Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

My first weekend in our new home.  This is awesome.  Of course, it would be more awesome if we had clean clothes to wear but one thing at a time, I suppose.

I got paged out this morning and started work at six thirty.  I’m still feeling very, very sick so this wasn’t ideal but it was good that they called me.  It was an actual issue and it is better to get me earlier rather than later.  I went into the living room and settled in to the rocking chair and used Dominica’s laptop to work.  It is, after all, the only available laptop, or computer of any kind, in the house other than the iPod Touch and the iPad.

I worked for quite a while and then decided that I needed to nap some being as sick as I am.  So I went back to bed where Oreo is being super snuggly and got another hour or two before getting up to do some other work for the office.

Ever since we moved into the new house Oreo has become much more of  a lap dog.  He is regularly climbing into my lap even when I am just sitting on the floor and even moreso when I am on the recliner.  Maybe because he is cold or maybe because he is a bit nervous about being in a new place and just wants to be held and to get some reassurance.  Overall, though, we are pretty confident that he is really liking the new place.  The ability to go outside anytime that he wants with trivial effort and no stairs makes him, and us, very, very happy.

Liesl’s new favourite place to play is in the “office” – the third bedroom that will be an office/guest bedroom for the next year and eventually the nursery for baby miller who is on the way.  She makes me sit on the floor.  “Sit daddy”, she says pointing to a spot on the floor.  She then sits opposite me and talks to me telling me about this and that and playing with some of her toys.  She likes playing in the office much more than playing in her own room.  Probably because they is more open floor space but possibly just because it is so secluded at the very end of the hallway as far from the rest of the house as possible.

I ended up having to work quite a bit today.  It was a very busy day at the office, even though it is a Saturday, but we did as much work around the house as we could.  Great progress overall.

We are loving how the LED lights look in the house.  We only have the two but they noticeably do not produce as much heat and the light that they give off is much more pleasant than even the fluorescent lights are.  We are planning to get more.  The house actually looks more attractive using them.  The first ones that we tried are one in the ceiling fan of our bedroom – one of four lights in that fixture, and one in the spot light pointing at the fireplace.  That one is really awesome as we can use it alone and it works significantly better than the much higher wattage bulb that it replaced.  The light looks better when on and when off the fixture actually looks better using that bulb.

Our really big project this afternoon is going through all of the kitchen and cleaning out the cupboards to get them ready for food.  The kitchen cabinetry is really in rough shape.  Tons of it is ruined and needs to be fixed and what isn’t broken is not in great shape.  We really want to replace the kitchen but that is low on our list of things that need to be done.  It is serviceable and will get us by for a long time.  The biggest issue is that many of the lowest cabinets bottoms have bowed and become useless over time.  It is clear that these are the original cabinets from 1978.

Brian drove up with a truckload this evening of stuff for the house.  We thought that he was coming to hang out but just came up, with Jen, to deliver a load and to take off again.  So at least we have a lot more stuff to work on putting away.

We stayed up late working on the house.  Tomorrow morning the new appliances are due to arrive from the Lowes delivery folks.  We are slated for early morning so it could be pretty early.

This morning all three of us, Dominica, Liesl and myself, are even sicker than we have been all week.  So it is off to the doctor for us.  We decided to try out the Minute Clinic at CVS.  We know that we all have bronchitis but just need to get it verified.

We went pretty much as soon as CVS opened.  We were right.  All three of us are sick.  I have bronchitis, sinusitis and an ear infection.  Liesl has an ear infection too which explains why she has been having such a horrible time sleeping recently.  So antibiotics for all three of us.  We are one hurting family.

From the doctor I zipped down to Las Colinas to go to the office and work for the rest of the day from the old apartment.  I am way too sick to be going into the office and am definitely quite contagious at this point.

I called the movers, Dr. Move, once I got to the apartment to see what they could do for us today.  They managed to get someone in a smaller truck, for less money, out to us pretty quickly.  Dominica came down from Carrollton to work with the movers and get that all taken care of.

