Chirky

Since I’ve been working from home, I’ve become more and more aware how my daily style and interaction is changing. I work in silence most of the day, aside from conference calls. I chat with friends and co-workers online. And mostly, I like it.

Since we are remodeling our house, the room that will be our office is out of commission. So for the past month, I have been working in my bedroom. Sitting on my bed. Laptop on my lap. Wearing my pajamas. I generally don’t get dressed until noon, when I walk into the kitchen for a sandwich and realize: Wow. I am kind of sloppy. Maybe I should put on real clothes. And sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t. Unless I am going out to get the mail, and then I always put on real clothes. What would the neighbors think if I were in my pajamas? Are my neighbors even home? Or peering out their windows when I happen to be outside? These are my burning questions.

So lately I’ve been thinking that maybe I should get up and get dressed every day at 7am, the same way I did when I worked in an office. Just because I’m working from home doesn’t mean my main clothing choices have to be robes, exercise clothes, or pajamas, right?

And to take it a step further, I’m even considering fixing my hair (a style other than a ponytail would do) and – gasp! – wearing makeup. I mean, if I don’t wear makeup, what exactly will I be washing off my face with my fancy new skin care system?

Do you ever work from home? And if so, do you have this same problem? How do you combat a month-long case of the frumps? Not that you look frumpy, darling.

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I’ve lost my underwear.

Now, don’t you worry yourself, because there is good news: I do have the seven pairs I packed in my suitcase when we moved more than two weeks ago. The washing machine and dryer are hooked up (thanks, Dad!), so I’ve been able to wash our clothes over the past couple of weeks. Still, there are dozens of pairs that should be somewhere in our house, and it kills me that I don’t know where they are.

I’ve searched for them, and I know exactly how they are packed: in a white trash bag, which I then stuffed into a black trash bag. In an awkward moment of modesty, I was desperately afraid that, while carrying dresser drawers, the guys helping us move were going to see my unmentionables. So I hurriedly stuffed them into the bags, and threw them onto the moving truck. We had already packed over 100 boxes, and still, we ran out. Trash bags provided the perfect improvisation. Incidentally, we also packed our couch cushions and decorative pillows in this way, and they’re all accounted for. Which brings me to the conclusion that somewhere, somehow, those trash bags may have been thrown away in a cleaning frenzy. And I’m not sure how I feel about that.

On one hand, some of my favorite things to wear were in that drawer. When I got married, I was given a piece of advice by a friend who had married the year before. The advice was on a simple piece of paper, and if you don’t already know, let me share it with you: “Always wear pretty panties.” Even if no one else sees them, they make you feel pretty. It’s true - you should try it!

On the other hand, if everything from that drawer has been relegated to the dump, at least I have the consolation that I get to shop for NEW pairs. If there’s anything I like to shop for, it’s under-things. (And shoes, for that matter.) Tables piled high with silk and cotton are like a tractor beam, pulling me forward, and even if I don’t buy anything, I still have to look. (Just in case, you see.)

Unless I uncover them soon, I think I may be doing more than just looking at those tables. I foresee an entirely new, ahem, "wardrobe" in my future.

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We have a tiny aisle from our front door, through our living room and into our bedroom. We also have access to the kitchen, though there's little food to speak of.

The move (well, the packing) is in progress, and I never knew our tiny apartment would hold more than 100 boxes worth of stuff (which is all well-documented on my Very Important Master List).

AND WE'RE NOT EVEN FINISHED PACKING YET. (Perspective: the official move begins at 8:30 a.m. tomorrow.)

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The Great Scrape of 2008 came and went without much fanfare. Our muscles are still sore, we’re still in desperate need of massages, and yet we’ve spent every night this week at the house peeling wallpaper, removing wood paneling, and dragging old, cat-pee-stained carpet out to the driveway for bulk waste collection.

Whoever the previous owners were, their passive-aggressive cat proved its dismay by relieving itself in every corner of the house. I’m not sure which I think is more of an accomplishment: completely ridding our entire home of the distinct scent of animal urine, or eradicating asbestos popcorn from all the ceilings.

