Sheep Guarding Llama

It was a normal day with no news on the house or the car until around eleven when Dominica called to tell me that we had a one o’clock appointment with the foundation expert to see what would need to be done on the house before it would be in good shape.  So we had to drop all plans and figure out what to do.

I ran home at twelve and walked Oreo and got the family ready to go.  The inspector was running late so we were in good shape and left at twelve thirty.  We drove over to the office and picked up Dan who had offered to come look at the house with us and give us his opinion as well.

We went to IHOP for lunch since we had time before the inspection.  That worked out well as we were all very hungry.

The inspection went pretty well and pretty quickly.  Ten piers are needed to shore up the foundation which will cost four thousand dollars.  Not cheap at all but far from the possible numbers that we were looking at like ten to thirty thousand at an extreme.  Four thousand is a manageable number and hopefully will be covered by the seller as the work already needs to be done and the walls have already taken damage from the foundation shifting.

Dan liked the house and gave it his seal of approval.  He felt that, overall, the house was in good shape and there was nothing too major about which to be concerned other than the foundation.  Everyone who has gone through the house really likes it which has made us a lot happier about the decision to move forward with the house.  Of course, after the inspection today, it will be at least two days before we can get any feedback from the seller and find out what they are going to do about the foundation.

After the inspection it was back to the office.  I worked very late as there was a lot to do and I was out for a while during the day.

We never heard about the car so we have to wait until tomorrow, I guess, before we can pick it up.  It is going to cost $1,800 to get it fixed.  Just what we need this month.

We ordered in Italian tonight and tried to relax and did some planning for my presentation at SpiceWorld on Friday morning.

We had to get up early this morning so that we could get up to Carrollton for the house inspection at nine.  That was quite the rush trying to get everyone up and out the door that early.  We aren’t an up and out the door quickly kind of family.

The house inspection, as expected, took several hours.  We had both a normal house inspection and a dedicated termite and wood destroying insect inspection.  The insect inspection went quite well.  The house had had termites in 1995 but no further sign of them.  The only concern by the inspector was the wood in the atrium and it is our intention to completely remove everything, except the tree, in the atrium and start over either with a composite deck or with a new slab and tiles.  So that is no issue for us.  That was the first change that we were planning to make to the house anyway.  It doesn’t even change our priorities.

The house inspection did not go so well.  There were several issues highlighted with which we need to deal right away.  The big one is the foundation.  There are foundation issues, which we had suspected, but the inspector could not say how much or what would be needed – only that a structural engineer would be required.  So that is huge.  An inspector is about three hundred dollars and repairs could range from two thousand to thirty thousand depending on the damage.  That could suck a lot.

Other issues included a minor plumbing leak which could be related to the foundation or might be completely unrelated.  It might also be connected to the broken sprinkler system which we had already known about.  That might be very minor or it might be a bit of a problem.  That is another investigation that has to be handled prior to us approving the purchase.  There was also some minor HVAC issues that we believe are covered under the home warranty that comes with the house so we hope that that is a non-issue.  Some relatively minor electrical issues but with all of the electrical work that we are likely to do to the house we did not suspect that that should even be brought up with the sellers.

At this point we are in a bit of a panic about the state of the foundation.  The other stuff is relatively minor.  The foundation could completely stop the sale which would be awful.  We really hope that our agent is able to work out everything so that we can have that inspected by a structural engineer tomorrow and find out how bad the situation is.  We kind of knew that this was going to happen but we had been hoping that everything was going to turn out fine.  The upside to having foundation issues now is that they will get resolved up front and we will have a foundation guarantee that will go with the life of the house which is a really big deal in this area of Texas.  Carrollton is one of the worst places in the world for foundations along with Farmer’s Branch and Irving.  So having the warranty in place is a lot of peace of mind.

While the inspection was underway Dominica and I got a lot of time to just spend time in the house and talk about things that we are going to want to do with the house once we have it.  We came up with a lot of ideas, such as the tiling of the atrium and possibly adding a reading bench to the northeast corner.

We are seriously considering putting in a kegerator in the bar area under the rear bar counter with one to three real taps above.  That would not be cheap but it would also be a major point of interest in the house.  And just because we had working taps would not mean that we have to keep all of them stocked all of the time.  We could just use one most of the time and have the others there for looks, resell value and if there was going to be a party.  Having a friend who will custom order mini-kegs anytime for me is a big deal.  We did not find a good place for the wine fridge to fit, though, so we are not sure where we are going to put that unless we just put it at one end of the bar and give up the space that that takes up from the walking space back there.  I suppose that we could build a shelf over that and get additional storage rather than just giving up the space.