The move went very quickly.  Less than two hours.  They brought two people and a sixteen foot trailer and just loaded up the rest of the storage unit, drove it to Carrollton and pretty much just dropped it all into the garage.  Not ideal but it is all moved and done.  Dominica even went to the storage company and closed out the unit and managed to get our money back for the month of December which goes a bit of the way towards covering the cost of the movers too.  What a great feeling to have the storage unit closed out.

We had been using Public Storage and we are thrilled with how great they were to work with.  We will be using them again in the future when we have storage needs.

After going to the doctor, Dominica went to Lowes and found the washer and refrigerator that she wanted.  She had looked at Home Depot but they could not deliver the washer to us until December 20th which was not an option at all.  Lowes said that they could deliver on Sunday which would have to do for us.

So this afternoon, Brian and I ran up to Lowes to take care of buying the washer and refrigerator.  We grabbed some LED light bulbs that have just come onto the market to test them out.  I’ve been wanting to get those for a long time.  So much better for the environment and so much nicer to actually use too.  But boy are they expensive.

After shopping it was back to the apartment to work for a very long evening of deployments.  I am very glad that it is Friday.  I’m quite worn out and want to be able to spend a day in my new house instead of going back to the apartment.  We’ve owned it for three and a half days now and all I have gotten to do is to sleep in it for one night.

After work finally wrapped up I worked on loading up the Mazda with as much as I could get into it.  It is amazing how much is still left at the house even after the movers had gone.  So many stupid little items around the house.  It is actually going to take quite some time to get all of this.

It was really late, probably close to nine o’clock, when I finally got home and unloaded the Mazda.  I can get about five, large, plastic bins plus some smaller items tucked behind the seats with each trip without obscuring my vision.  It is quite a bit and nearly as much as the BMW can hold.

We were quite exhausted tonight.  Just spent the entire evening putting stuff away.

We noticed a smell now and then coming from the bedrooms.  We kept getting tiny whiffs of it throughout the evening as we worked around the house.  Almost always coming from the doorway or our bedroom.

It took all evening before we managed to figure out that the smell was coming from the carpets and the water than had been sitting in them.  Of course they are still wet from yesterday.  Not just wet but soapy as well.  There was so much water in them that there is no way for them to be dry yet.

So now we definitely have mildew going on.  Just great.  This is turning out to be a bit of a problem.

We ordered in dinner from Coconut Thai tonight.  We are extremely excited to discover that there is a Thai restaurant that delivers to us.  The food available to us at the new house is turning out to be pretty awesome, thus far.

The food from Coconut Thai was great.  Liesl loved it too.  Dominica is constantly amazed that Liesl likes spicy food.  Liesl absolutely loved my curry fried rice and ate tons of it.  I got it spicier than Dominica wanted to have and Liesl still preferred mine.  Liesl has always loved spicy curry.  She is very thankful that Coconut Thai delivers to us.

Okay, we have owned our house for two days now and have been unable to move into it.  We are very hopeful that today will be the magic day and we will be able to get into the house.  Jen is on her way to Irving with a moving van full of her stuff so if we are not out of her way before she arrives we are going to have some problems of logistics.

Brian, Dominica and I tried hard to strategize this morning as to how the moving was going to work.  Should we borrow someone’s truck?  Not enough time.  Should we rent one?  Okay, but that is expensive and we are very sick and can’t really handle doing any moving.  What to do.

Then I remember a little orange business card that had, months ago, been taped to our front door.  I had taken it off and taped it right beside the inside of the door.  I walked over and there it was.  Dr. Move.  Sounds like it might be time to call.

I was able to get right through to Dr. Move.  Their rates sounded really cheap and when I asked what lead time they needed they said “about a week.”  I said “How about a few hours?”  She laughed.  She said “How about two o’clock.”  Awesome.  We have movers and a truck.  That was easy.

