We Finally Have a Floor!

I visited Nora earlier this week and it was brought to my attention that I have failed to post any photos of our new floor. (Actually, Carmen and Bob asked me about floor photos right after we had them installed and while I had good intentions at the time... but then it completely fell off my radar.) We've had the floor for about a month and a half (it was installed at the end of July) and at first I was ever-so-slightly less than thrilled. It looked... darker than I remembered it being*. And I felt like it clashed with the weird yellow "blond wood" color of our kitchen cabinets. But everyone else - and especially Robert - seemed to love, love, love it and it has definitely grown on me. I am still not loving how loud everything is without carpet... or how the furniture is constantly sliding around... or how much dustier and hairier the laminate floors look than carpet did... But it's quite aesthetically pleasing, makes moving the air conditioner from room to room a snap and is what I'd wanted for flooring ever since we moved in (I knew carpet would not live long!). Poor Garfunkel absolutely hates it. He has no traction and slides everywhere! Tug-of-War is his favorite game and he really has no leverage now with such a slippery floor. Plus, he likes to do a little head scratch/wipe/roll on the carpet after he eats, and since we now only have carpet in the bedrooms, he's taken to doing it in our room. Or on our bed. Kind of a bummer.

Anyway, here's a photo of the floor on the day they were installed. We'd LOVE to keep our furniture arranged this way, but it's a definite no-go for TV viewing. Yes, the television is the center of my life and my living room. I'm okay with that.


And here is the floor today:



Garfunkel would NOT move out of the way while I was trying to photograph the fireplace, so here he is. (Darn, he's a good looking dog!)




So! There you go - a tour of our new, mold-free, odor-free, dry floor. What do you think? Keep your fingers crossed the stupid people upstairs keep their disposal celery-free...


* Because we decided to use a contractor that both sets of parents had used in the past (and because his rates were so reasonable), Robert was willing to go with an upgrade. So, we picked a middle-of-the-road-but-closer-to-better-than-worse laminate in a cherry wood color. It took us so long to get it all installed because we couldn't get the HOA to make the check out to us and not a specific company (or the company they recommended). I guess we took SO long that the HOA finally gave up and mailed us a check! We got the floors done the following week. :o)

The 2nd Plague

Okay, so since Cesar Chavez's selfless actions afforded me the luxury of a day off yesterday, I finally got around to uploading the photos of the the sink overflow aftermath. (It's too bad there isn't a scratch-and-sniff option because the aroma of manky swamp water that has since permeated the house really adds a little zest to the photos.) Let me start back at the beginning...

Since we've lived in the condo, we have had 3 different people/families occupying the unit above us. It wasn't until the 3rd family moved in about 6 months ago that we started having plumbing problems. The sink would just start backing up at random; we quit putting anything other than liquids down the disposal after the first backup so we were confident it was a problem with the people upstairs. Before the overflow last Wednesday, there had been 3 earlier incidents of sink pluggage. We were (luckily) home for all 3 of those occurrences, though more than 1 of them required Robert to chop up our hose, shove a section down the drain, suck on the other end to start the flow and defile one of our old garbage cans with grody water emptied from the sink. Biji and Carissa were at our place during one of these hose parties - they can vouch for us. (Poor Robert... I don't know what all he's accidentally ingested against his will while sucking on the hose.)

Cutting to Wednesday: When I got home from work at about 5:45 I saw that the sink had backed up about halfway. The water level didn't change while I changed and grabbed my tap shoes so I called Robert at work, left him a message and ran out the door. Robert usually comes home a little earlier on Wednesdays to grab the dog from my parents' house while I'm at class, so I figured I was safe heading to class. (Plus, let's be honest - I am so useless in those kinds of situations. Would I have done a lot to rectify the situation had I stayed? No. I just would've watched the water level to make sure it was static. If it started overflowing, I probably would've called my dad!) Unfortunately, Robert had already left by the time I'd left the message (which, in my defense, was quite out of the ordinary. The man NEVER leaves before 6, even if the house is burning down. I swear!) and since I didn't leave a duplicate message on his cell (see previous sentence) he never got the memo. Long story less long: miscommunication on both ends led to disaster.

