rtstarr

Saturday and Sunday.

Our first full weekend in the new place. We sleep in.

Not much happening here. Rena works on getting the bedroom ready, I attempt to make some sense of the downstairs. We are slowly putting things away, breaking up boxes..etc..

Rena spends some quality time painting the hallways, while I work on getting the kitchen ready for cabinet doors. We are really stuck at this point. We can't put anything away because we have no countertop or doors in the kitchen. So all of those boxes are stacked in the living room/dining room.

Sunday: Rena is over at her moms again cooking up a storm for the wedding. I stay home and rearrange the garage yet again. I end up hanging the old cabinets from the kitchen down there just to get them out of the way.

We end up going out exploring both days for food. We find that right around the corner and up towards the mountains there is a neat little area with some cool old restaurants. This area (Alta Dena) has a little place called "The Dutchoven Bakery" that has some awesome breakfast food and the same cookies that Rena used to get at some Indianapolis bakery when she was a kid. She loves the things and won't shut her yap about them. But its kind of cute to see her get so excited about something like that, even if it does cause an increase in overall mouth yappage. Let the Tony Slapping Begin!!


Note: Still no pictures. Rena won't let me take any of the house being in shambles. I have a bunch from the last week (about 3 weeks after the date of this post) that I will post tonight.

Rena's Birthday!

On this, the day of Rena's birth, we decide to take some time off.

We meet at the old place after work. Exchange smooches, and hand off the keys to Vic the Dick. We take a tour of the place and we tell him that he needs to get a mold inspection done because we found water damage from the old upstairs tenants all over the place. He didn't really seem to care. We also showed him the damage to our Wok box and told him about Rena's box of CDs that got water damage and molded. He keeps asking if the CD's are "still usable". And we say "no, they smell like ball sack and are full of mold" but he doesn't get it. He keeps insisting that if we can play them, then they are fine. We tell him we expect him to pay for them. A box holds 30 CD's, and only a few were still in wrappers, so that’s quite a bit of music that got destroyed. We plan to use this as leverage if he gets uppity about the wood floors... "can you still use them" I'll say.

He tells us that our place is dirty (we obviously didn't clean the blinds enough)and that his cleaning crew will have to come in and take care of it. Interesting side note: our neighbor Christy (who hats Vic as much as we do) saw his "cleaning crew" working on our place and ran in there and took snapshots of "them". She called Rena laughing and saying his whole cleaning crew was the same old man (Father of Vic the Dick) that had put the cardboard shit in our bathroom. I can't believe this guy forces his 103 year old father to do all this work. What is it about these California cheapskate barely-human being landlords? I just don't get it.

Anyway, so we head off after that and try to hook up with Justin and Hannah for a little dinner action in Burbank. They are busy, and we need to shop so we head over to Lowes to get some things for the weekend while they try to get home to meet us. It eventually starts getting late so we call it off and decide to have dinner ourselves since they aren't ready yet. We get a table, then get a call saying that they can make it. We eat a nice dinner while hanging out with good friends. The best part of the evening is Hannah and I talking shop (Did I mention that she is a Tech/ Marketing writer as well) while Justin and Rena's eyes glaze over. Usually we are the ones having to deal with listening to music industry work talk.

Sunday - Thursday:
Goals: Make the new place semi-livable

Ok, so its been awhile since I have posted. There are a couple of reasons for this.
1. The first week after we moved in basically we just accomplished 3 things: putting up clothes hanging bars in the master bedroom. Since we ripped out the old junk that was in there, we had nowhere to hang our clothes. We also spent most of the week looking for either Rena's shoes or pants. For some reason she could not find anything. And third, we basically just shuffled boxes around.
2. We had to clean up the old place. We spent most of the week over at the old place fixing up the mess we had created. We still had a number of things still over there to take to the new place, a bunch of holes to patch and a lot of dust bunnies to slaughter.

I spent most of Sunday trying to get the garage in order so that we could park both of our cars in it. There is A LOT of stuff in the garage. We had the movers leave the old fridge in the garage so that we could eventually move it into the small room downstairs which will eventually be Rena's pantry. All of the shelves from the old garage are still at the old place because we didn't have room on the moving truck.
This is a bit of a long story, but I guess I will tell it so you can understand why everything is such a pain in the ass regarding room in the garage:
Ok, here's the situation. My parents are away on a weeks vacation, and they left the keys to the brand new Porsche.......ehh scratch that. Will Smith I am not.

