We met up with Kate and Zia in Beziers and headed to St. Chinian in a gigantic fancy midnight blue Citroen. Kate is an. . . exciting driver. Whew!

We could see why Kate felt guilty with just the two of them at the house initially.  It is four stories tall.

J and I stayed on the fourth floor, where everything was butter yellows and smooth terrazzo tiles and gigantic bathtub. Ooh la la.

I haven’t done nearly as much traveling as J, and I’m sure it’s come up somewhere already that this is my first time abroad. What I will say is that the few times I have traveled have been longer trips that have allowed me to do things like grocery shop and cook and get a general sense of what daily life is like. It was great fun, then, to go to the supermarche and pick up some cured meats and pasta and veg, and then (over a gas stove, le sigh) throw something together with the sound of cicadas and the long sharp shadows of early evening in the background.

Rather unfairly, the next morning J had to report to work; Kate and Zia and I went off into the mountains, more specifically to St. Pons and Fraisse-sur-Agout.

It was very pretty, and hot. We wandered down to the source of the Jaur, under a rocky outcropping. The air was positively chilling, it was so strange compared to the direct environs. I find nature totally bewildering, in this case it was in a nice way.

When you get to the markets you start by pushing through a ring of stalls that sell shoes and mobile phones, just like any street market in the world. Eventually you get to these sort of arecade-y (in the old sense, not the video game sense) buildings and everything gets Franch Franch Franch (“and Peru!”)

Then we ate delicious quiche because we’d been wandering around for hours and were well on our way to being tres fatigue.

Rather than taming the damn thing, we’ve run off to Parkdale again (geez). Here is a picture of Mount Hood.

When I turned the camera on to take that last picture, the shutter speed was set really low. I thought the grass looked cool all overexposed.

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.

“It looks so nice outside,” they said.  “Let’s go play.”

“Oh, that’s so much better, ya.”

]]> http://futilitynow.com/2009/04/06/throwing-my-life-away/feed/ 0 http://futilitynow.com/2009/02/15/good-year-for-the-roses/ http://futilitynow.com/2009/02/15/good-year-for-the-roses/#comments Mon, 16 Feb 2009 06:20:24 +0000 jmags http://futilitynow.com/?p=139 I know that it’s like all that I ever post here are variants of this particular image, but come on, this one is pretty cool.

And, of course, the wires:

Well, if you’re sick of those two tableaus, you’re in luck, because we went to Portland’s fabulous Rose Garden today.

That’s sort of a weak-sauce picture of Mount Hood. Here’s a better one:

Visiting a rose garden, even in the City of Roses, is a sort of your-mileage-may-vary proposition in February.

Here’s Hazel demonstrating an old adage/Jovie song.

And here are the two of us all overlit, like we’re in the Spice Girls or something.