By the time I got back from class at 7:30, I knew as soon as I opened the door that we were in trouble. The back door was all fogged over, the room was crazy humid and the smell was already bordering on rank. From 6:15 (when I left) to 7:30 the sink had gone from half-full to completely overflowing onto the kitchen floor. So much so that there was a half-inch of standing water in the kitchen that was slowly seeping into the living room carpet. Water that wasn't just water but water full of weird food remnants like oatmeal, cilantro and some kind of bean residue. So, of course, I stood there like a deer in the headlights and called Robert. He, of course, hadn't gotten my message and so had no idea what I was talking about; I, on the other hand, thought he had received the message and thought he was a #1 bonehead for going to the dog park when the sink was clogged. Anyway, he came home, grabbed the wet/dry vac (which I didn't even know we had... see? Useless!) and got to work. (Oh, I should add that when he went to the upstairs neighbor and told him about what was happening and asked him to refrain from showers, etc., the neighbor balked because he needed to shower before work. Douche. Robert made it quite clear that was not an option.)

The soaked carpet at the kitchen floor/living room border

The kitchen cabinets started absorbing water...

And the water actually started seeping outside from the kitchen/living room floor

As Robert ran out to the patio to start dumping the siphoned water over the ledge, he noticed that a bunch of water was leaking out onto the patio from the kitchen. Nice.

The water actually made it into the living room proper - the worst was right in front of the fireplace.

Summing up the aftermath: We had to go through the HOA and they got a plumber and a restoration crew out to the house by 10 or so Wednesday night. The plumber said he pulled a bunch of vegetables and a big wad of celery from the pipe. (I should add that the pipes in our complex are all completely level - there is no slope. Every time we've had to call a plumber out for the sink, they've all complained about the stupid pipe set-up.) So it's clear that the upstairs neighbor is a COMPLETE moron. Who puts celery of all things in a disposal?! Good grief. Even the plumber, when we asserted it was not us who had put the crap down the sink, said "Yeah, the first floor people rarely do. Because they know what can happen." Indeed.

The restoration guys did their thing (removed the manky carpet padding, baseboards, etc.) and set up a combination of fans and dehumidifiers. Here is one fan (and a very pleased Robert) trying to dry out the carpet:

Ah, the old Lava Eruption peel-and-stick tiles that the previous owners slapped down all over the house. How nice to see you again...

The restoration guys came back Thursday to check on the progress. Not good. They said the kitchen floor was much wetter than they thought it would - and should - be. So, they told us they'd be back Friday to rip up the floor. Robert and I were both bummed by this news because the kitchen linoleum was the only floor in the condo that we really, really liked! It was great! Even the restoration guys asked us if it was new because it was in such good shape. Suck.

Unfortunately, the restoration peeps left 3 gigantenormous dehumidifiers running all throughout the weekend and that really sucked. So very loud. SO very hot! We tried to be out of the house as much as possible and when we were in, it was shorts and flip flops all the time. (As I said in the earlier post, it got up to 81 degrees in the condo so I'm not exaggerating here, people!) They came back Monday morning and said the cabinets by the fridge were still wet, so they took 1 dehumidifier away and left the other 2. I had stayed home in the morning to catch the restoration guys and so when my dad stopped by later to pick up the dog, he was kind enough to wheel the fridge out as far as it would go to dry those puppies out as much as possible! Luckily for us, when the RPs returned on Tuesday they deemed everything dry enough and took the last 2 demon boxes away. YAY!

Now the condo is back to normal temperatures and this is what we have:




As much as I don't like them the HOA has actually done a pretty okay job on getting everything done as quickly as possible. The maintenance guy called us up yesterday to set-up an appointment with the flooring people and they are coming tomorrow to assess the damage. We'll hit their showroom on Saturday to pick out our new flooring and then I guess they'll install its sometime next week. The HOA also called the upstairs neighbor to inform him he's an idiot and not to shove everything but his couch down the disposal. I don't know what he said to them but he hasn't come and said anything to us yet, which is not impressing Robert too much. I just hope the dude heeds their warning and refrains from putting anything down their disposal! I don't have a lot of faith, though. Keep your fingers crossed.