We did have help with the popcorn, so we can’t take all the credit – Eddie came over on Saturday, and my dad came over on Sunday – for removing the ceiling.

The living room and dining room each have 12-foot-ceilings, and I sincerely regret not getting a picture of Roger, my dad and me all standing on ladders of varying heights, tackling the dining room. It was the last room we finished. The pride - and relief: it was finally over! - we felt when climbing down the ladder for the last time was unparalleled.

(Unparalleled, that is, until we start our next project. By then, The Great Popcorn Scrape of 2008 will just be a distant memory. We’ll think, “Awwwww, that wasn’t so bad.” But believe me: in the midst of the scraping? The dust? The hot, un-breathable Tyvek suits? The sore muscles? The having to hold my arms over my head for hours at a time? It was brutal.)

To view larger photos and more commentary, visit the Flickr photo set here: The Great Scrape of 2008

[For those interested in technical matters, it took three people to scrape 2100+ square feet of ceiling in two days (6 hours the first day, seven hours the second day). This is mostly because my dad is a machine, and no, you can’t borrow him. We spent three days simply prepping the house – by far and large, that was the more time-consuming project, and considerably easier on our bodies.

We rented an air scrubber to filter the asbestos dust out of the air. The machine did an excellent job, turning the air in each room four times per hour. Considering we let it run for more than 100 hours straight, I’d say the air is pretty dang clean. After we finished the entire house, we simply rolled up the paper/plastic and disposed of it. It was a simple cleanup, followed by vacuuming with a shop vac fitted with a HEPA filter, and after that we mopped both the floors and the walls.]

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Since closing on our first home this week, my emotions have run a broad spectrum:

PEACEFUL (When signing the paperwork.)

ENTERTAINED (While keeping a tally of how many times we signed our names - 34 each)

RELIEVED (When realizing the search was FINALLY OVER!)

EXCITED (When shopping for supplies at Home Depot.)

ANXIOUS (When our bill was totaled at Home Depot.)

INTRIGUED (When Roger installed our new lock. How do guys inherently know how to do these things?)

DEFEATED (When a ladder collapsed while I was standing on it.)

FRUSTRATED (While trying to figure out how to redesign the kitchen/pantry/laundry room/family room section of the house so it flows better, and then realizing that it's wasn't that my solutions wouldn't work, it was just that I had no solutions to begin with.)

DELIGHTED (Upon finding a 100% wind power electricity plan that boasted a fairly low fixed rate and allows us to earn American Airlines miles.)

GIDDY (When I laid eyes on my key to our new home: It's black, with hot pink hearts and rhinestones. Every time I think about my new key, little butterflies swoon in my chest - I never knew that buying a piece of metal would make me feel like I was falling in love all over again.)

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There is nothing more satisfying than making a big decision – like whether to buy a house – and just knowing that it’s the right decision. It’s something I can gauge with my gut, my trusty woman’s instinct, and the fact that Roger feels it too? That’s called confirmation.

After researching the removal of popcorn ceilings and then meeting with a host of general contractors, asbestos abatement companies, home builders and remodelers, we’ve decided to buy the house.

When I think about it, my stomach flutters and my mind races with a list of changes we want to make so that the house is exactly how we want it to be. I think to myself: I can’t believe we’re this fortunate, that we get to own a home in this particular neighborhood. I would sleep in a cardboard box if it meant I got to live here, I love it so much. And I can’t believe we got it for such a low price – even considering all the updates needed – or that we lucked into locking in an interest rate not long after it dropped, and just minutes before it started rising again.

Yes, there are reasons the purchase price is low: the popcorn ceiling needs to be scraped, the kitchen appliances are the original mustard color from the 1970s. But even with the changes we're planning, we’ll still come out ahead. We’re confident about that.

When meeting with the asbestos abatement companies, several different contractors independently told us we could do the job ourselves. Of course, they’d be happy to do the work and take our $10,000 for scraping 2,000 square feet of ceilings, but if we were on a budget, we could do it ourselves. It was something to consider, they said.

