...Find a Home
Metalcore. From the Ire album, released in 2015. More info from Wikipedia
Welcome to the first post of the new "journal!" Given that it's been nearly a month since my last post, let's give an update of what's been going on with the new look, as well as how things have been going with my (new) homeownership venture.
The first and most obvious change is that the platform in which these <insert description of blog here> posts are being made possible is no longer through LiveJournal. Sometime earlier this year, I made the decision to retire my LJ in favor of a custom-built platform that I could call "uniquely mine;" the result is the website you are currently viewing. It wasn't until about three-ish weeks ago that I put forth the effort to actually start moving down the path of creating this platform (I guess I should start calling it a blog, since that's what it is) and working on the code to make it happen.
The domain (ksot.net) is a domain I purchased to help maintain a long-running project on GameFAQs called KSOT - which stands for Kirby Still On Top - during my stint as a moderator for their message boards. Since I already have the domain, I found a way to get "free" web hosting for single-page applications (which is essentially what this blog is), provided the traffic stays within the free threshold. Combined with using a documentation templating engine (MkDocs - specifically, Material for MkDocs) to do all of the heavy lifting, I had the perfect resource to build what I wanted and brand it the way I saw fit, and thus, this blog was "born." All that is left is transferring the old posts from LiveJournal to my own platform, and I can fully retire that old thing. Of course, said work is still ongoing; given the fact that I counted about 175 entries in my LJ, it'll take a few days to get those posts "converted" to be compatible with this platform.
Whatever, let's move on to the more exciting shit.
My last entry documented me becoming a homeowner once again, having found a house that checked off all the boxes that I had (I'm not going to recapitulate these requirements, because they're in earlier posts - go read them). I'm coming up on my first full month of ownership of this property, and all is going generally well, except for one critical aspect: I'm not living in the fucking house yet. My reasons for not living in the house that I'm paying for are straightforward (at least straightforward to me because I know what the fuck's going on); there are repairs that are being made to rectify issues identified in the home inspection, and these repairs are taking a bit longer than anticipated to complete. What are these repairs? Well, I'm glad you asked (you did, don't deny it)!
The biggest concern with my newly acquired home is the "minor" structural issues associated with the sliding glass door that leads out to the back patio. The home inspection identified some water damage to the foundation, where water was penetrating under the door frame and damaging the wood foundation underneath. However, the inspection didn't reveal the severity of said damage. Two days after purchasing the property, my brother-in-law (Donna's husband, Chris, who has been with my sister since I was a pimple-faced, prepubescent teenager) and I went over to the house so he could look at it, and revealed just how extensive the damage was. We ended up ripping up some of the carpet, cutting out about 35-ish square feet of subflooring, about 18 inches of exterior foundation, and six inches from each of two floor joists to remove water-damaged wood and replaced it with fresh lumber.
Another concern that was identified (again, more severe than the home inspection revealed) was the state of the plumbing in the house. The home had the most grotesque mix of copper and CPVC plumbing installed by using compression and repair fittings (said repair fittings are expensive, about $8 per fitting) to fix the issues that came up during the previous owner’s tenancy; these fittings are akin to slapping a Band-Aid on an amputation. What’s worse is that there were so many of these repair/compression fittings – it would have been cheaper to redo the entire plumbing to the house than the amount spent on said fittings. The sad reality of that statement is that there is zero exaggeration in it; we’ve removed about 10-12 of those fittings and replaced it with proper plumbing (the sticks of pipe, the couplers, even the primer and cement) for less cost than what those fittings cost at retail. It’s absolutely absurd.
To cap it all off, I made the executive decision (it’s my fuckin’ house, after all) to relocate the washer and dryer to an area that made a bit more sense. In their initial state, the washer and dryer had their electrical and plumbing connections in the kitchen. This isn’t an entirely farfetched idea, given that my previous home (the house that Kayla and I bought in 2015) had a similar setup. Side note: maybe this was a popular thing to do in decades past, but I can’t fucking stand it.
While this may not be a significant problem for houses with ample space to accommodate, my house is very limited in available interior square footage. To make matters worse, the floorplan itself is laid out in a very odd configuration and wastes valuable real estate for meaningless purposes. I’m not going to elaborate much on this – mainly because it’s starting to get late and I don’t feel like doing so – so you’ll just have to take my word for it.
As such, to capitalize on some wasted interior square footage (and to get the laundry out of the kitchen), I decided that I wanted to relocate these utilities to some “wasted” space in the floorplan. The caveat? The space that these utilities were being relocated to is not big enough to accommodate a washer and dryer side by side. The answer to this was getting a stackable system (I opted for an LG WashTower, which, from my research, has shown that it’s a capable and respectable unit for laundry), but pursuing this route opened up an entirely new problem: the new location for laundry has no plumbing or electrical connections. This resulted in the need to create new access points for these essential utilities so that my overall goals of reclaiming wasted space could be accomplished. At this point, I feel I’m starting to ramble and digress, so let’s get back on track.
Overall, I’ve run into some setbacks that have postponed the start of my “permanent” occupancy in my new home. When I first bought the house, my goals were to be living in the house full-time by the end of November. Here we are in the first week of December, and I’m not yet established in my house. Despite this, I have plans to remedy this situation!
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been able to make significant progress on the required renovations to the home. The compromised flooring has been replaced with new lumber and is rock solid. The issues with the sliding glass door that caused the aforementioned water damage has been repaired. The leaks associated with the plethora of plumbing incompetence has been (mostly) repaired – there’s still some copper left that needs to be replaced, but none of the plumbing in the house (new or otherwise) is currently leaking. I also have the essential furniture needed to live in the house full time; namely the appliances and bedroom furniture. I’m still working on the laundry and other electrical concerns that were identified (not going to elaborate at this point), but those are things that can be done after I move in.
So, when is the target move-in date? This weekend – Sunday afternoon, specifically. I’m at the point where I feel comfortable in leaving the box I’ve been living in for the past year (holy shit) and starting over. The benefits of being in my own place that is much larger than my current arrangements, being half the distance to my office, and being five minutes away from my kids far outweighs the drawbacks of not having everything 100 percent up to kosher before moving in. The only true concern with moving in right this second is the fact that I don’t have internet established. This issue is a non-factor, however, as I have an installation appointment scheduled with the local internet service provider to have fiber internet installed on the 11th. This coincides perfectly with my plans to have this upcoming Sunday be my first night in the house, as I’ll only need to spend a couple hours using my phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot to work before having 250 Mb up/down speeds available to me, and since I’ll already be at the house when the internet installation is complete, I’ll be able to work from home for the remainder of the day.
It's getting late, and yet I still feel like I have more energy to burn. Nonetheless, I think this is a good idea to wind this “first” post down and get to sleep, especially since I need to get up early tomorrow morning and head into the office, which is 45 minutes away.
More updates to come. (If I had a dollar for every time I said this in a post, I probably wouldn’t be in as bad financial shape as I currently am.)