from the last 20 years in this country that doesn't have the band of colored tilework in the shower? I guess it depends on how strict you are with the word "shower". But here is the before and after on our main bathroom. No band of colored tilework, but we replaced the shower with a soaking tub (it's also a shower, but the shower head is hidden behind the curtain).   |
|
|
|
Post by Powerthirteen on Apr 16, 2023 18:17:46 GMT -5
This makes my house look comically enormous. Don't be fooled. It's all detached garage (with upstairs gym)! I think your garage is the size of my house.  |
|
|
|
Post by Powerthirteen on Apr 16, 2023 18:18:39 GMT -5
Is there a renovated bathroom from the last 20 years in this country that doesn't have the band of colored tilework in the shower? Ours (c. 2019) doesn't, so that's a win, but it's right next to a big ol' wall of shiplap, so, win some lose some. |
|
|
|
Post by Powerthirteen on Apr 16, 2023 18:30:57 GMT -5
I have had a fun and profitable weekend in the backyard. We had (as I may have mentioned before) a big-ish (24x12) ground-level wooden deck outside our kitchen window/family room door, which is tucked into the back corner of our property; the deck essentially ran up to the property line. Also, because the ground slopes, the deck was built in two levels, one about a ten inch step down from the other It's a decent enough place for an outdoor space, except that deck was a) very rotten and b) oddly elevated from the slope of the ground underneath it, so that if you stand on the lower deck you're head and shoulders above the fence. Not enormously private.
Anyway, after faffing around for 9 months thinking about what I wanted to do with it, this week I finally embraced reality. I demo'ed the entire lower half of the deck, which was mostly in good condition. Then I demo'ed most of the upper deck, which was not. Next up, using the good joists and planks from the lower deck to rebuild the upper deck, grading the slope the lower deck was on, and bringing in crushed granite to turn the lower area into a firepit/seating space.
I also dug out two monstrous posts the previous owner had put into the ground to tie her giant dogs to, which were now extremely in the way. Next weekend I'll put the new deck together, and then see about getting a couple yards of gravel delivered. Ideally it'll all be done before Memorial Day.
|
|
|
|
Post by Liz n Dicksgiving on Apr 17, 2023 8:33:44 GMT -5
Day five of the septic: The morning started bright and early with a visit from the township inspectors, and I guess we passed muster. Shortly after those guys left the septic installers advised us to close up the windows because "now's the dusty part." They spent the rest of the day moving all the dirt back into place and smoothing it all, re-seeding the grass (I know, I know; I'm not ready for the backyard to be any more of a project than it's already been, so lawn it is), and spreading out a ton of straw. They carted off the heavy equipment at 5 pm, and... that's a wrap, for the most part!   I've seen other houses in our neighborhood getting new septic systems over the last few years, so I was well aware of the process of utter wreckage followed by a surprisingly quick "leave only footprints" conclusion. But it still impressed me how quickly we went from a state of demoralizing ruin to "oh huh, it's all cleaned up out there!" There was some kind of issue with the originally-planned location of the septic field, which is the part where they had all the sand and gravel. From my modest understanding of how a septic system works, that's the part where the water gets filtered out through porous pipes into the cleansing sponge of earthworks around it. Our soil is basically solid rock, though, so our septic field had to be elevated (and filled in with all that sand); there was talk that it would be a tall, awkward mound (our neighborhood is full of yards with obvious septic-field hillocks in them) that would make for unpleasant rainwater drainage. But the installer called an audible and shifted the field about ten feet further from the garage than the original plan, and it ended up meaning he could sculpt a really nice, gradual rise across the yard. He was EXTREMELY proud of this and kept telling me about how thrilled he was with how it turned out.  Anyway, less smooth is the lids of the tank. I was freaking out all afternoon on Friday because there are the loathed green lids which I know we'll have to look at forever, but there are also two flat black lids you can just see to the right of the green ones poking up in the straw there (and a smaller one that's covered by the straw) -- I was told those would be covered when the soil all went back into place. But ugh! I can still see them! Like, our entire backyard is just LIDS! But the guy assures me they're not done. They'll let the system settle in a bit and then come back to do a final layer of dirt over it. So that's the story of my septic installation. Turning our entire backyard inside-out and then putting it all back in place was handled impressively quickly! (And then I spent all weekend being the most middle-aged-man I could possibly be -- I kept talking about how I hoped it would rain because our lawn really needs it.) |
|
Baron von Costume
TI Forumite
Like an iron maiden made of pillows... the punishment is decadence!
Posts: 4,684
|
Post by Baron von Costume on Apr 18, 2023 16:52:34 GMT -5
I feel you Liz, they are finally close to finishing off the new house on the fire lot next door and that should be the end of being annoyed/woken etc (I work from home 100%) after almost a year and a half of various things.
|
|
|
|
Post by Pedantic Editor Type on Apr 19, 2023 7:39:29 GMT -5
A little extra fun times with the doorbell.
The handyman replaced the button on Monday. Just the outside button, nothing else. It worked Monday night.
Yesterday, I got home from work and heard a faint humming/buzzing noise but didn't think much of it. A friend came to hang out for a little while and came in through the front door, where she reported that the doorbell didn't work. Hm. That's weird. And then I noticed the buzzing noise again, and after wandering around the area for a little while, we realized it was coming from the chime box, which is mounted on an inside wall a few feet from the front door.
I texted the handyman service, not expecting to hear back - it wasn't an emergency, and you couldn't hear it in the living room or kitchen, just wanted to see if we could get the guy back out to look at it. A little while later I got a call and the owner of the handyman service told me he wanted to come out still that evening (it was around 7:10 by then) and at least disconnect the chime box. So he did, checked the button and no problem there, but said the chime box was busted. Which is either a strange coincidence or something about the new button did it? but he'll be back Friday to replace that.
I did appreciate the evening service at no charge! He joked that "it's not a big deal, or it might have burned the house down" heh.
|
|
My previous house was an interior-unit townhouse, so this garage alone also had more windows than my entire previous house. It's... a lot of garage. Honestly, it's got almost as much square footage as the house itself. (It's an extra-wide two-car garage -- in that there was enough room comfortably for two cars plus the width of the stairs leading up to the gym -- with a single-car-width bay running across the back. For, like, a workshop and where you'd park a ride-on mower or whatever. And then we have that same square footage above. SO MUCH GARAGE. We often lament that we'd like one more room inside the house, but whenever we look at real estate listings for houses with that extra bedroom we're always like, "Ugh, but the garage is too small for us now.")
