Futility Now

Home is so Sad -- Philip Larkin

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

Tomorrow is our last day as renters.  While we won’t get our keys until the 1st, our loan is scheduled to fund Friday and we will officially own our disarming grandmother of a cottage. This is occasion for celebration, certainly (and they are in the works boy howdy), but I’ve been thinking about this last year and a half and what all has transpired in this particular apartment during that time.  How zia & I got the keys a week or so before jmags arrived from Brooklyn.  How his last flight here arrived early and I was still reading Poetry magazine in the bar in my black wrap coat. The expression on my face when the boxes with his books arrived (we’re going to need a bigger bookcase). How he & I kept the mattress downstairs in the living room in front of the fireplace for days after he  arrived.

Pretending to be Pyramus & Thisbe.

All the cooking & hijinks & sci-fi.  When, after too many days of being snowed in together, we put a pancake on zia’s head during breakfast. When I went rollerskating in the living room. The sugar ants on the ceiling.

I know we will look back on this as such a defining time.  jmags & I are very close to our 3 year anniversary — half spent long distance and half in this apartment, figuring out all of the things that you can’t figure out on gmail chat.

When we all dyed our hair together.

zia & I have lived in a total of 14 apartments together, some for very good reasons and others not so great.  So this feels like the end of a way of life. As we rush rush rush toward it arms outstretched, I didn’t want to forget to say goodbye.

zia & I, Jan. 15, 2007

Some of you may remember that when living in Brooklyn I took a rather dim view of anti-hipster backlash, because the obvious alternatives were much, much worse. Furthermore, as the comic that kicks that post off demonstrates, sometimes hipsters do things that are actually pretty cool.

So a cool thing that some hipsters did last weekend (and will be doing again next weekend, if you live here in town) was perform the Star Trek classic “Amok Time” in a park in Northeast Portland. I went with some degree of incredulity, but left totally floored. I looked around around for web presence, but they don’t seem to have any, and all the press is too busy pretending not to be nerds to convey how great it is. Instead, here are a couple of clips from my tiny camera that will hopefully give you some inkling of the greatness.

– Philip Levine, from “Drum”

So we finished the thing that must be done.  Which is to say, we finished scraping, sanding, washing, priming, caulking, and painting our house, so that it might pass muster come reappraisal.

Apparently, it’s not great if your siding looks like this. So you do some stuff like this:

And this:

And you rope your sister into helping you, and cross your fingers that the roof holds while your boyfriend walks around on it.

Of the six days, the first two were by far the worst, as we’ve been having really intense heat.  They were also the days where we had to wear more protective gear because of the potential lead hazard, and goggles & respirators are extra gross to wear in the direct sun.

Still, there were festive moments.

Not so festive was when we finally had all of our supplies assembled bright and early that first Friday only to find my battery dead.

Or rather, not dead, just corroded where the connector go, or something. Thank you, Stepfather, and thank you to your pocketknife.

I guess I should backtrack a little.  As my last post indicated, we had been waiting around for our appraisal to come back, since all other aspects of the sale seemed to be aligning.  We had two potential issues (or so we thought): the roof, which is clearly in need of replacing, and the sales price.  The current state of the market has led to appraisals coming in low, and since we built our closing costs into the sales price (all of our cash going to the 3.5% down), we could have been facing some conflict with the seller over how to address a discrepancy.  Since you can only get a loan for the appraised value of a house, a number lower than what we’d agreed on would have to have a cash stop-gap.  And as I mentioned, we don’t really have a lot of extra cash around at the moment.

So we get a call from HGTV (who had wanted to capture us finding out about the appraisal results in real time) saying there’s news and they’ll be there to film us when our realtor Steve comes by that evening.  I got this message during my ceramics class and promptly lost the ability to center pots for the rest of the morning.

Steve comes and tells us news twofold.  He’s no shrinking violet & as a former trial attorney has a real flair for drama, so he starts by telling us that the house has appraised 13K short of our agreed upon sales price.  jmags & Sylvia & I just sort of sat and looked back and forth at one another, stunned, not saying anything.  This was very bad news, as there’s no way we could come up with that kind of money. I’d felt so certain this was the right house, and it was very unnerving to appear to lose hold at this point.

Then (cameras still rolling, stupid bright lights still shining) Steve says he’d actually found out about this the Friday prior, and had been talking to the seller’s agent since in an attempt to come up with a plan — he thought we should order a second appraisal — but an hour before our meeting he got a call saying the seller would — get this — drop the sales price by 13K in order to allow the sale to go forward.

!

And the roof was deemed average (what?!).

Glee ensued, along with signing, and calculating how much we’d be saving in down payment, mortgage, and closing costs with the new reduction in price.  It seems that the seller’s original scheme of pricing the house very very low in order to solicit many offers didn’t pan out, as the low listing price was a red flag to the appraiser.

After we all calmed down, Steve told us about the issue with the siding.  Because we’re getting an FHA loan, the appraisals tend to be extra strict (except for roofing apparently) and the places with peeling paint would need to be patched and painted for us to be able to get that newly-reduced loan.  I’ve done a lot of (interior) painting in my time as a renter, and this didn’t seem too challenging.  When we had our inspection, I think we were all so focused on the state of the roof that we didn’t pay too much attention to the flaking paint.  I assumed we’d repaint the house next summer, and hadn’t really thought beyond that.

We were all totally wrong in our estimation of how much patching needed to be done.  We none of us knew, either, that I would turn out to be terrified of extension ladders.

This expression is representative of several of my emotional states, including terror, incredulity, & nausea. Note, though, that my newest vintage eyeglasses match the house surprisingly well.

The last day, yesterday, we finished the work feeling kind of giddy and punchdrunk.  My sister Ginny (also our loan processor) was a great help in keeping our spirits up and in helping jmags with the extension ladder while I worked on a different side of the house.  I couldn’t even really stand to watch him climb it.

The result of our labors is pretty good:

Things seem much smoother and cleaner, and we now know that we’ll need to hire out to have the whole thing done all over again, and properly, in a year or so.  At the moment we’re thinking Futility Now colors: dark taupey grey, black, & yellowish cream.  And a porthole in the front door.

It’s still possible that the reappraisal could fail.  We only have two weeks until closing, and our loan is on its way to the title company, so all should be well, but we won’t know for sure for a day or two or three.  It was strange working so hard on the house, but not being able to go inside at all, and for there to still be someone else living there.

In spite of a few tense exchanges in the heat, jmags and I worked rather well together.  I’m very excited to begin taking on more projects with him.

–from Paul Celan, “O Little Root of a Dream”

This is our home.  Almost.

So lo, the whole appraisal thing happened and ended up putting us in a pretty good position, on the condition that we do some scraping and repainting. We’re going to do this on Friday which, according to weather forecasts, is going to be one BAJILLION degrees. Taking suggestions for hats.