One of the contractors told us, point-blank: “If you were my brother, I’d tell you: This is a great house - buy it! I don't want to minimize the seriousness of removing the popcorn asbestos carefully, and you certainly can hire us to do the job, but the issue of removing the popcorn shouldn't be a deal breaker for you." He explained exactly how to prep the house, how to remove the ceiling, how to protect ourselves from the dust and how to get the same results his company would get for us. Then he told us he'd rent his air scrubber to us for only $200/week. He said, "If you were my brother, I’d even offer to come help…but, you know. You’re not my brother.”

[Note: An air scrubber is a massive fan that churns through the air and literally “scrubs” it clean. The machine is fitted with a triple-HEPA filter (the same HEPA filter masks that we’ll be wearing), which catches microscopic dust particles with 99% accuracy. The machine we are borrowing is capable of cleaning 2,000 square feet of air in one hour, so we figure if we leave it on for seven days straight, it’ll do the job. But we’re not stopping there! After we’re entirely finished with the project, we’re hiring an air quality hygienist to come take samples of the air in and around our home, just as an extra precaution. Obviously, we’re serious about clean air. And pretty ceilings.]

We plan on following the abatement contractor’s instructions explicitly, and I will create a how-to post when we remove the popcorn so that you, too, can benefit from his expertise.

All that is to say that we’re buying the house, and I couldn’t be more thrilled! (Well that, and I’m also already planning our massages. I figure we'll need them once we finish scraping the ceilings until they’re as smooth as a Southern drawl. We are in Texas, after all.)

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Number of months we've been looking for a home: 5

Number of houses we've seen online: 650+

Number of houses we've seen in person: 300+

Number of houses we've bid on: 4

Number of houses we've been under contract on: 2

Number of houses we currently have under contract: 1

Number of inspections we've paid for: 3

Total we've paid for those inspections: $1100

The last time this house was remodeled: 1978

The number of square feet that have popcorn ceilings: 2050

The number of popcorned square feet that we want to scrape: 2050

Typical asbestos findings in popcorn ceilings: 0-3%

Asbestos findings in the house we currently have under contract: 15%

Number of times I've cried over this: 0

Number of times I've thought about crying over this: 8 11 17

Since the house we have under contract has seen nary a hammer since 1978 (hey, to be honest, THAT is why it's in our price range), we plan to do a significant amount of remodeling. Remodeling involves moving walls and installing lighting fixtures and scraping ceilings and well, disturbing the popcorn ceiling - the asbestos popcorn ceiling - in all possible manners of disturbance. (To be fair, this is not the ULTRA dangerous type of asbestos. It's just the MOSTLY dangerous type. But still! Dangerous! Asbestos! Dangerous!)

In case you don't know what asbestos is, let me say this: it is a fibrous product that, once disturbed, becomes dusty (and, therefore, airborne). When someone inhales that dust, it can scar that person's lungs. Kind of like smoking. Except worse. (And if one paired inhaling asbestos with smoking cigarettes? Hello, cancer.)

Asbestos scars lungs deep down, whereas smoking scars the middle-lower section. Down the lung, I mean. Whatever. My point is that we have two options: completely remove the asbestos or NEVER disturb the asbestos and live in a 1970s-styled house.

Option Two is not actually an option, because our list of remodeling plans is quite lengthy, and frankly, 70s decor just scares me. Living in this house and not remodeling is not an option. In case I haven't been clear on that.

Removing the asbestos requires contracting an asbestos abatement company to come remove both the popcorn and the drywall (which likely contains asbestos mudding in the joints). Then we would need to hire another contractor to monitor the air quality and to inspect the work done by the abatement company, to ensure the asbestos is entirely eradicated.

In case you don't know what this looks like, let me paint the picture for you: wrapping the entire house in the industrial equivalent of saran wrap (I'm guessing) so that no asbestos fibers escape the house. And then: HAZMAT suits. I'm totally not even kidding. After everything is removed, they clean the house - walls, floors, everything - so that it's as if the asbestos never existed.