(Oh, and just FYI, I called the post 'The 2nd Plague' because I kept making the joke that on Monday we had the power outage and on Wednesday we had the water damage, so by Friday the locusts should arrive. No one got my joke, though. It's sad.)

Flood Update

I realize this is sort of putting the cart before the horse but since the majority of you already know about our water woes (and it's taking me forever and a day to post photos of the mess), I figured it'd be okay to post a little update. The restoration dudes came bright and early this morning and FINALLY took the last of the dehumidifiers away. We have had them running since Wednesday night so Robert and I are ecstatic to have the demon boxes removed. We can finally hear ourselves talk! And now maybe it'll drop below 77 degrees in the house! (It was 81 degrees when we went to bed last night... Ridiculous! Seriously. I've never been so hot and so dry in my life. We've been going through water and lotion like it's going out of style!!!) I promise to post a more thorough account of the disaster soon but I wanted to let you guys know that we are surviving. Installation of new flooring TBD...

Depression!

Today is the worst day. The WORST. First, it's already 81 degrees in the condo. Second, some twit is having a birthday party at the pool so there's going to be oodles of people, loud music and a buttload of shrieking all. day. long. (It's a little kid twit to boot, so you know there is going to be a bunch of little kids running around and screaming all afternoon.) And lastly, some douchebags are moving into the vacated unit above us. THEY. ARE. SO. LOUD! And it's been soooooooooooooooooooo nice not having anyone up there for the past few weeks. (When the previous tenant moved out, Robert and I didn't tell anyone. We didn't want to put it out in the atmosphere, you know? We never even mentioned to one another how very, very nice it was with no one above us. Just in case. But it came up at my parents' house the other night and now look - people!!! Stupid universe.) It's still unclear as to whether or not they have kids; it sounds like they do but we haven't seen any go up or down the stairs. And we're spying on the new people through the window and the peephole so, you know, we're checking. Today SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKS!! :o( I wanna die.

R.I.P. Spa

As you all know, Robert and I inherited a broken hot tub when we moved into our condo. Neither Robert nor I had any interest in fixing it because: (1) it would cost money and some of us are more *ahem* frugal than others; (2) Robert and I are both fastidiously clean people and wouldn't be interested in a used hot tub no matter what... but the women that lived in our place before us were gross so that feeling was just compounded 10-fold; (3) I have a natural aversion to hot tubs. They make me very hot and I don't like being hot. Who wants to feel sweaty while sitting in water, for crying out loud? Plus, their just big vats of sloughed off skin, hair and other bodily... things that I don't want to sit around soaking in. Blech.

So, the spa has been sitting on our patio, unused, for years now, mainly hiding Robert's woodworking crap (and sometimes doubling as a pseudo workbench for Robert's woodworking crap). I've made inquiries here and there to different people about how much it would be to have someone come in and remove the hot tub but the cheapest quote we got was about $200 and Robert was absolutely NOT going for that. He kept saying he was going to chop it up himself "one of these days" - and I just kept nodding my head and saying "Uh huh." I knew it was never gonna happen.

Well, I must eat my words (or thoughts, as it were) because Robert took two days off last week and spent one of them cutting up and disposing of the spa. I couldn't believe it! I honestly didn't think there was any way Robert was going to be able to cut up the hot tub and dump it in the Dumpster. No way. But, his dad offered to come help, my dad let Robert borrow his Sawsall and he got the job done. To refresh yourself on what the patio and spa used to look like, click here.

Here's Bob decked out in his spa-cutting gear (lots o' fiberglass, y'know - I'm glad they had the face masks!) I wish there was a photo of Robert, too. :o(


First, Robert and Bob skooched the spa out to the center of the patio so as to have more room to maneuver. Then, they started on the wood base.

Then they set to work on the spa itself.


Apparently, the hot tub was chockablock full of spiders. I would soooooo not have been down with that... blech!!


And voila! Done! And they did it in less than 2 hours! Now our patio looks naked... though, you can still see the dirt ring marking where the spa used to be. :o)

Biji came over last weekend and was flabbergasted by the size of our patio now that the hot tub is gone. "It's bigger than your living room!!" Thanks, man. All that did was spur Robert to want to make patio furniture! I told him about how our friends the Stovalls bought a used set and stripped it down and refurbished it themselves. Now Robert has a bee in his bonnet to do that... yeesh. Although if projects keep the man out of my hair then I'm happy to let him at it. He just needs to make sure I don't have to be involved! Basically, what I'm saying is is that if you get invited to a BBQ sometime next year, you'll have Biji and Robert to blame!

