Bates House of Chaos

More Tales From the Drake Side

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 07:26:59 -0400

Okay, maybe I was a little harsh in my last posting about this joint.
{later} Sorry, I had to take a moment to wipe the tears from laughing so hard.
Anyway, I guess you could say that this place isn’t that bad. I mean, it is a roof over our heads and we’re only a half-mile away from our new house which makes it easy to keep an eye on things.
In an attempt to have a better attitude about living on the Drake side, I’ve compiled a top ten list of the benefits of living in “the slab”:
10 - The kitchen’s so small that, when making smoothies, I can simultaneously hold the lid on the blender while opening the cupboard on the opposite wall to get my glass and straw. Now that’s an efficient use of time!
9 - If it weren’t for the large number of HUGE bugs in this joint, we’d never have known that Zane was better than Avery at screaming like a girl.
8 - The fan in the bathroom is great at drowning out the children’s screams from the other room while I’m taking a shower.
7 - Since the kids have spent the better part of the year in our living room (since we don’t have a family room), they’ve effectively ruined the couches and I’ll have to buy new ones. Darn!
6 - Walking from one side of the house to the other to transfer our clothes from the washer to the dryer has to burn at least an extra 10 or 20 calories each trip. I can already feel my hips shrinking.
5 - No matter how dirty the house gets, I can clean the entire thing top to bottom in less than an hour. Granted, it takes less than an hour for my children to return it to its original state but still it’s a start.
4 - Since half of our stuff has been in the back room in boxes since we moved in, once I finally start packing I’ll already be half-way done.
3 - The amount I’ve learned in the past nine months of dealing with our crazy landlord should qualify me for a college-level degree in hostile property management (anyone know of a college that hands out that kind of degree?).
2 - I can now officially claim the ability to “vacuum mouse turds out of a stove” on my resume.
And the number one benefit of living in the slab . . .
In less than a week, WE ARE OUTTA HERE!!!!

Tales From the Drake Side

Tue, 5 Jul 2011 06:57:31 -0400

Yes, you may think that we’ve fallen off the face of the planet. But the honest truth is that we’ve moved to Drake Street.
Looking for a place to live while we were tearing down the house was difficult to say the least. Given my overly optimistic view of our construction timeline and the fact that I was too honest to lie and say we were looking for a more permanent rental, no one seemed to want to rent to a family of six for only six to eight months unless they tacked on an additional $400 to $500 to the rent each month. Oh, and I guess the fact that I had set our rent limit to $2000 per month didn’t help things much either.
In the end we opted for a place that was only a half-mile from our tear down. With four kids in three different schools with widely varying bell schedules, we felt it was more important to find a place in our current neighborhood and on the school bus routes rather than, say, enough space for a family of six . . . or functional doors and windows . . . or working plumbing . . . or basic sanitary conditions . . .
So, a few notes about our rental (you know, for posterity’s sake). Please be forewarned that some of these comments - and none of these pictures - are not for the squeamish.
It’s about 1384 square feet. Total. No basement. And once you subtract the unconditioned “bonus room” off the back which we use solely for storage, that leaves us with 1062 square feet of living space.
In December when we moved in, we placed a thermometer in the “bonus room” so we could see just how cold it got. It usually hovered around the freezing mark. However, it’s a great room for storage, except for the fact that you can see it all from the living room through the french doors and that kind of wigs me out.
When we moved in, we had a total of four exterior doors, only one of which (the front door) actually worked. After much complaining and ultimately a bit of legal threatening, we’ve upped that number to two.
When we moved in, the garage door wouldn’t open all the way (yep, we’ve got a one-car garage - again, used for storage). Now it opens all the way, but you have to unlock the garage door from the outside, come back through the house to push the two holding rods toward the center of the door, then go back outside to turn the garage door handle the rest of the way before you can open the door. We don’t use the garage door that much.
I’ve gotten very good at mowing moss, because that’s all that seems to grow in our back yard. Oh, and sticks.
It’s a good thing the house is so small because the washing machine is by the bedrooms and the dryer is in the room behind the garage, sharing space with all of our food since there’s no room in the kitchen for anything other than the loaf of bread that sits atop the microwave.
It’s physically impossible to take more than six steps without having to make a 90-degree turn.
In the past six months, we’ve replaced a toilet (oh, man, is there a story about that, but I’ll save it for a future posting) and pulled the dishwasher out of our teardown to replace the one that broke here (all with the blessing of our landlord).
To date, we’ve caught six mice. I was going to post pictures (not of the mice, but of what I found when I opened the top of the stove), but Jeff told me they were too gross, so here’s what I wrote, sans pictures:
{Picture Deleted.}
And in case you can’t tell what that is, here’s a closer look.
{Picture Deleted.}
Yeah, you should have seen the look on my face when I was cleaning that out. I went through about half a container of disposable cleaning wipes. The little silver thing was a toy LEGO-type hatchet. Perhaps one of the mice nicked it from the previous tenants’ child? Or maybe they just nicked the child and the toy hatchet was an added bonus?
The carpet’s gross. The landlord says she wants to replace it all with hardwood after we move. Can you say “putting lipstick on a pig”?
{Picture deleted.}
We have a fire alarm that we took out of the old house. The batteries have run down and it chirps every several minutes, but we don’t know which box the fool thing is in - and we probably couldn’t reach it even if we did. CHIRP! It’s really not that bad. You can only hear it from the living room and dining room. CHIRP!
Back during spring break I did a deep cleaning of the house. However, I can’t open the house’s original windows from the inside to clean the area between them and the storm windows. On the brighter side, that area is an entomologist’s dream.
{Pictures deleted.}
Granted, moving here has allowed me to test my “designing on a dime” prowess. Check out these curtains that I cut from king-sized bed sheets from the local thrift store. I was even brilliant enough to cut the casings at either end to get a ready made curtain rod casing.

