Troll Echos

In a pattern most people that have been through college would recognize, I busted onto the scene of “real life” in roughly May of 2000 with very close to $100,000 in debt.  According to my loan granting institution, I had a full twenty years of paying on those loans lined up ahead of me.  To most people in this situation it is “just the way it is” and the twenty year plan tends to make the payments every month a little more manageable.  In reality however, you get done being a student and instantly acquire a mortgage backed by your soul.

If that weren’t bad enough, a lot of us, myself included, were driving around the old car we were given near the end of high school by our parents.  I am not referring to a silver spoon “congrats on your graduation or sweet 16 here is your brand new Lexus” but rather the “here is the car that we’ve been driving into the ground for the last decade that may or may not run properly, has well over 100,000 miles on it and may or may not burn slightly more oil than gas and we know selling it would be a waste of effort so you can just have it” type of car.  So aside from a mortgage on your soul, most former students immediately find themselves with a car loan for some slightly less used car because their’s died.

Now imagine that twenty year time window for a moment.  A huge list of things will likely happen in that time frame.  A lot of people will need at least one more car, sometimes two.  Many will purchase some form of real estate.  This time the mortgage is backed by your house instead of your soul at least.  Most will be married, many will have at least one kid, and so on.  Thanks to economic forces beyond our control, most will also spend frantic periods of time unemployed and trying to figure out how to survive on credit cards or money from family or both.  In other words, this twenty years of college debt is never the only debt in your life largely thanks to the fact that it is over such a large time frame.

I often referred to myself as “the best paid poor guy I know” to my friends.  I will not lie, I am well paid for what I do and fortunately to support that, I’m also very good at what I do so I don’t have to feel guilty or anything.  Dispite my status of being well paid, I had the eight college loans, the three cars, the real estate, the wedding, the unemployment, and the credit card debt over the years.  That produced a strange pattern of literally living paycheck to paycheck as I funneled as much money as I possibly could toward debt every month.  My goal was to beat the odds, and pay off not only my college loans, but all of my debt in any form, and to do so before twenty years had elapsed on my college loans.

Several months ago I paid off the last of my college loans, putting me almost eleven years ahead of schedule, but I wasn’t done.  My credit cards are all at zero as well, but I had a mortgage on my house and a loan on my car so I wasn’t quite there. 

When I met my wife we both owned houses and that put us in a somewhat unique situation.  We had an extra house.  Honestly not a terrible situation to be in if you can each pay for your own place the same way you obviously could before you met.  Based on location we decided to move into her house instead of mine.  After a long process lasting roughly a year, my house has been repaired and sold.  This brought about an awesome debt tour de force.

The only two debts I had left were my house and my car.  I had just sold my house making it go away, and with the profit from the house in my pocket and no need to move it into another house thanks to having a second one already, I had the unique opportunity to pay off my car at the same time.  I did exactly that this morning.  So from May of 2000 to August of 2009, a total of nine years and three months, I have scraped my way entirely into the black.  I am now completely debt free.

Having worked at it so hard for so long I think I may still be in a little shock about it.  It doesn’t yet feel real.  The sudden drop in my monthly expenses will probably make it feel very real indeed very soon I suspect.

Last autumn I went to my house and prepared it as well as I possibly could for the cold winter ahead since the house was going to be sitting empty for the season waiting to be put on the market the following spring.    The pipes were drained, the furnace lines too, anti-freeze was added to toilets, sinks, tubs, and anything else that had any known residual water in it or was otherwise in posession of a U-bend.  It took quite a while to get all the ducks in the row for the winter, and when I was done, I figured I would be in pretty good shape.

Over the course of the winter I returned to the house at random intervals to verify that it was still standing, do a quick check inside, sometimes to do some chores, and to grab the latest mailbox-full of junk mail.  Each time I went, everything honestly seemed fine.  No floods, no fires, no problems.    You know what they say about best laid plans though.

After the cold passed, I returned to the house to start turning things back on after the winter and to do some final preparations for sale.  I turned on the water, opened the valve, and all seemed ok.  For about six seconds.  Then the ceiling of my basement in a section thankfully not immediately over my head sprung into an odd flow of water a bit like an ill conceived cross breed between a fire sprinkler and a waterfall.  I immediately cranked the valve closed again and the amount of water coming out of my house into my basement slowed quickly to a stop again.

A couple more ons and offs later, I had a reaonable idea of where the water could be coming from and all the evidence I needed that I had a split copper pipe somewhere up in the walls of my house.  I uttered, “this is not how this was supposed to go” sadly to my wife and got on the phone for a plumber and an insurance claim.

The next day the plumber arrived, confirmed my theory on where the leak was coming from, and repaired it.  A pipe had simply popped out of a 45 degree angle connector.  Once that was patched up, I turned the water back on, and the waterfall began anew.  More trouble shooting for what was obviously a second  broken pipe in the same vertical section of house, based on the fact that the first fix was no longer leaking but the water was coming from the same place in the basement, revealed the need to poke through more walls on the main floor of the house.  