Clearing Up Some Spa Confusion

My friend Christina was in town this weekend and Robert and I were able to catch up with her a bit (we actually attended a party at her parents' place but because I'm retarded and forgot to upload the photos, I'll post about it tomorrow!). As you may know, Christina is an avid reader of the blog so she'd read my earlier post about the blinds and their usefulness in combating Fatty McMan-Boobs and his friends. She indicated to me that she thought the spa featured in my pictorial was the community spa and, as such, she was at a loss to understand why I would ever be under the impression that anyone in the spa could ever not see me... seeing as it's about a foot away from my sliding glass door. If that were the case, I would've moved out!! I would never be able to tolerate Fatty McMan-Boobs steaming up my windows, blinds or no blinds. So, in an effort to give you a better idea of just how close we are to the community hot tub, I thought I'd post a few photos of our patio. Oh, and don't be fooled by the absence of people - I took the photos at 10 o'clock on Sunday morning. Had I waited two hours - or taken the photos at 2 AM - there would've been oodles of peeps. Trust me.

This is the view of our hot tub from inside our living room. It is not the community spa. It came with the condo, complete with a blue lightbulb in the little outside light you see there above the spa and a 'privacy shade' that unfurled from the overhang. The heater was broken when we bought the condo, though, so we've never used it. I would never have used it anyway because I am just not a hot tub kind of gal... never have been. Still, we haven't gotten rid of it because we can't quite figure out how to dispose of it short of hacking it into pieces and throwing it in the Dumpster. It won't fit through the sliding door (obviously) so unless we want to set up a rig and hoist it over the balcony (doubtful!) it's probably going to be sitting there for a long time to come.

The hot tub also doubles as a place to store crap that has nowhere else to go and as Robert's pseudo-workbench. Hence the sawdust coating...

Here's the view from our balcony. Sure, it looks pretty now, but when 117 kids are shrieking "MARCO! POLO!" at the top of their lungs for hours and hours on end, the prettiness fades away really quickly. I hate Marco Polo. Hate it. Surely there must be some other pool game for children to play...? Ugh.

This is the view from our sink, peering out through the window. I've outlined both the pool and spa for your convenience. :o) We can see all the dancing, hear all the music and when we turn on the light in the kitchen at night to make dinner or get a glass of water, we can see one big shadowy blob split up and become two bobbing heads in the spa. It's kind of creepy. And gross. Why anyone would have (or come very close to having) sex in a communal hot tub I do not know. It's essentially a giant vat of sloughed-off skin, hair and other assorted fluids of I don't know how many people... YUCK!! Why would I want to sit in that much less do anything else in it?!! I. Would. Not.

So, as you can see, the spa is still too close for (my) comfort but definitely not as close as Christina thought it was! :o) I could certainly do without all the noise associated with the pool but the one small saving grace is that it's next to our living room and not our bedroom...

Adventures in Window Treatments

When Robert and I bought our condo, it came with some pretty janky white plastic blinds. We didn't think too much about it until, about 4 minutes after moving in, we discovered they had no wand. The rope-pull was there to open and close the blinds but we couldn't actually rotate the individual blinds themselves. Eh, okay... we'll live. Or so we thought. We soon discovered that if we wanted any air to circulate in the house, we'd have to have the door open. Door open = blinds open. Which would normally be fine except the pool is right outside our patio. If we can see Fatty McMan-Boobs barbecuing and the amorous couple in the hot tub, they can see us, too. Me no likey. Robert didn't mind that so much but, luckily for me, he didn't like the clackity-clackness of the blinds so three years later, we decided to buy some new ones. Yeehoo!

(This was the best photo of the old blinds I could find...)

