here is the house...

Doing the Tenant Shuffle

Just when you thought things would have calmed down here with our awesome, completed garden, another curve ball came our way and has had us scrambling like chickens without heads for the past few weeks.  Our 3^rd floor tenant got offered a job overseas and asked to be let out of his lease early which we were more than happy to do as long as we could find a tenant to pick up right where he left off.  The tenant selection process got a bit hairy and there was much yelling and hair pulling regarding the realtors and some extremely unacceptable folks they kept pushing on us. But we finally found someone who seems solid and leases were signed not too long ago.  The only thing that was left was to assess the wear and tear done to the apartment over the last year and a half and spruce the place up a bit for the new tenant. 

As you might remember back in Spring of 2007 when the main renovation was winding to a close and our first contractor Tim was wrapping up the rental apartments, I broke my foot (due to some negligence by his crew in not properly covering a large hole in the basement—but why quibble?) so going up and down the stairs to inspect rental apartment progress was not something I was capable of doing as often as I would have liked.  Thus, a lot of the rental apartment fixtures got that same half-ass treatment we’ve discussed before.  The only difference is I hadn’t lived with them for the past year and half so they weren’t so fresh in my mind.  But we’ve got to see them all in the past few days…the non-green board lined windows covered in mold, the shoddy stainless steel sheets around the bathtub with rusty screws and leaks, the awful patching and flooring finishing job, the non-existent priming job that we paid for, poorly hinged doors, etc.  All pretty standard stuff that we’ve seen in our place as well except for one new and fantastic thing:  it turns out that Tim’s guys who installed the toilet up there made it line up flush with the sub floor but didn’t account for the tiling so the toilet did not form a good seal.  They simply caulked the crap out of it to try to compensate for the height difference.  So evidently it’s been slowly leaking for the past 18 months and caused all sorts of fun damage.  We had a plumber come out who suggested stacking two wax rings on top of one another which he did and which lasted exactly 24 hours before the leaks began.  It’s so nice to know that the poor work ethic is so universal.  So Eric did some research and purchased a cast iron flange which should help us form a tight seal—we plan on installing that tomorrow. 

We’ve already patched and painted what we could, along with scraping away tons of old caulk from around the shower.  The shower is going to be a real problem—we are sure there is a lot of water damage behind those stainless steel sheets—that was Tim’s suggestion and while it seemed like a good idea at the time it has caused us nothing but trouble.  But that’s his specialty, things that look good long enough for the checks to clear and for him to leave you high and dry.  We are planning on ripping them all down and redoing that whole shower area with tile the next time we have a change of tenant.  But we’ll do the best we can with it now.  We’re re-caulking all the seams, replacing the rusted out screws with new stainless one and scraping and paint the non-stainless shelving units that he installed there that have also completed rusted out.  It’s going to be down the wire to have everything ready for Saturday when our new tenant moves in, but hey, that is the way we roll—in chicken without head mode.

One cool thing—the tenants left us this elephant planter that we plan on using in the garden as an outdoor ashtray.  Cause while neither of us smoke we know a lot of people that do and during out redo-housewarming party last weekend people had no place to put their butts.  This should do nicely.  But Jules holds it in the highest of contempt. 

Tag, You’re It

It's never fun to wake up in the morning and realize your property has been vandalized. But yet amidst of weekend full of personal family strife that's exactly what happened. We noticed that a common neighborhood tagger who painted "666" on various houses in our neighborhood has struck last night on us. Admittedly it's wasn't very large, but it's the concept of people purposely messing with our property and vandalizing it that really sticks in my craw. Usually it's people who live the neighborhood so I can't for the life of me understand why they would want to shit all over it. Makes no sense to me at all, but then again and actions of the ignorant rarely do.

The awesome part of this story is that we have two security cameras at the front of our house so a quick review of the tapes shows the vandal very clearly at 4:40 am this morning. The part that shocked us (and really, I'm surprised anything shocks me anymore) was that the vandal was a late 20's, upper middle classes looking white female wearing what appeared to be expensive shoes and carrying an expensive designer handbag. Not exactly the type of person you expect to tag your home now is it? We got two fantastic photos of her face, one of her doing the actual tagging and another as she walked away with her boyfriend. It was also very clear from the video that she didn't specifically target our house; she walked by and then doubled back upon second thought, presumably after seeing a nice flat surface to write on and digs in her bag for the marker. Even though it wasn't a big deal to clean up for us, we knew she was the same person who had done much more damage to neighboring buildings, so we called the police to report it. I'm a firm believer in reporting anything along these lines, as the number of crimes reported each year dictate funding and manpower for each precinct. So the cops came and filed a report and we gave them the two crystal clear photos of the vandal. They were shocked as well, not only by the type of person committing the crime, but by how accurate our camera's caught her face and the exact time. I'm pretty sure nothing will come of it, but just in case we can know we did our part.

Upon Eric's insistence I'm not posting the photos of the vandal here. He is apparently much less vindictive than I am, but he's right in saying that posting them here probably won't get us any closer to nailing her. But if by chance she reads this she'll know that the police have some great photos of her committing a crime they take very seriously.

We were able to get it off with some Goof Off—is there anything that stuff can't remove?

