armlessbear.com - Neverending Battle of Home Improvements - Comments

City of Madison Loan

Phaedra — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:40:19 -0700

http://www.cityofmadison.com/planning/cedu.html

I got the housing rehabilitation loan from the city for my windows and solar cells:

http://www.cityofmadison.com/planning/cedu/Documents/HRSPILsum.pdf

Good luck! And I love your house AND location!!!

Violations, etc

kirstin — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:22:46 -0700

Oh, there are some bare wires coming out of an, um, junction box thingy in the ceiling. Some romex pulled around vents instead of being pulled through holes drilled in the joists, a switch mere inches (like 2”) above a basement sink, and a couple others which I forget. The guy quoted the re-wire because that’s what he does a lot of, electrical renovation in old houses. We don’t have knob and tube wiring, but previous owners have done some creative wiring in the past that have created and/or compounded the blowing the circuit problem.

But, on the bright side… we bought this house because of size, price and location. We knew that there would be some things that required fixing, repairing, or replacing.

Really, I just like to “complain” about things. And blogging about it gives me a place to look back to when I want to know when we did a certain thing to the house.

Ow

murph — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:04:08 -0700

Holy crap. Dude was willing to quote a re-wire – but you don’t really need one do you?

What kind of violations? exposed splices or ulp knob & tube….?

Say it ain’t so…

Self-reassurance

Ryan K — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:52:59 -0700

As you know, Ryan and I have been serial-movers in the past. I’ve usually felt a little guilty about always buying a new house when we move instead of a pre-existing home… especially during the last move when the market was going bad and I felt some guilt over not helping out a fellow house-seller.

There were always 2 reason we chose new instead of resale:

#1 – I could get exactly (or almost exactly) what I want without having to do extensive remodeling.

#2 – Even with a home inspection, you never really know what you’re going to get in a pre-existing home. With new construction, you can walk the house as it’s going up and know the location of every wire and pipe.

A lot of people use “charm” and “personality” as reasons to buy a resale. I don’t want to make you feel worse about your house fixing needs… but you’ve made me feel better about the decision to buy new this last time. Charm is lovely, but so is the knowledge that I won’t need to rewire my entire house.

Have you put any effort into seeing if you can get a government grant or assistance of some type to help you fix these issues? Who knows, there could be some obscure law on the books to help you out.

Neverending Battle of Home Improvements

kirstin — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 10:01:14 -0700

Often times people display a startling lack of intellectual curiosity. I am as guilty of this as anyone else.
The facts before us:
1)Our hot water heater has serious trouble generating hot water in the winter.
2)The vent in the living room between the sofas blows cold air in the winter.
3)A few, er, mice found their way into our house this spring.

These things are all related, but it took #3 for us to actually tie them together.

A detailed search in the back recesses of our basement where we seldom venture led to a curious discovery. The window back there was missing half the pane of glass. Lest you think we’re incredibly stupid, there was something else in it’s place – the previous owner had set up some venting tube for doing wood working ventilation.