Ok, so in Pasadena California, it is the law that you cannot park on the street from 2am until 6am. This of course means we have to have both cars in the garage at night. This means that any project that we are working on has to be totally put away and moved so that we can park. It is a pain in the nut sack.

So basically, on Sunday I put up the shelving units from the old garage, and loaded them up with junk. I also tried to get as much stuff out of the way so that I could hook up the washer and dryer during the week. Rena is at her moms house baking. We have a wedding that we are both working on the 8th of April. So the next 2 weeks we spend alot of time doing that, and not so much working on the house.

Monday: All of our clothes are still in boxes/suitcases/on the floor. So we finally decide to put up the bars in the master bedroom closets. This is really exciting and fun. It is a temporary fix, since we really want to do something nice in that closet. For some reason, this saps all of my energy after work. This is the first day of the work week in the new house, and it is an epic adventure to find anything in order to go to work.

Tuesday:
We need to hook up the washer and dryer. I got all of the needed materials on Sunday and make an attempt to get everything rolling. I bought some super special washing machine hookup cables (the old ones were fused to the pipes at the old apartment) that had some kind of auto-leak detection thing on there. Which meant they only worked when they got the installers temper above a certain level. Which by my estimates were somewhere between puppy kicking and baby punching mad.
So after punching a baby about 10 times, I got the hot water line to finally work. Then it took Rena and I about an hour to get the damn dryer vent to hook up properly. We get everything hooked up...try it out, and the washing machine drain pipe starts backing up. Apparently we had some sort of clog. Luckily this is covered by the HOA. A guy comes out on Thursday and cleans our pipe with a huge assed snake. So we finally have laundry abilities on Thursday night. And this is when we realize that we have 3 flights of stairs to go down whenever we do laundry.

New project: Move laundry room to third floor.

Wed: At the old place cleaning - We had some wood floor "problems" at the old place. The shitty old floor in that place started to come up in places so I put some wood putty/ filler in there to take care of it. And it looked like total ass. Rena spends time packing the rest of the old kitchen and I work on the garage.

Thurs: At the old place cleaning still. We finish up, I twist my damn ankle tripping over some shit in the garage. We TOTALLY pack all of the garbage cans in the joint and head home.

Saturday:

Goals: Move on up...to the east side.

pics

Well after our exciting Friday night, we wake up extra early to get things done for the move. I went to bed last night feeling like ass, and woke up feeling the same. The big things that we need to do this morning are to move the fragile things (Rena's harp, my computers, sat. dish receivers, etc...) We get up, I pack the rest of the office, Rena hits the bedroom. Last night again it felt like everything was in slowwwww motion. But this morning we are knocking things out quickly. We load up the cars and head to the new place. As I am carrying my 2 huge monitors up to the 3rd floor I start to think about how glad I am that we hired movers. I am too tired to carry all of our stuff up all those stairs. This is the first time that I have ever used movers, and am nervous because of all the horror stories that I have heard about them adding charge after charge and holding all of your stuff hostage with demands for special lunches and cash. So my apprehension starts to build.

We unload our junk and head back to the old place. The movers only take cash, so I hit the bank and Rena hits the Starbucks. We get back to the old place with about an hour and a half before the movers arrive. They are due at 10 and Rena's mom and Paul are coming over at 9:30 to help. We continue taking things apart - we pack up the rest of the office and start to take our bed apart...and I hear a truck outside....I glance out the front door and see it....Delancey Street Movers. They are half an hour early. This is unheard of in the moving world. We are not really ready. If we would have had that last half hour, we would have been fine. The guys show up and I invite them in....they look like a line of recently released convicts. This is probably because they are a line of recently released convicts. The Delancey Street Moving company is part of the Delancey Street Foundation. It is sort of a half-way house for former prisoners, substance abusers, and people who need help. These people agree to live at Delancey for 2 years, learn a trade and stay away from their old habits. The trades include moving, culinary (they have a really nice restaurant up in San Francisco) and construction.

These guys were the most respectful, nice people that we have had the pleasure of meeting throughout our home buying experience. They went through the house, sized everything up and started carrying stuff to the truck. This thing got loaded like a mutha. All of our fragile items and furniture were wrapped in shrink wrap and handled with more care than I would have used on our junky furniture. In fact, there were a couple of items that I was hoping they would break....I'm looking in your direction, indestructible 5 dollar Ikea coffee table that we've been trying to break for 5 years....