After EVERYTHING we've been through with buying a home, this was the poisonous icing on the cake. So now Roger and I are trying to decide: do we negotiate to rip out the asbestos, live in a home reminiscent of That 70s Show, or walk away from yet another house?

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For the past several months, Roger and I have been house hunting. Is hunting the right word? Because that just makes it seem like we’re looking for any old thing to shoot at and win, when really, it’s more like we’re rifling through every piece of real estate inventory within very our small parameters and coming up empty-handed. We’ve visited more than three hundred homes in person. We’ve looked at more than 500 online. And I know all of this because our Realtor’s handy online system keeps track of all of it for us. Every last bit, every rejected home. We haven’t rejected all of the homes, though. Some of them have rejected us.

The first house reminded us of a Frank Lloyd Wright home, what with its interesting footprint and architectural-grade roof and perfect foundation. But the sellers refused to sell to us! We came up on our price by $13,000 – and they came down $900. We were confused, because aren’t we in a recession? Isn’t there supposed to be some sort of negotiation? Are we such home-buying newbies that we don’t actually know how it works?

And so we moved on, lamenting the roof that could have been ours.

It’s funny, when you’re house hunting you start to have conversations that go like this: “I really love the color of this brick” and “Do you think that hardwood is uneven?” and “The texture of this tile in interesting.” And we’re so enthralled with these conversations about roof lines and loft spaces that we think maybe EVERYONE wants to know about them. I find myself excitedly discussing triple pane windows with my friends and their eyes glaze over. They start getting all shifty and finding excuses out of the conversation, and I can’t really blame them.

We put a bid in on a second house, a house with great bones, but that needed updating. It was a block from a park with biking and walking trails, and every time we visited it (three times) there were children playing in yards. The neighborhood felt very family-oriented, and though the house was the smallest on the block, the neighborhood sold it. After negotiations that increased our bid OVER market value, the sellers wanted us to pay some of their closing costs, too. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Disappointing, considering the potential in that house for having our very own media room, and it was so close to a park. Mentally, I had already started planning parties with the neighbors. We walked away.

The third house we bid on – or, almost bid on, since we shredded the bid before we had a chance to submit it – had a very obvious two-inch declining grade in the living room, plus a foundation warranty that was no longer in effect. But it was in our price range! That was something, right?

We moved farther out of the city, reasoning that a newer house in our price range would be worth the extra drive. Besides, maybe we could carpool, in the HOV lane, and that way there wouldn’t be as much time lost. And more time together! Maybe. We got into (and subsequently won) a bidding war for the foreclosed property. We paid the home inspector. He inspected. Practically everything that COULD be wrong with the house WAS wrong with the house: a leaky roof, faulty foundation, bad plumbing. Neither A/C unit worked (which, considering the Texas heat, was a deal-breaker) and the heater didn’t work. There wasn’t a functioning bathroom in the house. More renovations would be required before we could move in than the house was worth. We terminated our contract, and with it our visions of lofty ceilings and five bedrooms. All that space! Gone.

So this last weekend, we went out once more. We found an even larger foreclosed home. In better condition. And while it didn’t have five bedrooms, it had the kitchen of my dreams. The pantry of my dreams. It was the perfect home for entertaining, the perfect home for raising kids – even with a playroom! – and had a nice neighborhood. (Well, I mean a seemingly nice neighborhood. I was only there for half an hour, after all.) We arranged to put in a bid. Our Realtor called back. The house was no longer on the market. The bank simply hadn’t changed the house’s status yet. Failed. Again.

Sunday night, we were disheartened. We’ve been looking for five long months. We’re exhausted. We just want to buy something and be done with it. Our standards have been lowered, and lowered, and lowered. At first we had a list three columns long of everything we wanted in a home. Now all we want is a solid foundation and roof that hopefully won’t leak.

And then we got a call. The second house we bid on is still on the market. The sellers are frustrated with the on-going, nit-picking negotiations they’ve been through with another buyer. They want to know if we’re still interested.

We are.

Now we have another signed contract, and the home inspector is scheduled for this Friday morning. I’m anxious, and hopeful, and nervous.

And acutely aware that our apartment lease has already expired.

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