On August 8, we closed on our apartment. On September 1, we finally got into it and began to work--er, I mean to labor--on it. The timing of all of this was very interesting, actually. A short history follows, but, if you wish, you may skip straight ahead to the Labor Schedule.

The Saga Begins

We chose the apartment quickly enough (read about that stage of the process here), and went to Purchase & Sale fairly quickly as well. Then everything stalled: mortgage documents, owner-occupant ratios, lock-in periods, and flying faxes became the stuff of our daily lives. We went with E*Trade for the loan, finally, and overall we do recommend them. Hey, with a 5.38 interest rate, we'd recommend anyone! Seriously, E*Trade seems like they're no more hassle than any other company, and their part of the closing went smoothly.

The day of our intended closing, however, it was Robert and the seller who created more roadblocks for us: their squabbling and up-and-down negotiating over a rebate due to a small, lately detected (now fixed), leak in the roof caused us not to close until 5:00 in the afternoon. I almost went back to the bank to redeposit our obscenely huge cashier's check three times, but things ultimately went off without a hitch. Robert proved himself so obstinate--and keep in mind I say this completely complimentarily--that the two realtors, terrified the deal wouldn't happen and after six months they'd be left with nothing, each kicked in $75 at the last minute. Robert also managed to ask so many bizarre hypothetical questions (along the lines of, "What if it turns out we cheated on our taxes and misrepresented our income? Can our loan be taken away from us?") that our horror-stricken attorney--hastily reassured, by myself and our realtor, that Robert was just asking hypothetically, nearly lost his reputation for being the speediest at closings in his firm.

I personally enjoyed our closing immensely. I compiled a list of my Favorite Legal Documents as a result; the list includes such highlights as our Homesteaders' Application Form (yes, folks, we have finally arrived in the same league as Laura and Almanzo), the Hold Harmless Form (nice name, no?), and the AKA Form, on which I got to sign my name in many, many variations (with and without middle name, with and without middle initial, with first initial only, with first and middle initials, and then all of the above with my maiden name).

The closing over, we then proceeded to become landlords for 23 days to three college students, nearly all of whom very quickly moved out, and only one of whom actually used the apartment--in this case, as a storeroom for a bed and a few boxes of clothes--through August 31. When we picked up her final set of keys, on the afternoon of the 31st, the fun began in earnest.

Labor and Pleasure

Below is a calendar for the months of September and October. Each day in the past with an interesting story to tell has a page of its own with details of what we accomplished that day. Each day in the future has, on the calendar itself, a tentative plan for what we hope to accomplish then. Obviously, clearly, it-goes-without-saying-ly, these plans are subject to wild changes. But, since we have to be out of our old apartment by October 31st, there's a final boundary after all. Help from friends particularly skilled, let's say, in painting or plumbing or anything else or nothing at all is cheerfully welcome. We promise a part of our hall wall for the signatures, artwork, and inspired thoughts of all who help in the process. Heck, it's our own place--why shouldn't we write on the walls if we want to? We want our friends to share in the pleasure too, of course.

 

September
Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
1--Labor Day	2--Carpet Saga	3--First day of BU classes (no work on apartment done)	4--Appointments, Appointments: HVAC guys give estimates, and locksmiths change locks	5--Help Arrives (Christina's parents from NY, with cleaning power, power tools, and handyman advice)	6--Yay, Filth! (a not-so-gratuitous Tick reference and a day of thorough cleaning and ripping out of kitchens)	7--Hard Work with Mom and Dad
8--Old washer and dryer get sold; trash goes out; floors get ordered	9--Christina primes and paints; Appliance Arrivals: new range, new dishwasher, new trash compactor, and new washer and dryer from Yale Electric	10--Priming and painting	11--Jef helps rip up carpet strips, oil doors, supervise plumbing, and spackle	12--More Weekend Work	13--DIY Electrical and Plumbing 101	14--Painting, priming, getting rid of trash, and the beginning of cabinets
15--More kitchen cabinets	16--More kitchen cabinets	17	18	19--Robert leaves for England on a business trip	20--Painting and priming, and small catch-up jobs	21--ditto yesterday
22--Robert away (no work on apartment done)	23--Robert away	24--Robert away	25--Robert away	26	27--Fulfillment and Frustration	28--FF, continued
29	30--Pearl and I paint and stain
October
		1	2--Robert and I move over some stuff for cabinets and closets	3--Unpack closets and put out trash	4--Plumbing and painting and everything else	5--PP and EE, continued
6--More moving over for cabinets/closets; put out trash	7	8--More cabinets/closets moving	9--Pearl, Jef, and I paint, fix stuff, and wait for floors (which don't arrive)	10--Floors actually arrive!	11--First pass at floors; other work continues	12--Floor mission aborted; other work continues
13--Columbus Day: Floors, finally!	14	15	16--Move over some kitchen stuff and boxes	17--Painting furniture and cleaning things up	18--Final painting, some moving, some moulding work	19--Cleaning and moving boxes, setting up, unpacking the kitchen
20--Throw out trash, move in kitchen	21--Finish packing	22--Finish packing up entire house	23--Gentle Giant arrives to the rescue	24--Mom and Dad's last (regular) weekend here: settling in and final touch-ups!	25--Settling in and sorting out	26--Arranging furniture and boxes
27	28--Fun stuff: Party prep!	29	30--Party prep!	31--Halloween Housewarming Party (Evite already issued)		November and beyond--Carpentry work (bannisters, shelves, molding)

UPDATE: Looking back after three years. . .

