there still isn’t a lot of exciting renovation progress to report. the contractor promises he’ll have his crews running at full speed starting next week. it’s understandable, given the delays we encountered in getting utilities turned on, that his crews were busy with other things and couldn’t just drop everything to start the first day that we had heat. but it’s also frustrating that we’ve now been paying to heat a drafty, poorly-sealed house up to 60 degrees around the clock for a 10 days now and still hardly any work has been done.
some demo work did start this week. as you can see, the basement “half bath” has become a quarter bath:
they also started some of the system inspections, and “discovered” that all the copper water pipes in the basement are missing. our contractor called us over to the house on Thursday to deliver the news. you’re missing some copper, he told us. yes, yes we knew that. but what we didn’t know was that the 203k inspector left it out of the repair list so the contractor didn’t include in his bid. which means we have to pony up separately for that. there’s a contingency fund for exactly these sorts of things, but we’d hoped to use it on sexier projects than plumbing.
the interesting part of this process is that i have no frame of reference for what things cost. i’ve been working in theatre long enough to know that if a director says he wants to fly an actor, that’s a minimum cost of $10k, but if a director asks if that white cotton dress can be purple by tomorrow night, that’s just a box of rit dye and an afternoon of labor. even before pricing out a project, i have SOME reference point for knowing how many 0s we are talking about. but not with house renovations. things are surprisingly expensive at times, of course, and other times surprisingly cheap. Ben asked our contractor how much it would cost to add a window in the south-facing living room wall, and it was less than $2000. But 20 feet of 1″ copper pipe in the basement? $3300. it costs less to CUT A HOLE IN A BRICK WALL than it does to attach a few pipes to the basement ceiling. but the water main isn’t really an optional repair, so we signed the change order and the next afternoon this went up in the basement:
in the mean time we’re trying to get through the stuff that we can do ourselves. i bought a washer, dryer and fridge today. our unit came with a fancy new fridge (an icemaker? i’ve never had one of those!) but we needed one for the rental unit. we deliberated but in the end decided than spending an extra $200 to get a stainless steel finish on the fridge was silly, but worth it. stainless steel finishes on kitchen appliances are so in vogue right now that i think it will make the apartment rent better than a big blocky white one. and, considering that i am the world’s worst bargainer, i’m proud to say that i at least asked for a discount and managed to talk the salesman down by about $100 from the sticker price. i’m sure someone else could have done better, but it was pretty obvious i wasn’t going to leave without buying some appliances today. there’s only so much bargaining power in that situation, and i didn’t have ben along with me to play good cop/bad cop.