I worked as much as I could today.  We did some packing trying to get ready for the movers.  Not very much warning for us to get the house in order for a real moving crew.  It is going to be extra difficult with so many people here and stuff in the way.  There is a certain ease to moving “everything” rather than just this thing and that thing selectively.

The movers arrived with the twenty foot trailer at a quarter till three.  It didn’t take them too long to pack up the apartment.  There really was not that much to go.  The big furniture, the bed, the dresser, some boxes, etc.   It was awesome watching other people load up all of that stuff.  Each load representing a bunch of effort that we did not have to put in ourselves.

Once the apartment was done Brian and I led the movers over to the storage unit where they packed up as much as they could get which was probably about a third to maybe a half of the storage unit.  A pretty good chunk representing almost all of the furniture and odd items.  Mostly what is left is the book boxes and miscellaneous other boxes.

Then we drove up to the house, unfortunately during rush hour, so that the movers could unload the absolutely packed twenty foot trailer up there.  Rush hour turned the fifteen minute trip into forty five minutes, easily.

The unloading went very quickly and our stuff was into the house in no time.  Dominica had beaten us to the house and was directing where everything was to go.  She had to get up there by four so that she could meet the Verizon FiOS installer.  She was very, very happy to discover that our water was turned on when she arrived.  What a great feeling to have almost everything done in a single shot.  This was a great decision.

The movers wrapped up around seven in the evening.  We had been talking about having them do a second trip but they didn’t have headlights and it was dark so they declined to keep working tonight.  They said that there should be people available tomorrow so that we could just call in tomorrow morning and schedule movers at that time.

Verizon wrapped up the FiOS installation before the move in was complete.  We are so excited to have great Internet access again.  We were so spoiled in Peekskill with Cablevision’s Optimum Online and then going to AT&T in Irving was just a disaster.  I tested our FiOS over the wireless and immediately got 48Mb/s down and 28Mb/s up.  Pretty awesome.   This is the fastest that we have ever had for Internet access.  And only twenty four milliseconds of latency according to SpeedTest.  Sweet.  I am going to really enjoy working from this house.

Dominica immediately got on the laundry.  That has been driving us crazy all week not being able to do laundry.

This evening, after doing five loads of laundry while we worked to try to go through as many containers as possible to get stuff ready for tomorrow when we will need the bins to get more random stuff out of the apartment as we find it, Dominica stepped up to the washer and felt a wet “squich” beneath her feet.  Quickly we discovered that there was water all over the floor.  Apparently something is wrong with the washing machine.

The washing machine is very old, as is the dryer and basically all of the other appliances, so for it to have rusted out and flooded is not that much of a surprise.  But boy is this crappy.  We were desperate to do laundry and now have to wait a while longer to do it again and we have to deal with wet floors.  No fun.

We ordered in dinner from Angelo & Vito’s.  It was awesome to discover that they deliver.  They have really good pizza – like you would expect in New York or Geneseo, at least.  We will be getting pizza from there a bit, I am guessing.  They are very friendly too although they had a bit of a problem finding our house.  Carrollton is very confusing to get around.  Everyone was over for dinner tonight – Watson, Souder, Tara, Jen and all of us.  Now that we have water, we have the house to be in.

We kept working all evening on unpacking.  Getting the bed setup being the big item.  We also discovered that the floors were far more wet than we had thought.  The flooding was not localized to the laundry “room” but had gone all through the hallway, into the master bedroom and totally flooded both master closets.  All of this space being carpeted, of course.  Now we have a real problem.

We took out both of our “Little Green” floor cleaners, thank goodness that we own those, and Dominica and I put in some serious time attempting to suck any water that we could out of the floor.  What a way to spend our first night in the new house.  We could have gotten so much more unpacking and setup done if we were not focused on this.  And Liesl’s room is completely useless because it is packed with our laundry just sitting all over waiting for there to be a washing machine that we can use to wash it all.