Yep, I’ve definitely got a future in interior design.
But if not, maybe I could go back to doing day care.

Okay, Okay, Okay. . .

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 06:28:42 -0400

Without any further ado, here’s a website where you can see pictures of the house demo: MobileMe Gallery - Construction. There’s a whole story that goes along with them but I’ll have to post it (probably about the same time I update almost a year’s worth of missed blog entries - Jeff really needs to go out of town for a few days!). I’ll also periodically (and that’s up to debate) post new pictures as we get them.
Just a few comments:
I handed my camera over to a friend for the first portion of the demo so I could go get Avery out of school. However, I forgot to make sure the camera was on auto focus. Hence, the first group of demo day pics are a bit fuzzy.
The pictures are all out of order and I can’t figure out why. I’ll get my tech guy on that when he comes home from work.
Yes, that’s me knocking down the chimney.
Future note to self, no matter how busy you are you should always take the time to do your hair and makeup on the day your house gets demolished because you never know when you’ll end up on film/in pictures.

Tootin’ My Own Horn

Mon, 16 May 2011 11:01:50 -0400

Now, I never do that, do I??
We closed last Friday (a week and a half ago) on both the townhouse sale and the construction loan for the new house. We had been under the impression that all of the permitting was going to be in order so we could tear down the house and start construction shortly thereafter only to find out that, well, someone somewhere hadn’t done what they were supposed to.
So between the two closings we found ourselves at the town hall signing paperwork, submitting checks for bonds (that I’d mailed in almost a month ago!) and calling the builder to get paperwork filled out that should have been already taken care of.
Needless to say, I was a bit antsy to get the permits issued as soon as possible. Finally on Tuesday of last week I just couldn’t take it anymore and went to the town hall, crossed the expeditor’s name off the paperwork, substituted my own information, wrote a check for the permit myself, and took everything over to the county to get the final steps done for the permits. By close of business I had the demo permit in hand, and less than 72 hours later I showed up at the builder’s with the building permit in hand (the process normally takes at least two to four weeks).
Granted I have to give the county some credit. For some reason, they took our building plans and approved them on the day I submitted them. If I’d truly been on top of things, I could have checked the permit status online starting the day I submitted the forms (I’ll remember that next time) and had both permits in hand within just over 24 hours from when I picked them up at the town. Now, that’s got to be some sort of record.
Anyone need an expeditor?
(Toot! Toot!)
And on a completely unrelated note, we had to drive to school this morning after a bird pooped on Zane about a block or two away from the house. According to Jeff, that kid’s going to have some seriously good luck today!

Quick & Dirty

Fri, 13 May 2011 09:01:25 -0400

After having this little gem on the desktop for probably over a year, I promised Jeff I’d get it on the blog or get rid of it today.
Rather than try to embed the audio, I’ll just send you to the YouTube Link.
By way of background, this was supposedly the message that the Maroochydore High School in Queensland, Australia staff voted unanimously to record on their school telephone answering machine.
This came about because they implemented a policy requiring students and parents be responsible for their children’s absences and missing homework.
The school and teachers are being sued by parents who want their children’s failing grades changed to passing grades, even though those children were absent 15 to 30 times during the semester and did not complete enough school work to pass their classes.
Again, don’t know if it’s true or not, but I still thought the message was hysterical.
Enjoy.

