Murderers

We've killed a lot of plant and tree life on our property in the last eight years. It's not that we're cold blooded, just that circumstances required it. For example, the previous homeowner, who was maniacal about landscaping and privacy, planted juniper bushes along the right-hand side of the driveway. Besides the fact that junipers smell funny and make us itchy, they were encroaching on the driveway and scratching our cars. So we pulled them out the first or second year we were here. Goodbye, junipers (except for one, but I'll get to that later).

Then we built the garage and an awesome tree ended up having to come down. For that I continue to be very, very sorry. Next to it was/is a much less healthy and attractive tree that got to live on only because its trunk was lucky enough to be a few feet further from where the corner of the garage needed to be. I wish their positions had been reversed.

Years later we collaborated with our neighbors to take down a couple pine trees on the eastern property line because they seemed dangerously close to falling over during wind or ice storms. We've been seasoning the wood, which is good for outdoor fireplaces, and one piece that's a large, flat circle may even become the neighbor's new outdoor bar table some day. If we can figure out how to do it and they still want to by then.

Today we worked on removing the enormous rhododendron that was growing next to our front door.


The rhodo had to be moved because it is where a set of stairs down to the driveway will ultimately be. I chopped around the base with a shovel to loosen it from the ground, and then Ken took over for the fun part. Here's what happens to a rhodo after it's tied to a truck and the maniac driver hits the gas:


And here's the path of destruction leading to the rhodo's new home along the western property line (that's the rhodo in the right-hand quarter of the picture; Ken gave it a good trimming to fit it in its new spot):


Assuming it takes well to its new home, this is one lucky plant that won't have died at our hands. And thankfully our neighbors are OK with it's new location right next to their decorative grasses (thanks, J&T!).

Then Ken moved on to a juniper that has been sitting at the corner of the house (you can see it in the picture above) since we bought it, and he has always hated it. Now that that corner needs to be accessed in order to put new siding on the house, he was able to fulfill his vendetta:


The new gaping hole where it used to be:


Now we are officially juniper-free. If anyone wants this thing, come and get it quick!

When it cools off a bit tonight, we have one more job out front to tackle. We need to remove all these shrubs from in front of the bay window (yes, those are our snow shovels and the kids' sleds by the front door; so much for putting things away--they were hiding behind the rhodo all this time):


The doomed shrubs are occupying the space where the new front porch will be some day soon. We'd been planning to pull them out with the truck and offer them up to anyone local who wanted to grab them this weekend and replant them in their own yards, but then Ken wisely remembered that some of them are near the natural gas line. Not something you want to go messing with, just in case their roots have entwined around the pipe. So instead of yanking them out, Ken will have to break out the chainsaw and cut them as close to the ground as possible. Then we'll need to apply some root killer (ugh, my conscience hurts) so they don't start growing back. Whatever we can gingerly dig out without risking a collision with that natural gas line, we will remove.

It does seem wasteful to murder a handful of very healthy (ahem, overgrown) shrubs, but they are also holdovers from the previous owner, and while they've served us well for eight years, they are not part of the scheme of things to come. I don't know yet what we'll put around the new porch, but I want it to be simple, uncrowded, and easy to maintain. Ken and I don't have a whole lot of time to trim billions of shrubs, weed planting beds, or carefully weedwhack around those sorts of things. We used to try, but once we had the kids we gave up all hope of keeping up with what the previous owner had planted around here.

We murderers are currently taking a break from the heat to get some other stuff done. Tonight the row of shrubs meets its grisly fate. Mwahahahahahaha.

Generosity

I've often thought and said that my firstborn son has a heart as big as the world. This morning was yet another example. We stopped at Produce Junction to buy fruits and veggies, and in each separate line I got two quarters back in change. I gave all four quarters to him and asked if he'd like to put them in his piggy bank when we got home. "No, Mommy," he said. "I want to use them to buy you stuff for the new house. Now that I have money, I can buy you things."

Permits acquired! Supplies ordered!

Hallelujah! After what we thought was a permanent setback to our permit application process, we had a breakthrough when it turned out that the consultant who reviewed our plans (and listed numerous additional things we'd have to submit) was just a stopgap measure until the new township inspector, G, started. And G's first day was the day that Ken happened to choose to go into the office to find out what the heck all the new requirements were for. He knew many of the things the consultant had listed weren't required for residential properties in Pennsylvania. Lo and behold, G gave us a pass on almost all the notes from the consultant. The only thing we absolutely had to do was provide a structural analysis that showed the existing building can withstand the load of a second story. I guess that makes sense. I kinda want to know that, too.

