One of my photographs that I took when living in Newark has been used by a law firm there located in one of the buildings near 1180 where we used to live. I used to walk by this building in the mornings on my way to Wall Street and they liked my picture of their building so asked if they could use it on the site. This is a picture of the Gateway Center in downtown Newark near Penn Station.
I got up at eight thirtyish this morning. We were awoken in a panic by a knock on the door. We thought that the appliances were being delivered an hour earlier than expected. It turned out to be the Salvation Army coming to pick up the dresser that they had already picked up on Wednesday. Not sure how that confusion happened.
At nine thirty our appliances arrived. The old washing machine got pulled out and we ran back to see what was going on behind it. To our horror we realized that we had mold! Just great. Now we really have a project on our hands.
So we did a bit of mold research this morning to see what we need to do. We also got a mold inspector called and hope that they get back to us soon. Now this has gone from a major inconvenience into total mess.
The next big disaster occurred when they went to install the refrigerator into the kitchen. It turns out that the kitchen cabinets are not true and the countertops are one half inch skewed – just enough to not allow the fridge to fit into the kitchen. So we called Bennie and he is going to come up on Friday night and shave off part of the cabinets so that we can use the fridge. So for the next week we are going to have the fridge sitting right in the middle of the kitchen. That’s going to make getting everything put away so much more convenient.
The first thing that we did was a load of laundry. We are still very much in a panic about the laundry.
No sooner did we do a load than there was water all over the floor again. Well, I guess that the issue was not with the washer after all. Now we need a plumber.
Thank heavens the house came with a warranty from American Home Shield. We called them immediately to see how this whole home warranty thing worked and learned that it was very easy and that they would get a plumber out to the house for us for just a sixty dollar “co-pay”. They won’t be able get someone out until tomorrow but at least we know that someone is coming and it won’t cost us a fortune.
So, another day now without being able to do laundry and the floors are wet again. Not nearly as wet as they were, but rather wet. Not fun. This just keeps going and going. We are never going to have clean clothes again.
Now that we know that we have mold and that we have plumbing issues we not only have to deal with those things but we also don’t have anyplace to put our clothes and other belongings. The biggest rooms affected are the two master closets and without them what do we do? They are the two largest storage spaces in the house. Considering our main task for this week is to put things away we are in pretty rough shape.
We spent the day unpacking. Tons of progress made today. We are getting very depressed, however, with the house just being one disaster after another. The mold and the plumbing are huge issues. We have no idea if they will be nothing or if they will be massive disasters.
This evening the mold specialists called back and made an appointment to get out to see us on Tuesday morning at nine thirty. At least we know when they are coming now and we know that it will probably be four hundred and fifty dollars. Not cheap but it could be a lot worse. But that is just an inspection. No remediation.
We had a tough time getting food today. Apparently no one delivers on Sunday. We ended up trying several places. Many were closed, one was “too far”, one had their only driver have a car accident. It just went on and on. Finally we found a place called Joe’s. We ordered hot subs from there for lunch and then ordered pizza from there for dinner. The subs were much better than the pizza. We are very thankful that we found them because they deliver all day and are open later than the other places that we were trying to order from.
Tomorrow I am going to make an attempt at my first day commuting from Carrollton down to Irving. We will see how it goes.