  

Your Light A Splode

You know, Vibia should really market their whole exploding light shtick as a feature. Last week the second of our Vibia Nobel pendant lights in the kitchen literally exploded, this time much worse than the first one. Why was it worse? Well, because when it exploded the glass casing was actually on the light so not only did the entire wire catch on fire, but the glass shattered so loudly that it sounded like a gun went off and shards flew everywhere. Miraculously nothing and no one was hurt, but we had to make yet another call to Vibia to explain what happened. Funnily enough, I checked out the receipt and the light exploded one year plus one week after we bought it. Cursed warranty! But again, Vibia took it back with no questions and within a few days we had a brand new light, with vastly superior design, ready to install. I'm shocked these didn't burn down our house. They must be getting lots of complaints about their initial faulty design to replace these with so few questions asked…um, recall perhaps?

Fun with broken glass!

I like my wires burnt to a crisp…

Good Customer Service, Bad Customer Service

Even with how jaded and misanthropic I am I'm still continually amazed at how bad customer service is the majority of the time. It's absolutely mind boggling that companies don't realize the power of the internet for consumer to share stories and research issues. Case in point is my old post from earlier this year about all the issues we had fixing our $9,000 Thermador range. It's a travesty that a company that charges that much for luxury appliances treats its customers so poorly. Anyway, this post has become the most popular and most visited entry on my site by far and has over 70 comments to date. The comments are mostly from people describing their horror stories in getting support from Thermador on their appliances. An ex-Service Manager of Thermador chimes in quite a bit and discussed the company's changing business practices and lack of commitment to customer service. I can only hope that anyone considering buying Thermador appliances finds my thread and it gives them pause. Even though our stove is now fixed I dread having to deal with Thermador on any issues that might crop up in the future.

So, imagine in the midst of customer service hell that I would actually receive some good service. Some excellent service, actually. About two weeks ago our excellent color changing faucet stopped changing colors, which seems odd considered that is 50% of its job. The LED's are supposed to go from red to blue when the water goes from hot to cold, but one day with no fanfare whatsoever it was eternally stuck on red. The water temperature would change but the LED wouldn't. Curious.

So I called up my sales rep where we bought the thing, Mark from Davis and Warshow, who has always been super attentive and helpful and described the issues to him. He told me he would get in touch with the manufacturer and get back to me. The faucet is made by Hansa but distributed in the US by KWC, so he called them. About an hour later Mark called me back with his contact's info at KWC and asked me to call him directly to describe the issue. I immediate got this rep on the phone and told him what was going on and his response was "Well, that simply will not do. Fax me your receipt and confirm your shipping address" Two days later I had a brand new faucet. Wow! So obviously they've had issues with this faucet, but their speed in replacing it was pretty remarkable. No, the faucet didn't cost as much as the stove, but it was an extremely high end faucet purchase so this is the type of service you would expect after purchasing such an expensive product.

Eric installed the faucet with a little trouble (since it is European it required special metric tools that he had to go out and buy) but he managed to get it working in a little over a day. Interesting enough, it appears that Hansa discovered some issues with the faucet and resolved it with this version. The one had a self-leveling installation bracket that keeps the faucet level. We are thinking perhaps the level was off and the water bounced back and someone got into the electronics. Now the faucet has no water-bounce back and the design is mostly similar but slight sleeker and with more streamlined looking LED's. We couldn't be happier to have our new faucet. So internet user, you want a Hansacanyon, or any other faucet from Hansa or KWC, look no further. They have great service and I highly recommend them. They actually realize that it is a good business move not to treat your customers like crap.

In fact the only one's traumatized by the faucet swap out were the cats, since they have both come to love drinking out of it. As Eric was working on the reinstall they circled around him like vultures, eager for more faucet-lapping action.

Vincent gets his last licks in from the old faucet

But once the water is disconnected he is not pleased. How can you deny that face?

Bonus pic – new shiny Hansacanyon innards!

Is there a third option?

Could he be cryogenically frozen in some state between life and death?

I seriously need to be paid to be this type of "expert".

UPDATE:  It just occurred to me that CNN might be telling us that Bin Laden is spinning us right round baby right round like a record baby, etc, etc...

Election T-shirts abound

There's no better way to mask your bitter disappointment and that feeling of impending doom then by wearing a clever shirt. Here's are some good ones to chose from:

For some debate humor you can buy this shirt here

Show Jon Stewart your love (and fuck that bow tie wearing bitch) here

More debate humor. You gotta love it and buy it here

But this one is my personal favorite--Hahaha! T-Shirt hell has this one and some other gems.

Fun with Cross Posting

Metblogs co-founder Sean Bonner asked us all to share our election stories on our on respecitive Metroblogging site, so here's mine. He didn't ask us to share our bitter disappointment, but you can read some of that up there too in the comments.

Because blood is thinner than oil!

Still, according to Jon Stewart, you can't trust CNN either.

But this is pretty funny.

So here's a little story...

Some shit you just CAN'T make up. Kinda like Prince making pancakes. The purpose of this site is to document the woahs and triumphs of my househunt, purchase and renovations in beautiful Brooklyn NY. We're starting a little late in the game, but every once and a while I will post about something that happened in the past and give you some background information. And that is how is works. Any questions? No? Well then let's begin, shall we?