We talked more about the living room television.  We are pretty sure that we are only going to consider doing a projector in there.  We don’t want a modern television cluttering up the pristine living room space.  It is so perfect as it is.  We are planning on having a retractable screen in the front of the room that comes down in front of the fireplace and having the project itself back in the bar area.  We came up with the idea today of hiding the projector inside the bar “roof” and having a moving shingle that we would lift up to reveal the projector and then hide it when not in use so that the entire mechanism was effectively “secret” keeping the room as “non-theatre” as possible while still providing a great place to watch movies in the evenings.

We looked in the “den” where Liesl and her young sibling will play.  We want to put in an LCD television in there that they can use to watch their children shows but there really is not any space.  We are pretty sure that putting a thirty two inch LCD on a retractable arm in the corner by the kitchen will work and keep the television from being visible from the living room but still give them a good way to watch things without retreating to their rooms.  We plan to add a bit of foliage to that room so that will hide the television, we hope, from view from most areas of the house.

One major surprise was that the NuTone original intercom system in the house was still working.  The radio was turned on and we got music pumped throughout the entire house.  The system is quite old and not in perfect shape and lacking a lot of important features such as auxiliary or iPod input support so we would likely look into replacing it with a modern, and far more attractive, NuTone system.  But having an intercom go to all points of the house is pretty neat.  There is even an intercom station out front for guests arriving at the house and one on the back patio.  We would want to add one to the atrium, we think.  Francesca has the same unit but hers does not work anymore so Dominica was very excited to have one that already works.

We checked out the back patio and yard.  The patio area is actually quite nice.  The slab is broken and sinking so that needs to be repaired but should be very cheap.  We are thinking of resurfacing it and tiling it to make it really attractive, adding and in-ground grill on the side and filling it with plants to make it a lot more inviting.  I’m not sure if we would want to put a small table there or maybe just a few nice, relaxing outdoor chairs.  It is a small space just off of the living room but the perfect spot to enjoy a lemonade while watching the children play in the yard.

The back yard is in rough shape.  The grass is dry and mostly dead.  The swing set back there is horrible and has to go.  We are asking the sellers to remove it before they are done.  It is ugly and dangerous.  One way or another it has to go right away.  The fence against the one neighbour is in bad repair too but then that house is in rough shape on its own having been vacant for some time and having foundation issues.  Hopefully someone buys it soon and takes care of it.

The big disappointment was just how unattractive the corner of the house was in the backyard.  The heat pump (yes dad, the house has a heat pump) is a little too far out and is just outside one of the windows.  There is an unnecessary water softener in the corner and then a ton of cable boxes and random cables going everywhere all over the side of the house.  The whole thing is an aesthetic disaster.  We will solve some of it by removing the satellite dish and the television antenna and ripping out all of the associated cables.  There might also be regular cable that we can remove as well.  The only cable that we care about is the Verizon FIOS which we hope is one of the more attractive cables.

So we are considering removing the water softener and, if at all possible, moving the heat pump and its slab over a foot or so to get it out of the view of the den.  Then we will be able to change the bushes and do some aesthetic mitigation in that space.  As it is designed currently there is not even a way to put fencing or anything around this ugly corner so we are pretty much stuck with the situation unless we come up with something really ingenious.  The back yard was obviously not a focus of the current residents who have been in the house for sixteen years but this does give us a more or less blank slate from which to begin.  Once we have grass, new plants and clean up some of the mess I think that it will really add some “oomph” to the house as so much of the house looks into the yard.  The look of the yard is very important to both the inside and the outside of the house.

We are disappointed to discover that we don’t reasonably have the option of putting a window into the side of the garage because the garage wall is brick.  Maybe a skylight would work there for my future office space to have some natural light.  The “office space” in the garage is already kind-of converted to living space.  It was used as a workshop and has a wall, doorway, etc.  We would need to do a bit to actually make it useful but I don’t think that it would be anything expensive except for the bit where we need to modify the garage door itself so that it is sealed and not actually able to open and close.  We are not sure what we would want to do there or how it might impact resale value so we have to be careful.  We are going to be discussing options with some people.  The space will need to be carpeted, painted and central air and electrical run in.  I think that it could be an awesome office and library area, though.  A place that adds interest and excitement to the house rather than a dirty, nasty work and storage area like it is now.

There is a ton that we can do in the kitchen but we expect that we will leave it as it is for quite a long time as it is in very good shape and will function perfectly for a long time to come, we assume.  No issues there even though there are lots of changes that we would love to make if we had the funds.  It will probably be near the end of our home renovations rather than at the beginning.