Sure enough a second vastly more obnoxious problem was discovered, this time a split pipe in a nearly impossible spot to get to without swearing about it a lot.  To back up that theory, the plumber did a fair amount of complaining as the spot with the problem proved to be nightmarish.  Once that problem was fixed we turned the water back on and allowed ourselves a moment of hope as no waterfall resumed immediately.  False hope is the worst kind indeed.

A slow leak all over the kitchen floor inspired the water to be shut down quickly again and more research into the next problem.  The water this time appeared to be issuing from behind the refridgerator, which pointed at the ice maker water line initially.  That is until the water appeared to be leaking from somewhere within the refridgerator itself instead of the cheap copper line.  The specifics of this problem remain unknown but obviously something that carries water inside the fridge wasn’t meant to freeze.  A funny thought considering the primary purpose of the water in the fridge is to actually make ice.  With the tap for the fridge in the basement turned off, the water was once again returned to service.

And shut down again.  This time the water was coming out of the dishwasher.  The front panel was removed to show a pretty obvious leak out of the flow control solenoid.  So we shut that down as a lost cause too and turned the water back on again.  This time no obvious water problems, but it was time to move onto the hot water systems.  The valve on the furnace was turned on, and within very short order revealed that we weren’t done.  Now water was issuing from under the kitchen sink.

Don’t ask me why, because I honestly can’t come up with a good reason, but there was an extra hot water pipe under my kitchen sink.  I would be forced to guess that it was destined for the dishwasher, but an alternate tap off of the sink’s hot water tap had been created instead.  The result was about 15 inches of pipe under the sink ending in a welded on pipe cap.  On its own that wouldn’t result in any trouble, and in fact it didn’t for six years in the house, but today all bets are obviously off.  The cap itself split open.  The effect was a glorious sprinkler like one that only revealed itself when there was pressure in the hot water system.

Finally, things seemed to be patched up, almost $800 later and the plumber was on his way.  Drywall needs to be replaced to fill in the holes and repainted to make it look nice again.  This is far from done, and to avoid unknown problems the water was shut down again before I left.  Better to turn it on again and find a problem later than leave it on and come back to find your house is a lake.

In the on-going efforts of preparing my house to sell it, I’ve recently procured a fairly massive dumpster. I discovered that Home Depot offers dumpsters one day while wandering around at the Home Depot where I’ve spent thousands of dollars during this project. I ordered one while walking around in their parking lot from my cell phone and a couple of days later it arrived in my driveway. While placing the order I had a small flier with pictures of dumpsters in it and information about how big they are, but nothing more than that. Almost at random I chose the middle of the 5 sizes, a 15yd dumpster. It was $535.00 for 1 week, and the option to extend it for a second week at no extra charge if needed.

When it arrived I immediately began to think I had managed to get a dumpster that was way bigger than I could ever possibly fill. It sat in my driveway collecting bits of springtime tree pollen and other random dust on the wind for almost a whole week. By the time I was feeling dejected about having wasted $535.00 and decided to call for the extension by a week, I had only managed to place about 3 things in the dumpster. I was using about 1/50th of a cubic yard.

Over the course of the next week, I moved a bunch of other things into it which seemed to fill it very quickly due to poor arrangement. I was beginning to realize I would need help and tried to figure out what best to put into the dumpster in the time I had left. I called on my fiance, and the work began with me climbing into the dumpster to shuffle everything around. What was a nearly full dumpster once again become a dumpster with almost nothing in it. Then the fit hit the shan.

What followed was a bit of a blur honestly. It was an entire weekend of working on the house, cleaning out storage bins and trunks, throwing away everything that wasn’t important, chopping up furniture, tearing up carpet and padding, and carefully arranging new additions to the dumpster to optimize space usage. When it was over the dumpster was packed full, my fiance and I were exhausted, and my house was way emptier. This effort left both of us sore, tired, and frankly, feeling like we’d gotten a heck of a work out.  Imagine pushing a solid wood coffee table up over the edge of a dumpster that is as tall as you are if you can’t figure out why. It’s a work out I would recommend to anyone with a house to clean, but only if you own a Sawzall.

Unless you’ve ever had to actually install a storm door, you probably think of them as the fun extra door that gets in the way when you are getting a new couch or refrigerator delivered and that they are just standard issue house “stuff.” I now find myself as a member of the group that has had to install a storm door. Few things you could ever install onto/into your house seem like they could be easier. In reality, few things could be farther from the truth than that assumption.

My original concept of what the process would involve closely imitated the storm door displays in Home Depot. Wonderfully ready to go screen door in a box that need only be lined up in the hole and screwed in place. This concept was promptly dashed as I opened the box of my very own storm door to install and discovered exactly how many pieces it came in and that it had its own 12-step program.

Storm doors, you see, are designed to fit an impressive number of possible doorways. Ones that aren’t quite straight, ones that are wider in some places than others, ones that aren’t any standard width, ones where the hinge-side and latch-side are interchangeable, and so on. To allow for such flexibility in design, the number of tools needed to install one climbs dramatically, and the number of parts of the door that are ready to go out of the box are reduced to almost zero. Once you are ready to start be sure you know where your closest hardware store is, you’ll need it. Repeatedly.