Sold!

Tue, 5 Apr 2011 18:54:49 -0400

We officially accepted a contract on the townhouse today.
Cross your fingers that everything goes smoothly. If so, the wrecking ball (or backhoe, as it were) will be visiting Olympian Circle soon.

Missing Something?

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:20:17 -0400

Yeah, I’m sure you’re all missing me and my glorious blog posts. Got lots to update but not really in the frame of mind to do so. However, I thought I’d quickly send this picture of Zane. After several weeks of having one of those nasty hanging teeth, he’s finally wriggled it free from his mouth.
And speaking of Zane, perfect time to include a comment from Gavin about him. A couple of weeks ago, I commented to Jeff that, despite my best efforts to wake Zane up for school, he was still “out cold.”
Gavin’s casual but quick response was, “How come he was out cold? I was pretty warm!”

No What????

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 05:22:31 -0500

In the off chance that people think we’ve dropped off the face of the planet - oh, wait. Yeah, we have dropped off the face of the planet.
Who knew when I wrote that we were having a “new addition” that having a newborn house would be just as time consuming as, well, having a newborn in the house?
But it has been. Since early December, if it hasn’t involved selling off bits of our existing house and prepping it for demo, meeting with a gazillion people to finalize the plans for our new house, tearing up carpet and repainting our townhouse so we can put it on the market, or moving at the last minute into our current rental and dealing with an absolutely awful landlord, then I haven’t had much patience for it.
And that’s with the builder coordinating the bulk of the site work. If I’d taken it on myself (which was my original thrifty intent), I’d probably be sitting in a nice, tight, white jacket in the corner of a nice white room, methodically thumping my head against the nice, white, padded wall right about now. Hmmm. That does sound kind of nice right now, doesn’t it?
This morning when I woke up at 4:30 to Jeff scraping the ice off his car, I figured we’d have a two-hour school delay. By 4:45 when I realized I wasn’t going to go back to bed, I’d planned around this minor inconvenience. I’d send the older two off to their bus stops and then take the youngest boys out to the builder’s office to drop off some stuff, getting back just in time to drop the boys off at school and head over to the townhouse to get a precious four hours of painting in.
Instead, I was greeted with an email stating that school is closed for the day.
WHAT!?! There’s not THAT much ice out there. Must the school board be overly worried about thousands of kids safety at a time like this? I need my children babysat for the day by their respective places of learning!
Should have taken up Jeff on the offer to let me spend all of yesterday painting. But no, I figured I’d do things like actually clean the house and buy groceries - a rare phenomenon in recent times.
Maybe I’ll take advantage of today to help Zane make his Pinewood Derby car in time for the race on Wednesday. Currently, it’s a block of unimproved wood painted yellow with “The Gold Brick” written in red sharpie on all sides. Yeah, I’m thinking we’re not going to get the award for the fastest looking car this year.

A New Addition

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 14:55:02 -0400

Well, I guess you would actually call it a tear down and rebuild. By late next summer, our house should look a little more like this:
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:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)
(i.e. I can’t stop smiling!)

Blessing or Curse?

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:45:44 -0400

I love email. I love how I can compose a (usually) well-worded note to someone without them knowing that all heck is breaking loose around me.
If a kid interrupts me because they’re bleeding, I can take a few minutes to staunch the flow of blood and apply a bandaid and then come back to what I was doing, with the recipient not being any wiser.
Contrast that with a phone conversation where the caller can hear my kids apparently maiming each other while simultaneously tearing the house apart (but thankfully, can’t see me shaking the “you’re going to get it when I get off this phone” pointer finger or vehemently motioning for them to leave the room) and you can see the draw of email.
But I’ve gotten to the point where I conduct and coordinate almost everything via email. And this means that every time I sit down to check my email, I’m almost guaranteed that I’ll spend an hour writing responses and taking care of needed items, and I’ll still end up with a list of things I need to do when I’m done.
And if I miss a day, it just adds another hour’s worth of catching up on the following day (which is what prompted me to write this post).
So what’s your take on email? Is it a blessing or a curse in your life?