In the master bedroom we definitely came up with some significant changes that we are considering.  The bedroom itself isn’t an issue but the two master closets, the master bath and the huge expanse of sink space need to be reconsidered.  We are thinking of shaking that space up so much that we need to get in a designer and look at options.  We are thinking potentially of having the bathroom space itself come into one of the closets and cutting out a lot of the space of the sink area to give us room to make a really nice, modern master bath with one of those steam shower units that I have always wanted.

After going through the house we went and got lunch at Jack in the Box.  We drove up and down the local “business street” to get a little feel for what we have available near to us.  There is a pretty good selection of restaurants and shops so that is looking to be pretty positive.

After lunch we went home.  We were all pretty tired.  I played Oblivion for a little bit then took a nap.  Liesl came in and napped with me although she didn’t really fall asleep so she kind of ended up just keeping me awake because she was playing with her crayons and stuffed animals.  Then, after not very long, I got paged and had to work for the office.  Then Dominica went to take a nap and she fell asleep.

I ended up taking care of Liesl for a while who had a minor emergency requiring that I give her a bath.  We played for a long time with her crayons and drew all over the tub and tiles.  She absolutely loves her bath time Crayolas.  What a great investment they were.  Liesl also took her first shower today!  Her first one on her own, anyway.  I had turned on the water initially just to fill the tub but she was having fun playing in it and then stood in it while she coloured on the tiles.  So apparently she doesn’t mind taking a shower not.  Not even when she gets her head wet.

I walked Oreo, did some cleaning and then ordered dinner as I knew that Dominica was going to be hungry at some point and having food arrive in an hour would be the best thing.  I played Oblivion for another thirty to forty minutes and am now at two hundred and one hours of gameplay!  Lots and lots of stuff left to do, though.  I am nowhere near the end of the game.

We did a good half an hour or more of serious house cleaning.  The house looks much better, company ready.  Then we ate our dinner and watched the remaining bits of 30 Rock.  I have now seen the entire series.  Perfect timing as I have a very busy week coming up and no time to do anything but work until next Saturday when I return from Austin.

The BMW is still in the shop.  They did not manage to finish work on it yesterday so we expect that we will get it back tomorrow.

I wonder how much of 1970s design that I love is not so much because it is the design of my childhood but it is the design so prevalent in the EPCOT of my memory?

Liesl has a new thing that she likes to do: she goes and lays in bed and watches Dora from bed.  The good thing is that she loves taking naps and will come ask to go to bed quite often.  The bad part is that she doesn’t always fall asleep and she watches more than she should.  It is also hard for us to manage turning the PS3 and television in her room off without popping in and disturbing her if she is not completely asleep.  So no good solution there yet.

Liesl has also started a new thing where she says “I Love You” when we leave her room.  So we open the door and say it back to her.  Then she says it again, louder, once we close the door.  This goes back and forth for several minutes.  She finds it very entertaining.  She is the cutest little girl ever!

I got up and worked for the office for a while this morning then we rushed out the door to take the X3 to the dealer for service.  The only dealer that we could find in the area is thirty minutes away which is a bit of a pain.

Dropping off the car turned out to be a major ordeal.  It took the shop over an hour just to check us in!  Massive inefficiency.  Everyone was friendly and the place was clean and attractive but the staff was all confused and there was no clear direction as to how to get service and when I finally managed to do the “right” thing… the concierge handling me just left and left me standing there waiting for him.  After half an hour and several other people offering to help me I finally decided that he had left for the day and left me there so someone else helped me.  Not very coordinated at all.

While I was waiting at the dealer I got to see a guy drive his BMW 528i into the side of the garage because they made him, a clearly not-very-focused older guy, back out of the long garage bay area.  He drove out at a twenty degree angle or so and just hit the one garage door post.  Did quite some car and garage damage.

After dropping off the car we drove back to the apartment and dropped off Oreo.  Then we went on to Waffle House for a really late breakfast.  So late that it was kind of late for lunch, even.  Liesl ate an entire half of a waffle.  She is really getting good at eating her meals now.

We went home and I worked for a little while and Dominica napped.  I took care of Liesl until Dominica woke up after almost three hours.  She has been really exhausted growing this baby.  Far moreso than with Liesl.

It was almost four when we drove down to Mansfield to hang out at the Newpowers’ for the evening.  Liesl is getting more and more comfortable with the family and knows where we are now when we arrive in their neighbourhood.  She immediately leaves us and is happy to go visit with the adults and play with the kids.  She knows to run upstairs to get to the toys and play area.