In my case, I discovered a very real need for a hacksaw, a trip to the store to buy screws that failed to be included in the package, tons of measuring with a tape measure, some more measuring with a ruler, a collection of screw driver bits, drill bits, and even a center punch. Diagrams in the instruction book were designed to be understood by the common idiot, with a PhD in Physics and twin masters in Geometry and Spacial Reasoning. Things that sound simple like “To identify which side is the top, you just do this” actually take a keen sense of logical analysis and a dictionary to figure out the reference point names they use.

When all was said and (sorta) done, my screen door is only partially attached and is carefully attached to the railing of my porch with string to prevent being battered by wind. It’s not what I would call “installed.” The project will have to continue after acquiring more screws that match the aesthetics of the doorway and door.

The next day I finished installing the door and all it’s various bits, but I’m almost 100% convinced that I did something wrong. Despite having read each step of the directions no fewer than 5 times and trying my absolute best to fully understand what I was about to do, before I did anything I would regret, I fully believe I’ve installed the storm door incorrectly. I question whether or not it can be corrected without massive amounts of work and also whether my front door is designed to take the storm door I got.

fur·ni·ture tet·ris: [fur-ni-cher tet-ris] -noun

1. the game involving taking an entire room worth of furniture and stacking it in another smaller room so it takes up the least possible amount of space.
2. the appearance furniture takes on after being stacked in such a way as to leave virtually no room between individual pieces and can therefore be “cleared.”

This evening was spent playing furniture tetris. The goal was to take all of the furniture out of the living room and fit it into the kitchen. Bear in mind while picturing this that the kitchen is approximately the same size as the living room, but it’s got a table, some chairs, cabinetry, a few major appliances, cat food bowls, and a garbage can all taking up space. Also worth picturing is that the living room started with the following items: a big heavy TV and the stand for it, a few video game consoles and loads of wire share space with the TV stand, a sleeper couch, a love seat, a chair, a piano and stool, 2 end tables complete with lamps, a coffee table, a small book case full of video games, a few boxes full of DVD cases and/or more video games, and a wine rack with literally 99 bottles of wine in it.

Now with my back aching something fierce and my kitchen being entirely full of stuff, my living room is ready to get the carpet ripped out and the laminate flooring put in. It’s going to be another busy weekend of working around the house.

In an on-going effort to make my house nice to sell (or if the market refuses to be helpful, to rent out) I made several trips to the store today to buy a hefty pile of laminate flooring. What I’ve learned about redoing the flooring of a room is that you must always buy more than you think you need. There will always be scraps that you can’t use because they have the wrong dove tail edge or they are damaged or a previous cut was made to tailor a specific corner which made the rest of the piece useless or any of a million other things.

Now there are places that will happily sell you flooring over the internet but I can’t in good conscience use any of them. You haven’t properly appreciated shipping charges until you’ve tried to figure out how much it would cost to get 1200 lbs of wood to stack in your garage. If the place promises free shipping, you can rest assured that it is built into the price of whatever you are buying. Also, without having actually seen the material you are about to sink large amounts of money into with your own eyes, it’s hard to know what you’ll end up with. That last point is especially important because the term “laminate flooring” can refer to several different types of flooring.

Some types are much like standard issue vinyl flooring. Think linoleum and realize that if your goal is the hard wood look for less money, this isn’t likely the approach you want. People will know there isn’t any wood involved. If you get the kind that involves what some places call “pre-finished hard wood” (where the stuff is at least mostly made out of real wood) you need to be absolutely sure you get lots more than you need because there are a zillion variables that will make getting more of the same stuff a pain in the butt. They come in about a dozen thicknesses, they can have an almost unlimited number of dove tail / locking tab / leaf edge systems (which seem to be brand specific), and they come in hundreds of woods (or wood appearances at least.) Beyond all that some require a dense rubber mat to be installed below them for sound dampening and general flexibility and others have a padding mat like substance pre-mounted on the bottom. Still others require the pieces to be glued together, and some actually don’t and are usually referred to as “floating” floors due to the fact that they are sitting on a rubber mat and held in place almost entirely just by being properly fitted to the room they are sitting it together.

I have acquired around 815 square feet of flooring for a task I’ve calculated to need around 640 square feet of supplies. I picked it up at a store in person so I got to see it and choose it myself. And I had to make 3 trips to the store to get it all home in my car. I could comfortably lug around a dozen boxes of the flooring material which came in ~35lb boxes containing 22.7 square feet in 9 pieces. Try not to do the math on how much lifting I had to do tonight to get it from the shelf at the store to a neat pile in my garage.

With help of relatives that are coming in this weekend, I hope to get a lot of the stuff installed. There will undoubtedly be several more trips to places like Home Depot to get the edge pieces, possibly glue if the vote is held to glue my “glueless” flooring, and any other supplies that I haven’t thought of yet. It should be interesting.