Ken cracked open some structural engineering books, talked to some structural engineers at work, and found a software online that allowed him to plug in info about the house structure and then spit out the calculations he needed. It took some brain grease, but he ultimately cranked out the analysis the township wanted. And lucky for us, it said the house could withstand the second-story addition. I thought it would be cool if the software would show a video of a crumbling house if your answer was that the building couldn't handle another story, but it wasn't that cool. Just kicked out "Structure is adequate," which felt kind of, well, inadequate, but it was all we needed for the inspector's office.

When Ken went last Thursday morning to hand in that paperwork, the inspector handed him our permits. He'd had them put through since he knew Ken would ultimately submit what was needed. We left on a short vacation that morning simultaneously thinking, "We're doing this!" and "We're doing this?!" We're sort of still at the same stage right now. That point where we know we're about to get underway with an enormous mostly-DIY project, but we haven't yet begun.

Unless you count the fact that I just ordered a truckload or two of building supplies through 84 Lumber, which sort of commits us to this whole set of shenanigans, I suppose. While I'm mentioning our supplier, let me just give a shout-out to Gene O at 84 Lumber in Claymont, Delaware. He was unfailingly helpful to Ken when he needed truss diagrams and take-offs throughout our permit and budgeting processes, and since we had planned to order--and now have ordered--all our lumber, siding, and windows through them, he gave us a break on pricing. Compared to Home Depot's prices for the same items and quantities, it looks like we saved roughly 10-12%. So big thanks to Gene, who now is probably on his way to Hawai'i to retire on the commission he just made on our staggering order.

In one to three weeks all those supplies will show up at our doorstep, and we'll have piles of stuff everywhere--in the garage, in the yard, in the family room maybe. I'll be sure to get some pictures of that mess for posterity and post them here. And I'll start this weekend with taking our "before" pictures since our deck's days are numbered (3 at most). Come Monday we expect an excavator to be making a gigantic hole in the earth under where the deck currently resides, so said deck needs to vamoose, and we will help it along this weekend.

Progress, people! Progress! Now I'm off to Home Depot's nursery section to buy a few money trees so I can get those good and established before the next time we have to order stuff.

Memories and more progress

Finally, after much delay we are on the move again toward starting this both dreaded and highly anticipated project (which one depends on what day and time you ask me). Yesterday Ken brought the final plans (in triplicate) and metric ton of paperwork over to the township offices--plumbing, electrical, mechanical, construction, grading--and after they tallied up the permit and escrow fees, I ran the big check over to them. Which means that now we wait...again.

It should take 3-4 weeks until we get permit approval (and/or questions in the meantime) from the township, but they did give us the go-ahead to tear down the existing deck so we can clear the spot where the new addition will go. We'll do that at the last minute since removing it will make it harder to get the dogs outside for potty breaks.

There's still plenty of work to do in the meantime. Today we worked on clearing out the lower attic since it will no longer exist when the new story is added on to that side of the house. Turns out most of the stuff was mine from childhood through college. I recall my parents renting a van the day we moved into this house in 2002 and bringing out all my possessions that had been left behind with them throughout the college and grad-school years. Who can blame them? It all went into the attic since it wasn't stuff we were actively using (and we had plenty of the latter to fill this place up that first day), and this is the first time in 8 years I've dug it out to take a look.

What a path of memories. Field band music still in its holder--likely sweat-stained and sun-bleached if you were to look closely enough. Yearbooks that I couldn't help but page through, one of them from 4th grade, my first year in Greencastle. Another from my junior year of high school. The changes in all of my classmates and me in the intervening years was amazing to relive.

Photos from Malinda's college graduation, my senior prom, my high school and college graduations, fun times with my college friends at various activities or just hanging out in someone's room or apartment. Even baby pictures of me at my first Christmas at my grandparents' house. How much Henry looks like me as a baby is startling. Then the programs from years' worth of college choir tours, bringing back memories of traveling in a charter bus across the states to sing with some really great people, though also the sad memory of the sudden loss of our choir director to brain cancer the year after our graduation.