It is amazing how quickly Liesl is becoming independent.  She will even go outside with just the kids and play on her own.  She doesn’t need to have Dominica or I around at all.  She is growing up so fast.

We had to take off early this evening because Oreo was waiting at home for us and we have to get up early tomorrow so that we can go do the house inspection at nine up in Carrollton.  So we need to get some sleep tonight.

I slept in some today and got up just in time for my first morning conference call.  Friday mornings are so boring.

As soon as my first call was done it turned out that there was another call on my calendar.  Oh fun. So I jumped on that one.  That call ended up going all morning.  It actually went into the afternoon.  Dominica made breakfast and brought me food while I was on the call.  Then later she made lunch and fed me while still on the call.  One of those days, I guess.

All morning was crazy.  I made it into the office, finally, at around two thirty, believe it or not.  People were pretty surprised to see me but it is Friday and there is as much to do after three as there is before so I was still in the office for the bulk of the day.  Probably best that I was home for a while as I am so much more productive when I am home.

The afternoon did turn out to be just as nuts as the morning.  By the end of the day everyone was totally burnt.

Jeff, Dan and I headed over to Rockfish for Friday evening martinis.  Rockfish didn’t order the gin that they were supposed to get for me.  They gave some excuse that made absolutely zero sense and so I guess the real answer is that they don’t special order drinks but they shouldn’t offer to do so.  It isn’t like I asked them to, they volunteered and then when I showed up to order it they got all weird.  Whatever.  Watson was waiting at Rockfish when we arrived.

We had dinner and hung out for a while.  While we were there Dominica and Liesl went to Kroger and did some grocery shopping so it was a good use of the time.  I didn’t miss out on Liesl hang-out time while being out.  Prasanna joined us just before we broke for the evening – we are lightweights and consider nine thirty to be really late.

I grabbed Rockfish’s bread pudding for Dominica and Watson dropped me off at the apartment.  Then it was some 30 Rock and off to bed for us.

We have out house inspection scheduled for Sunday morning at nine.  Tomorrow we have to take the X3 into the shop to get its seventy thousand mile service done.  Just what we need this month, another expense.  We are just bleeding cash at the moment.  It seems bleak but once the house is done we should be saving a little bit there, a hundred or more per month we hope.  And the BMW should be set for quite some time.  And I finally filed our tax returns for 2009 today and we are getting an amazing refund so that will help immensely with everything.

Tomorrow evening we will be down in Mansfield hanging out with the family.

We ended up being up way too late last night.  It was around one thirty when Dominica and I finally turned in.  Liesl was the culprit, she was up using her Tag Junior and reading her Curious George book on colours and having a really good time so we decided that as she was reading that she should be allowed to stay up.  So it was between twelve thirty and one when she finally went to bed.

Sometime around four thirty, I am guessing as I did not look at a clock, Liesl had problems sleeping and came into bed with us.  This happens only once a month, or so, now that she is older.  She likes sleeping on her own in her own room normally.  She does not sleep well when we have to share a room.

At five thirty I was paged out for a server that should not have been alerting but due to several systems at work not working properly the suppression of the alerts failed and I got paged – as did support around the world.  So, since I was already awake, I just showered, walked Oreo and headed on into the office.

It was a brisk morning, maybe fifty five degrees as I walked to the office.  This is when the Texas weather is really awesome.

CNN Money Magazine ran an article recently on the Best Jobs in America.  Not surprising, a very large percentage of the top jobs are in IT including number one!

Dominica and I are still waiting to hear any news about the house on which we put an offer four days ago.  We are really hoping to have this resolved today.  It is quite crappy to just wait and wait to find out about something like this.

Big news in the world today that the Chilean miners who have been trapped underground for over two months have been freed!  This is major world news as this is the longest known human entrapment underground in history in which the people in question survived.  Truly amazing that they were able to save these miners stuck for so long beneath the desert.

Ancestry.com has reported that US President Obama is distantly related to a number of odd people.  Somehow this makes news in the US but this should come as no surprise to anyone.  The relationship level goes back ten generations in most of these cases.  For most Americans, especially those who come from families which have been in the Americans for a significant amount of time and even moreso for those who come from highly affluent backgrounds such as major political figures, there should be no surprise at all that they share relations going back to early settlements.  America only had so many people in it in the sixteen hundreds and those people’s decedents number in massive figures today.  Most Americans can trace themselves back to early settlements – often through many different paths.

In this particular base, Obama’s family history was traced back ten generations.  If you have two parents, four grandparents and eight great grandparents (which you do) then at the tenth generation you have one thousand and twenty four ancestors to choose from.  When you consider the tiny American population that long ago and then take over one thousand predecessors of Obama and one thousand predecessors of someone else there is a decent chance that you will have one of them overlap.  If you then look for hundreds or thousands of famous people in America today, each with over a thousand relatives against whom to compare, you will find seemingly highly coincidental matches for just about anyone – but when you do the math this is completely expected.

