The Adventures of
David
Elizabeth
and Leif

A very sad fact of life. My backpack has been used more for this …

… than for this …

That really hurts.

In the kitchen, our builder is putting up a new wall about 2 inches in from the original one. This is because the existing wall is cinderblock and has a lot of pluming in it. It would be really hard to dig out the existing wall to reroute the pluming, so Yves will just do it inside the new wall. This also makes it a lot more convenient for the electrician. Here’s the framing with the wiring done from a few days ago.

Today they have most of the kitchen drywall up.

Our new circuit breaker panel is roughed-in.

As are the many places where the walls were opened up to run conduit.

A few days ago, Yves asked me to come into the bathroom. He showed me where they had pulled up some of the old floor to do plumbing work. The joists were non-existent and/or rotten. He told me to stand by the tub. Then he went and stood by the door and the whole floor rocked. It was an old slab of cement poured in with tile on top. Here are the parts Yves broke up to remove.

He then put down new floor joists and a new floor of plywood and wet-board.

(No, we’re not going to keep the toilet in the bath tub.)

Today, I went back and Yves was finishing the tiling.

No grout yet…

Finally, a coat of primer has been added to the baby’s room.

Anybody want a vintage air conditioner?

We started renovation the day after we closed. My electrician, who I had haggled about 30% of his original estimate, required 50% payment to start the job. My general contractor, however, wouldn’t take any money at the start. He said he’d ask me for money after he completed enough of the work to make me happy. So he started on the bathroom.

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The next day I came by in the afternoon. The baby-room wallpaper had been torn down revealing a beautiful, crazy patchwork of plaster and lead-based paint. I told Yves, our contractor to leaving it there, since growing up in the ’70s with lead-based paint didn’t have no harm to me. I b’lieve I’ve seen some work in the museum of modren art that looked like these walls, so if our child gets his mother’s artistic jeans [sic], it’ll do him a bit o’ good too!

Meanwhile, in the bathroom, the walls are gone. The sink and shower were plumbed to the building water supplies through shutoff valves, so they could be removed from the pipes. The toilet, however, was plumbed directly to the building’s cold water supply. To disconnect it, Yves had to knock on all the apartments in the building and let the occupants know he’d be turning off the water for 15 minutes. This he did and his plumber quickly cut the pipe to the toilet.

Meanwhile, the electrician was improving our circa 1921 electrical system.

Yves was also installing structure for new ceilings.

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Work ceased on Saturnday morning because one of the workers locked a different lock on the door than usual. Nobody had the key to it. I was in California on a trip when Yves called me on Saturday to let me know they couldn’t get in and would be starting on Monday at 7:30. I told him I’d be there to let him into the apartment on Monday.

After that conversation I got in a jet and flew back from Burbank, CA to New York. While on that flight, my digestive system started to send me signals that all was not well. As soon I landed the plane (a super-smooth landing, by the way) and the door was opened, I ran. I spent the entire night in … let’s just say in extreme distress. It was almost as bad as the serious bug I had in Budapest last year.

So, after taking care of her sick husband all weekend, my rather pregnant wife had to wake up early to open the apartment for our contractors so they could continue making a nest for us. Waking up early is a major sacrafice for someone who (a) needs a lot of sleep and (b) usually has a husband that can take care of all early duties in our familial life.

So, after waking up about 3 hours earlier than she usually does, Elizabeth drove down to the apartment and discovered that none of the keys we possess for the apartment could open the aforementioned lock. She called me. I called a locksmith who told me it would be $65 to come out and fix our lock.

About 45 minutes later, I got a call from Elizabeth who told me the locksmith couldn’t pick the lock and he was going to remove it for $280 or so. I could tell that E was starting to get a little fragile and I could also see the $$ in the locksmith’s eyes, so I asked to talk to him. I asked him what he was going to do and he said he was going to drill out the cylinder of the lock. I then asked him how much it would cost and he told me it would be $280. I said that they told me it would be $65 when I called his company. He said that the $280 for drilling out the lock was in addition to the $65 call-out fee. I then calmly expressed my extreme displeasure at the situation. I tried to negotiate when mid-sentance he handed the phone to Elizabeth and I heard the sound of his drill. I think we both had the same thought at the same time … my contractor is there and I could just ask him to drill out the lock. Needless to say, he was closer to the lock than I was and proceeded to drill it out.