It took them about 3 hours to pack up the entire house. I kept offering them lunch, but they kept refusing saying that they brought their own and that they would eat on the way from the old to the new place.

As they are packing up the truck, our energy level really starts to drop. Luckily Paul and Joyce were on hand to help with the finishing up process. As our furniture slowly disappeared, it became more and more apparent that there was more water damage to our place than we had realized. Last summer, the idiot people that lived upstairs (dumb and dumber) somehow managed to get their washing machine drain plugged up resulting in water getting into our kitchen. We came home one night and turned on the kitchen light, it immediately shorted out and I look up and the whole fixture is filled with water. We could have just thrown a goldfish and a bunch of pebbles in there and had a new pet. Anyway, we found that the water had made its way down the wall onto the wood floor in the living room, leaving a nasty looking rotted wood mess. Add this to all the dust bunnies and crud underneath our appliances and its amazing that we didn't die of toxic shock from breathing in that place.

With the truck filling fast, the guys ask me which items we NEED to have taken by truck and what we can take on our own. I show them what we want to take and they start packing it in. One of the last things we asked them to move was this giant succulent plant that we inherited from Rena's aunt and uncle. It has thrived in our backyard and it was heavy when we got it, I’ve tried to move it a couple of times, but have always been put off by both the weight and the amount of spiders in/on/around it. One of these guys bear hugs the pot and carries this heavy assed plant all the way to the truck. When we get to the new place, he does the same thing up the stairs and out onto the patio. The guy was a real die hard.

We eventually arrive at the new place and the guys get to work unloading. Through all of this we are talking to the moving guys about the classes they are taking, the trips that the foundation takes them on, how much they enjoy being in the house and how they like doing a kick ass job on their work assignments. I didn't know much about the foundation before we hired them, but by this point I was extremely happy to be giving our cash to them rather than to some other jackhole place. They get all the furniture in and then start running the boxes upstairs...and I mean RUNNING. These guys were animals. They said they like to get done quickly, not only to save us money but so that they can get back to their house because they are having a BBQ that night. They quickly plowed through the remaining boxes and totaled us up. The cost for the move (we found out later) is about half of what other people have paid for similar services in the area, without having to put up with the used carsman-esque mover crap, and at the same time allowing us to donate our cash to a good cause. We found out at some point during the day that the guys don't get paid at all, they just have to do the job as part of their house duties. So it is in their best interest to get done early.
One thing I forgot to mention, after trying to get our precious precious couch up the stairwell into the living room, they decided it was a no-go. So we had to hoist it up over the balcony and in through the sliding doors. They wrapped the couch in a layer of plastic, a layer of blankets and then a thick layer of shrink wrap. Two guys lifted and pushed from the bottom and 2 movers and I grabbed from the top and pulled it up over the railing and into the living room. It was pretty sweet to see.

Near the end of the unloading, Kyrie (Rena's Sister) and Nader showed up and were ready to help us unpack or to put up cabinet doors. The place was in no shape for either of these things, and we were in no shape to do much of anything. I was exhausted, so I pretty much fell asleep upstairs while Rena and Nader attempted to put the grill together with Kyrie managing the process. Towards the end they find a huge dent in the front of the grill, and I awake to hear Nader yelling at someone at Lowes about it, over the phone.

We decide to deal with it later, they leave, and we go out to eat, come home and go to sleep. Our first night in the new house:. Its a weird feeling. Everything still feels like "that place we are working at but have no real connection to". Hopefully that will change soon.

Taking stock: one last thing. We still have an incomplete kitchen. We found out the countertops aren't coming until April 24th and the island is still in pieces in the dining room (we need to build that so we can give dimensions to Rena's dad for that countertop), and there are various places where we haven't installed ceiling lamps. Luckily, we have a fridge and some paper plates...so we should survive.

One thing I forgot to mention in the last post. It is now Monday day 9 in the new place. We finally get our DSL back today. I'll take some pics of the place tonight so you can see our "living" arrangement. Sorry the posting was infrequent last week, we were swamped with just trying to find underwear. And I had to come to work looking like Grizzly friggin Adams for 3 days while trying to find my razor.

One addition that Rena wanted me to make to the Wednesday/ falling down/ garage scraping post: While wiping off one of the ceiling pipes in the garage, Rena knocked down a set of keys.....which contained a spare set of house keys and a mailbox key...the same Van Damme mailbox key that I just paid an assload of money to have replaced. Damn you Sherman Hemsley...DAMN YOU TO HELL>...