The weekend before Memorial Day we schlepped down to Expo to peruse their selection. Neither Robert nor I had warm fuzzy feelings for Expo after our last adventure there - buying our counter top - because they have the Worst. Customer. Service. EVER. Seriously. No one knows what they're doing and if by some miracle you actually find someone and drag them off to help you, they let you know that they're none to pleased to be there. But, they were offering some 12 months no payments/no interest extravaganza that Robert wanted to take advantage of, so off to Expo we went.

I won't bore you with (too many) details but needless to say, Expo's customer service was just as delightful as we remembered. Loverly. Robert had taken his own measurements of our sliding glass door and the el cheapo white blinds - and the woman helping us was not happy about that. She told us 492 times that "self-measured blinds can't be returned... other people have tried it and they haven't been happy... it's only $82 to get one of our people to come out, you know..." When Robert was quite firm in his assertion that he trusted his own measurements and was willing to take the risk, she wrote "SELF MEASURED!!!" in ginormous letters with stars and exclamation points on the bottom of the order form. Ugh. (Besides, the woman was retarded - there was a big sign on her desk indicating that the $82 promotion was only good if you bought 3 window treatments. Dumbass.) We carried on. Unfortunately, the woman couldn't find the type of blind we wanted in the catalog - Robert found it for her - and then she didn't know how to fill out the order form. She had to wander off to ask someone, which took 10 hours, and she still did it wrong - Expo called us the next day to fill in the blanks she'd overlooked. Both Robert and I were quite sure that whatever blinds arrived on our doorstep in 2-3 weeks would not be exactly what we'd asked for...

But they were! They were the right dimensions, they came with the type of wand we'd ordered, they were the right color and they opened in the middle like they were supposed to. Joy! Now the question was: could Robert install them properly by himself? I honestly had no qualms that he could figure it out; I also knew I didn't really want to be there when he did! ;o) But Robert was chomping at the bit to get the suckers up, so Saturday morning he started...

Robert was very diligent and methodical in his approach to the blinds installation, as I knew he would be. He only got as far as getting the brackets up before he had to quit for the day (we had an early Father's Day celebration at my parents' house that afternoon). First thing Sunday, he was at it again... only his first attempt came up a bit short, as you can see in the photo below.

Robert wanted to double-check the length of the el cheapo blind vs. the new blind...

He found his measurements were correct and just as he'd thought - but he'd been so nervous about making the blinds too low that he over-corrected and made them floodwater blinds.

So, we unattached the rod, he reset the brackets and tried it again. This time, however, the blinds were too low and rode the carpet (above). Again we removed the rod, he reset the brackets and... the blinds were still too low. I don't have a photo of me lying on the ground and covering my ears from the imminent onslaught of swear words but believe me, it happened. Robert took a break for a bit and then tried adjusting the brackets one last time. The third time was the charm (thank goodness!) and the blinds were just right.

So, we snapped in all the blinds and hung the valance...

Only to discover that the blinds wouldn't close all the way. I burst out laughing, I couldn't help myself! Robert actually handled it very well and calmly readjusted the blinds so that they would close completely.

Success! By 8:00 Sunday night, the blinds were done. Sweet.

The wand was rigged too tightly, making it "too erect." This made Robert chuckle, which brightened his mood a bit. (He was able to re-wicker it with no problem.)

You guys probably knew this already but new blinds have the coolest wands! I had no idea that companies made them like this, but the rope and the wand are all one unit now. It's awesome!

And thus concludes the saga of the vertical blinds. They are perfect and beautiful... and they work! The saleswoman at Expo should sleep better tonight knowing that Robert will not be coming back as an irate customer trying to return self-measured blinds after she told him he couldn't.

I. Hate. Summer.

And it's not even really summer yet!!!

I love my condo and all but good grief!! It is an OVEN when the weather is warm. BLEEEEEEECH! It's disgusting. This was the temperature at 7:20 last night inside my beloved shoebox:


It then proceeded to get even warmer as the night wore on! Actually, I think the highest I saw the thermostat read was 83.9, so it's not like it got degrees hotter but still - any increase sucks! It was a cool 81 degrees when I left the house at 8 this morning, so I'm stoked to come home to a crispy cool condo tonight!

I very much wish we had air conditioning... though I guess we're more environmentally friendly sitting in our non-air conditioned house, feeling our brains melt. If only good deeds made you cooler (literally)... ;o)