After we sucked out all of the water that we could I brought in our dehumidifier and set it up to dry the area as much as possible.  It is going to take a long time to get this much water out of the floor.

Tomorrow we need to deal with new appliances.  More money that we had not been intending to spend.  At least washing machines are cheap.  We have to get a refrigerator as well, though, and those are not cheap.

So we own our new house but had to sleep in the apartment tonight.  Hopeful that we can be into the house today and sleeping there tonight.  Got up early so that I could be on the phone with the city’s water authority when they open at seven thirty.

I called in and learned that the city of Carrollton keeps the water off for three days unless you pay an $55 fee to get it in two days.  I asked about public health and safety and they said that health and safety concerns do not apply to new residents moving into the city.  I asked about the water being turned off a day and a half ahead of time and they claimed that the sellers of the house and requested it off when it was turned off and, via direct implication, that the seller’s agent was lying to us about the entire thing.  Fun.

We tried to get a hold of the sellers and find out if they really had kept the water on and ask them to call the city on our behalf so that we could get it turned on for us as a wrongful shutoff but the seller’s agent flatly refused to even discuss the situation.  So, as far as we are concerned, as the city clearly pointed to her for providing false information and her complete refusal to support it in anyway that she obviously was lying and is now attempting to cover it up.  Of course she is from Ebby Halliday, the real estate agency is was “too good” to even return our phone calls and emails when we were first looking for a home in Texas.  Our business didn’t matter to them then and it sure doesn’t matter to them now as we were already unwilling to ever recommend them but this really takes the cake.

So we are screwed. We paid the city’s carefully planned bounty and hope to have water on Thursday.  Of course, no commitment on the time of day so it basically means that we get water at the end of the day.  We are not happy with the City of Carrollton right now and think that the city doesn’t have a very good plan for making a good impression of people moving into the city.  Talk about a good way to tell people that outsiders aren’t really welcome in Carrollton, Texas.  The water authority told us that it was a city ordinance to deny us water, in fact.  That means that the city council actually voted to block newcomers from being able to move in safely and easily just to do so as it costs the city money to not provide services.  It is very expensive to send crews out to turn off water and then turn it back on – especially when in between they can’t charge for water usage!  We sure got the message very clearly.

So no moving in today.  Another day wasted.  We took two car loads of stuff up to the new house today of things that we don’t need in day to day living.  We really can’t take much of anything because we are not at all confident that our water is actually going to get turned on tomorrow.  If we take too much stuff there we could be in a really desperate position.  So we have to be conservative and hold stuff back until we know for sure that it is safe to move.

I am really, really sick today.  Going out into the air to do some of the moving yesterday and today has really taken a toll on my throat.  I’m sure that I have bronchitis.  Dominica and Liesl probably have it too.  We are a hurting family.

Brian and Tara arrived this afternoon.  They made good time coming in from Tennessee.  It is tight quarters in the apartment tonight with so many people here.

We did some packing but basically there just isn’t anything to be done.  We are just waiting out the water and stuff.  We really need to get out of the apartment tomorrow.  Jen is coming up from Houston and there just isn’t going to be any free space at all.  We are moving towards “move panic” at this point.

This evening we went up to Carrollton so that they could see the new house.  There wasn’t much else to do anyway and we were pretty excited to get to see our new home some more – plus it gave us a chance to take another few loads over to get the move started.  We were very happy to see that the dresser which was supposed to be picked up this morning was actually picked up today and is now out of our way.

Since everyone was over helping out, Watson, Souder and I ran over to Angelo & Vito’s on Frankford Road to get pizza.  We were excited to discover that it is actually really good pizza.  One of the big concerns of any new house is that you are going to be in an area that doesn’t actually have good food available.  This is a major find on our first day.

We couldn’t hang out for very long in the house as there was no water.  Washing up and using the bathroom being major issues.  At least we had a fridge in the garage into which we could put our leftover soda.