For Dominica and I, both of us having been in America for around fourteen generations, the numbers get astronomic with sixteen thousand early ancestors coming from a very tiny pool (first colonial generations) which suggests a very high likelihood of being distantly related to almost anyone with a few generations of American heritage.

You don’t really realize how likely you are to share American heritage until you realize that there is a single couple from the New Netherlands Colony (they came on the very first boat, in fact) who were newlyweds when they left Holland and today are believed to be direct progenitors of roughly one out of every ten Americans!  That means that one of every ten people is related to one out of every ten other people through just one of sixteen thousand optional fourteenth generation ancestors.  Do the math and that means that it is highly unlikely that any two people with any significant American heritage to not be related to each other!

It’s amazing how different the world seems when one applies math to it.

At ten o’clock this morning Dominica called to tell me that we had gotten the house.  They accepted our initial offer too!  We had made a really good offer – we offered the asking price asking them to pay the closing and to hold off on the closing until November 30th.  They were pretty happy with that deal – which in reality they should be as the house has been on the market since July and we are rock solid buyers which you don’t seem to get too often down here.

We are very excited to have plans now.  And Dominica is relieved that she now has a plan for where to hold Liesl’s birthday party.  We had no idea what we were going to do if we did not have the house in time to use it for the party.  Now we have to plan a house warming party too.

At eleven Dominica, Liesl and I went to lunch at Panera and from there went over to sign some documents and turn over some funds for the house.  That went pretty quickly.  Not too much to do.  Between all the stress, excitement and lack of sleep I was barely able to keep myself awake at that point.

After dealing with the paperwork we drove up to Carrollton to take a look at the house again.  We could not get into the house but we did manage to take some pics of the yard so that we could do some planning.  The yard is smaller than we had remembered and it is going to be tough to put the shed in the yard that we had been hoping.  We are considering a partial garage conversion which are pretty popular here to put a storage space and an office into one of the garage bays.

There is a lot of work that is going to need to be done on the outside of the house.  Part of the yard appears to have been treated as a dog run and it is just small rocks and no grass.  It looks awful but is easy to fix.  The middle of the main yard is just plain dirt so we will need to get grass growing there too.

The back yard as a really awful, old jungle gym thing that needs to be removed, and I think that we need to plant another tree in the back and one in the front of the house.  There is an abundance of sunlight and very little shade.

We also discovered that there is a generous amount of decorative flora in the front of the house that will require our attention.  Having a yard, garden and other areas that we need to keep up with is new for us as both of our previous homes were townhomes and had the outdoors managed by the homeowners’ associations.  So now we have to learn about that stuff.

We need to do fence work too.  Already just on our first trip through the house we are racking up the things that need more or less immediate attention.  December is going to be a very busy month as we attempt to fix everything on the outside of the house.  Most of it is pretty minor but there is definitely a lot of stuff.  I’ve never had to do all this type of stuff so it feels a little daunting although it will probably be fun to work in the garden some.

This is the first time that we will own a place where we have the right to make pretty much any changes that we want.  We actually own the whole house, not just the inside of it, so we get to screw all that stuff up now.

We could not get into the house or even into the yard today so I took the iPod and took as many pictures as I could to get a feel for the yard space.  We walked around the block getting a feel for the neighbourhood and down the alley behind the houses to see what our approach was like.  With the iPod I was able to take pictures over the fence in the back which helped us to get an idea of how much space there is there.  Not much is the basic idea but it should be enough.

I think that our focus in the yard will be in shoring up the fencing for safety and cosmetic reasons.  If we don’t take good care of the fencing then Oreo could hurt himself being blind.  There didn’t appear to be able places where he could get out but there were some spots of concern for safety.  Mostly we will be working on making the lawn healthy and getting some garden plants going.  There isn’t enough space to do too much.  Maybe we can get a water feature in at some point.  We both love water features.

After finishing with the house we drove back to Las Colinas and Dominica dropped me at the office.  I wasn’t at work for even an hour before our agent needed to stop back by with additional paperwork for us to sign again.  So I took care of that and, in theory, we are all set.  We did not get a chance to sit down with the bank and get everything straightened out today because our banker had a baby today!

This evening was just a quiet evening at home.  We are very excited and obviously spent a lot of time discussing plans for the new house.  We ordered in Italian and just ate at home.  We watched some 30 Rock and it was time for bed.