Letters from college friends during the summers when we were separated and couldn't sit up late every night, chatting about all the things that worried or excited us. Hard to imagine anymore those years before we all had email and Facebook and could keep in touch nearly daily via those means instead.

Even with all of the above, most of the stuff that had been abandoned in boxes for so long had not retained much sentimental value and has been whittled down from 4 or 5 boxes to just one. That new box will be kept somewhere a little safer than a non-climate controlled attic that's been known to be visited by field mice. I'm lucky the artifacts survived this long in those conditions.

I wonder what I'll find tomorrow.

Some day we'll look back on this and laugh, and that day is today

Winning first prize in the chucklehead category, one real-estate appraiser who somehow failed to notice that looming behind and just off to the right of our house is a bigass garage. Like 14'9" tall and with interior space of 742 square feet. This garage is so large and so noticeable that when we run into people in the neighborhood whom we don't know well and we start explaining where on the block we live, they nod their heads knowingly and say, "Ah, you're the people with The Garage." Yeah, it's hard to miss. But the first-rate appraiser hired by the credit union to assess our property value marked the form thusly:

Garage or carport: None

Wow. You'd almost have to stab yourself in the eye and stick your head in a bucket to pass by our house and overlook the garage.



(And here's a shot from the backyard, with the garage to the left and the house in front of you.)


But instead of increasing our home's value on paper by adding in the worth of our beloved Garage Mahal, said appraiser/chucklehead subtracted thousands of dollars from the estimate because one of the comps has a 1-car attached garage and he thought our house had none.
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Ken begged me to let him be the one who gets to call the loan officer tomorrow and point out the mistake. I love him too much to deny him that bit of joy in his life. But how much do I wish I could trail him to work and lurk outside his office while he makes that phone call? Maybe I should make him record it for quality assurance because I am going to be in agony until I hear how it went down.

Of course, we'd already reconfigured our money-borrowing plan to fit the unexpected strictures their initial appraisal had landed on us, but with this new piece of information--the presence of a garage that's half the size of our house--we're guessing they could bump up the appraised value of our home just a tad. All the better for us since we'd like to stay in the sweet spot of having the lowest possible interest rate on the new loan.

While Ken is at work tomorrow having all sorts of fun at the credit union's expense, I'll be taking a personal day to keep purging our house of unwanted items and reorganizing the possessions that earn the right to remain. It's not fun exactly; I wouldn't use that word. But I definitely feel productive when I tackle a room, chuck a third of its contents, and box up another third for an upcoming yard sale (not ours; a friend of mine has generously offered to have our stuff plopped on her lawn in a couple weekends).

In fact, with the progress I've made to this point, the house feels bigger already. Almost as spacious as that garage out back.

The Drive-by Appraisal

We supplied our credit union with all that fun paperwork prior to the April 19th deadline and have been (im)patiently waiting ever since for them to conduct their title search and do an appraisal to back up our layperson's estimate of what our house and property are worth.

Today we got our answer. Let's do a little math, shall we? A realtor friend of ours estimated the market value of our home as X. To be conservative, we estimated our home's value at 10% less than X. The lender's appraiser calculated the value at 24% less than X. There is a big difference of opinion there, wouldn't you say? Of course, the only one that matters is the official appraiser's because he or she was hired by the credit union and that's the data they care about.

We've requested the appraiser's report, which should arrive by mail tomorrow or Monday, so we can see exactly what elements of the home and property were taken into account--what were the positive features? what were the detractors? We know our house is not perfect by any means, or we wouldn't want to remodel it, would we? But the .76X value that came back from the appraiser is the approximate sale prices of a home around the corner that had to be gutted when the new owners bought it a year ago. Our house is a bit cluttered (OK, a lot cluttered), and the dog's toenails have dug little paths into the hardwood floors in spots, but it doesn't exactly need to be gutted or we wouldn't be living here.

So we'll see what the report says and go from there. If they won't budge on their appraisal value, we'll reconfigure our project to fit the new financial situation, but it'd sure be nice to just be able to tackle the whole shebang and get it over with. I'm glad this drive-by wasn't of the shooting variety, but it sure was shocking nonetheless.

Quick question

So we applied to the credit union for a home equity loan, and soon we will apply to the township for our construction permits. But to whom do we apply for the time and energy to get this project underway and done while holding down full-time jobs and being full-time parents?