"Hot town, summer in the city

. . .back of my neck getting dirty and gritty. . ."

When we made an offer for the house, we included getting central AC. And they agreed.

Due to the time frame for the house being built, they didn't install the compressor (we had a holdback of a few grand to cover the stuff that the builder had to finish in the spring).

Finally, summer comes, they've installed the compressor. We finally go to turn it on, and nothing. Not a sound from anything except a click in the thermostat. Look outside, and the compressor isn't moving. So I call the company that installed it, since it's under warranty. They eventually send someone out, who tells me that no one hooked up the power to the compressor, and that I have to get an electrician to do that. I think it's extremely stupid that they don't have an electrician on their staff just for that purpose. They never even told anyone that an electrician needed to come out.

So I get the electrician that did the original work on my house to come out, and he connects it up. He apparently stopped by and did it when I was out (there's a separate outside breaker box), so when I need the AC again, and start getting pissed, I find out that it's hooked up. I started it, didn't come on, call the electrician again, he comes out, and it turns out the the HVAC people screwed up some internal wiring. He gets it working, cursing them.

We turn on the AC, head out for a couple of hours, come back, and the basement floor is being covered with water, and the house isn't significantly cooler. So I call the HVAC people again. They send someone out, and he drills a hole in the slab of my house, and runs a PVC drain pipe into it, tells my wife that there's another thing that needs to be fixed and leaves. I find this out when I come home, get really pissed off because I've had to call them so many times, and they still haven't got the damn thing working right. And they didn't even clean up the extra pieces of pipe and cement dust off the floor. I find out that they installed the wrong size evaporator in the unit, so they have to get the new one and bring it. In the meantime, it will work, just not as effeciently. They installed the system, but didn't put the right part in?

I call my contractor to find out how bad an idea it is to drain under the slab, because it sounds stupid to me. He has them (the HVAC people) send someone out to install a drain pump. Apparently this guy is actually decent, says that it's an unfinished basement, so running this drain isn't a problem, and should have been done from the beginning. He also cleans up the mess left by the other guys, fills in the holes (there are actually 3 - guess they couldn't find a good place the 2nd time) with silicon. Since that, so far, we've had no problems.

A pain in the butt that took over 2 weeks to resolve, but in the end, it's worth it. It works well now, and I was shocked by how little it affected the power bill.

Food!

Actually, no, nothing at all to do with food. Maybe one day I'll post those squirrel cleaning instructions. Sadly, I don't personally have squirrel cooking instructions.

On the good side, the paraplegic dog is now fairly independent. This is very good, as now we don't have to walk down stairs and carry the dog around everywhere just so it can urinate/defecate. Also good since it's getting cold out.

So after the fence, the next project on the house was to section off the basement. We actually started this before the dog-stroke incident.

As you may have seen from the single picture of the house I posted previously, it's a split level house. The basement is completely unfinished.

The first "basement finishing" project we had was intended to target 2 goals: separate the upstairs/downstairs better for heating/cooling, and create a closet under the stairs.

Over the course of 2 weekends, my brother-in-law and I managed to mostly succeed. We built the door frame, installed a pre-hung door, put up some sheet rock. We had a few issues hanging the door straight, but we fixed it fairly easily the second weekend. We also sheetrocked under the stairs and hung a bifold door, and despite Mark's trying to screw up the measurements, it actually hung pretty much perfect the first time.

Where did I leave off?

Oh yeah. . .paraplegic dogs. . .

After a trip to the regular vet, and 2 trips to the emergency vet, the dog was admitted. Every time we took her somewhere, she'd seem to improve, then we'd get home, and she'd be worse than she started.

Vets basically said it's either a major case of arthritis, or a disease older dogs get which causes disks to deteriorate. They scheduled an MRI (for a dog!), and eventually surgery.

Apparently, the MRI showed a chronic disk condition, but possibly also something they call a spine stroke. They surgery basically went: open, nope, it's not a disk problem, close.

$3500 for them to basically not be able to do anything except have us haul her back end around in a sling (which was a plastic trash bag). Dogs can apparently recover pretty well from a spine stroke. As of now, the dog can't do stairs or jump, but can walk around on her own.

And bark. And chase the cat. And lick anything that stays still long enough.

To add to the fun, and make this have almost something to do with the house, between trips to the vet, the other dog manage to find holes under the fence and escape. Twice.

Those holes have since been blocked.

So some people have something to read

My wife's ex boyfriend (from years ago) had 2 dogs, one of which they had when they were together. Every couple of months, he would call and ask her to take the dogs.

When we lived in an apartment, the answer was no. When we moved to the new house, the answer was no.

Then we got the fence, and the answer was yes.

We happened to be driving down to NC to go to a wedding, so it was actually a convenient time. We drove 18 hrs back (really bad traffic) with 3 adults, 3 kids, and 2 dogs. And we survived.

Dogs + cat = pain in the neck. Obviously, the dogs like to chase the cat. It probably doesn't help that the cat is either stupid or really daring and trying to toy with the dogs.

At 5 am, this is a really bad thing. When afterwards, one of the dogs ceases to use its rear legs, its an even worse thing.

Frist Post!

On March 3rd, 2008, we became the owners of a brand new house. Brand Spanking New.

We got a good rate, in a good neighborhood, with good schools, good road access. . .1348 sq ft, on about 13k sq ft lot.

Then the fun begins. It's our house, and our lot (sort of), and we can do whatever we want to it.

The first project to undertake was finding out about a fence. I found out about a week before the closing that my house fell under a Wetlands Protection Act waiver. The waiver basically allowed for the construction of a house on this lot because it's been designated as a residential lot for years, prior to the act.

The waiver also says that nothing can be done more than 30 feet past the foundation of the house on any side. That effectively reduces the amount of usable land to about 9000 sq ft. Needless to say I was annoyed.

Since anyone who's possibly going to read this thing has already heard this story more times than they ever wanted to (including the first time), I'll sum it up. . .the Chairman of the Commission decided he wasn't getting any help from his compatriots, and didn't see any solid reason to deny me anymore, and I had acquired all the necessary paperwork (they asked for paperwork that didn't exist, so engineers had to draw some up), so they said ok.

Now I have a nice vinyl fence surrounding my back yard. It keeps some of the weeds at bay. Next time I buy a house, I'll make sure there's no Japanese Knotweed on the lot. Apparently it's terrible to fight. As one website stated, make the fighting the growth of this plant your new hobby.