The next time my phone rang, Elizabeth was almost in tears. She said, “He wants to replace the lock for $160.” I said, “Tell him no. We have a deadbolt that works fine and I’m happy to leave a small hole in the door till I can go to Home Depot and get a new lock.” She hung up.

Can I just tell you that my wife is truely amazing? When she told the locksmith “No,” he said, “Well, if you won’t tell my boss, I’ll replace your lock for just $65.” My awesome wife said, “No, it’s too much, my husband will do it,” so the locksmith (who I hope still feels ashamed that he ripped off pregnant wife so badly) put it in for free. If he’d done that and given Elizabeth a couple $100 bills, it would have been closer to fair for the amount of work he did.

I didn’t feel like it would be wise to venture too far from my home that day, so I didn’t make it down to the apartment to take any pictures.

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For my birthday, I got to see an antique sink ripped out of the wall…

They also installed “the box” (ie the circuit breaker panel).

In the living room we now had appliances…

… and a smiling guy carrying drywall up 4 stories from the street. He must have carried at least 20 sheets of it.

In the bedroom we were closer to having a ceiling…

…and electricity. It’s a lot of work to run electrical conduit through a plaster-and-wood wall.

In the baby room, we had a new skim-coat of plaster…

… with another coat to go. We also were getting ceilings …

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Today, the ceilings were in in all the rooms except the kitchen.

There was real electrical power in the box …

… and a lot of places in the house that looked like this …

In the dining room, the cracks in the walls were still there. Yves will fix the cracks, but he says that in a plaster wall in an old building, the cracks will reappear. We can’t afford to put drywall in everywhere, so we’ll just live with the cracks.

The holes from running electrical conduit are beginning to be patched…

We originally considered leaving the brick exposed in the bathroom, but some of it was in pretty bad shape.

The most exciting thing to see was non-demolition. Yves had tiled the shower!

Elizabeth was really excited to see the photos until she saw this one. Then she said that the decorative strip is upside down! The dark part should be down!

It’s fun to see 1921 and 2006 meet. I can’t wait until we can start waking up to it!

Today, at 3 pm in Times Square, we finally closed on our new apartment. It was a lot different than closing on a place in Atlanta. First of all, there were a lot of people there:

• In the buyer’s corner: Elizabeth, me and our lawyer.
• In the seller’s corner: An older gentleman (whose photo ID was from the People’s Republic of China) who spoke no english, his son Francis, and their attorney. Their real estate agent didn’t show.
• In the bank’s corner: An attorney
• In the building’s corner: The president and treasurer of the coop board, an attorney, and the coop manager

The day before, my lawyer contacted me with the figures. We put down 10% and had a 95% mortgage, so we were expecting to get some cash back. Everything went just about as I expected it … except that I had to plunk down $850 for the coop’s attorney. In this coop, the buyers pay for the attorney. It’s different in every building. I just wish I’d known about it in advance.

Did I say that everything went as I expected? Oh yes, just like I expected … it was a 3-ring circus.

People were coming in and out of the conference room, the bank’s attorney having to re-cut checks and have a courier run them over from 3rd avenue, the sellers having to sign an affadavit about their lost stock certificate, the seller’s real estate agent calling and saying he couldn’t make it, could they pick up his check for them, the coop attorney and manager passing around leases to sign, to void, stock certificiates, etc. At the very end, the bank’s attorney made a hand-written HUD-1 form and we all agreed to it. I think that’s commonplace here since there are so many players involved.

When the business was all through, the older Chinese gentleman stood up, handed me the keys and tried to say, "Congratulations," in english. It was sweet.

Tomorrow at 9:00 am, I’m meeting our contractors at the place with checks and contracts and they’ll start work! IKEA delivers the cabinets tomorrow, Home Depot delivers the appliances on Thursday. Lord willing, we’ll be able to move in in 4 weeks!

For those who want a rough tour of the place, look here. There are lots of big photos so it’ll take a long time to download.