Looking back on it now, I don't know how we did this all. I was teaching full-time, in my first semester at a new job, trying to figure out a new program and new texts and new student demographics, and I was on the phone with editors about Marnie's and my book at the same time. In an average week in September and October, 2003, I figure that I spent 40 hours working on the apartment, in addition to work, the book, life, and sleep. Clearly we couldn't have done this without Mom and Dad and Jef and Pearl.

So now, as of November, 2006, we're still in our apartment, quite happily. Since our big two-month blitz of renovations, in no particular order, we've:

• gotten a new side-by-side freezer/fridge for the kitchen and hooked up water and ice to it
• replumbed the kitchen sink a few times (not quite just for fun)
• planted lots of tomatoes, eggplants, and herbs in planters on our roofdeck each summer and generally fixed up the deck to be a great summer hang-out
• installed custom slatted dutch doors on a large set of open shelves in the bedroom, in order to enclose some less-than-beautiful storage and essentially make another closet, dust-free
• had both of our fireplaces inspected, both chimneys cleaned, and installed a custom-fit glass fireplace door on the bedroom fireplace, to make both fireplaces working and useable (we only burn javalogs--"logs" made out of recycled coffee grinds, great for the environment)
• had several small leaks to the roof repaired
• hassled with the condo management over a number of issues, most notably a new front door and intercom system for the entire building (read about that saga here; I don't suggest ever hiring this company, though we're unfortunately still using them to manage the building, mostly because of the other trustees' corruption and inertia, probably in equal parts)
• made and installed new doors for the under-stairs storage area, which had never had well-fitting doors to start with
• re-wired all of the phone lines in the apartment to simplify things and correct a short in the phone wire
• permanently installed two nice, energy-efficient window air conditioners (taking great trouble to make them water-tight and pretty air-tight, so we don't have to remove them in the winter and find a place to store them)
• gotten three new windows, triple-hung, very energy-efficient, two for the living room and one for the small bedroom, to replace old double-hung windows that a) had broken seals and b) were installed in what was by now rotten, water-hogging wood that caused leaks in every rainstorm
• had a master carpenter design and build a set of floor-to-ceiling bookcases in the bedroom and a custom window seat with storage to take up the triangular area at the head of our bed (see pictures of that job, and our roofdeck, here)
• gotten a new couch--our first non-futon couch!--for the living room
• installed floor-to-ceiling wardrobes (Pax) from Ikea in our bedroom to streamline storage and increase closet space
• gotten a nice large desk built for two people for our bedroom, which matches the wardrobes and streamlines the rest of the furniture
• installed a nine-foot-wide automatic, retractable screen in the living room for our TV, and a pretty valance to hide the unit when it's retracted, along with speakers hanging from the ceiling
• gotten a new projector (an upgrade) to project TV and movies onto our screen (in the process of getting a new projector, we had to enlarge the hole we'd cut in the wall to accommodate the old one; this was a lengthy endeavor, and in retrospect, it would have been easier to cut the hole larger to start with)
• gotten a new skylight installed to our roofdeck, with a harder-to-work lock but a much easier-to-exit-from opening
• finally hung glow-in-the-dark stars on our bedroom ceiling (this was a childhood dream of mine), in the shape of actual constellations

We're currently in the process of:

• ripping out an old, unused (but leaky!) hot water heater and an old, unused (but very, very heavy) cast-iron steam-heat radiator that were built under the living room built-in breakfront (again, this wasn't just for fun--the hot water heater burst, and it was out of necessity, just a few weeks ago, that we're now in the process of having a carpenter rebuild the bookcases and breakfront unit, tripling our storage space in that area now that the radiator and water heater are gone, and possibly adding an extra under-counter Sub-Zero freezer unit)
• dealing with a fairly major roof leak that seems to be under the roof deck, which greatly complicates matters finding and fixing it

Future projects planned, as time and funds permit, include:

• replacing some broken tiles in the kitchen floor, or installing a new floor on top of it
• installing a decorative tile edge around the hearth in the living room and along the edge of the chimney
• upgrading the built-in microwave to a microwave/convection-oven combo
• finally putting fish stencils or clouds or another decorative painted thing on the hall ceiling
• touching up various paint and scratches and light-rims that were either overlooked to begin with or have deteriorated in three years
• cleaning and resealing the bricks under the windows that used to leak, but now don't, but caused a lot of damage to the bricks in their leaky state
• refinishing a telephone table (with built-in chair!) I inherited from Aunt Mary and Aunt Grace

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Created: 9/3/03. Last Modified: 11/16/06.