jeffpollard.net

A Walk Through Poem

In leu of the exciting day to come tomorrow (our pre-settlement walk through), I decided to get a little poetic tonight:

Eric and I did our scheduled pre-official-walk-through walk through. I'd have to say that we're been really lucky to have Eric around to help with this house-buying thing. In fact, if it weren't for Eric and Brian, we probably wouldn't be closing on our very first house on Monday. Thanks, guys.

So what did we find tonight? Well, we found a good many things that need fixin'. Many of them are simple dry wall problems: a rough place on the wall, a closet that needs some more paint, etc. The worst problem is that the frame for one of our windows in the great room appears to be bent. We had noticed that it looked strange before, but we marked it a few days ago and they replaced the window. We failed to notice that the actual frame of that window is bent. Not sure if they'll have to replace the entire window or not. Hopefully they can just bend it back in shape.

The other big issue is still the hardwood in the foyer/hallway/dinette. Yes, the contractor came back and installed the hardwood in our hallway, but things still aren't peachy. What's the problem? The problem is that the contractor didn't bother to take the room divider wood piece out. Instead, he just butted the new wood peices up to that divider piece. But, they're not all butted up against it flush. Nope, some of them are good, some others have a large gap. Either way, it's definitely NOT the way we had envisioned our foyer/hallway/dinette would look. It's also definitely NOT the way the model looks. The hardwood in the model does not have any kind of divider between the two rooms, and the wood flows smoothly between the rooms.

So I called our community supervisor, Patrick, today to tell him that we still were not satisfied with the floor. I can't put into words how much I dreaded making thhat phone call. Again, I felt guilty complaining about this (now major) problem. But, I realized that if I didn't get this fixed that I would walk through that room every day for the next ___ years and grit my teeth and beat myself up for not getting it fixed. I had to really convince myself to make the phone call.

Luckily, Patrick was open to my complaints as usual. He did mention that it's impossible to make hardwood perfect (without gaps), but I told him that I didn't expect total perfection, I just wanted our floor to look like the model's floor. He said that they (Ryan Homes) are not in the business of making people unhappy, but rather they are in the business of making people happy and if this would make me happy then it would be fixed. He did say that it would not be able to be fixed until early next week or so, but I assured him that this was okay since we weren't planning on moving in until the next weekend. So, it's going to be fixed. I hung up the phone and immediately felt a huge weight lifted from my shoulders. Painful as it was (and will be for them), I had done the right thing.

Well, thus ends my book for tonight. The walk through is at 10am tomorrow. This is great because I get to sleep in a little late.

Here's to the crazy ones...

Inspiration for the day

Here's to the crazy ones,

the misfits,

the rebels,

the troublemakers.

The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules

and they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them,

disagree with them,

glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can't do

is ignore them,

because they change things.

They push the human race forward.

And while some may see them as the crazy ones,

we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to

think they can change the world

are the ones who do.

Think Different.

More cool vintage Apple TV spots >>

Wow! and Whoops!

We went over to the house tonight and were pleasantly surprised and surprisingly shocked. So, do you want the good news or the bad news first? I'll give ya the good:

The good news is that they got a LOT of work done today. Our bannister has been installed and stained, our bar countertop has been installed, and we have carpet downstairs. We have..lots and lots of carpet downstairs...

Which leads me to the bad news: There's too much carpet downstairs. You see, when we decided on the options for the house, we decided to go with hardwood in the foyer and the dinette. The sales lady, Sascha, told us that if we got those two options, then our hardwood would continue down the first floor hallway up until the great room doorway...creating a virtual sea of beautiful hardwood when you open the door (I think first impressions are important).

So what did we find when we arrived at the house? Hardwood in the foyer. Hardwood in the dinette. And grey carpet from the foyer to the great room doorway. My stomach jumped up into my throat and my heart sank down into my pants. I was angry, confused, and sad. Luckily, we noticed that Sascha was still working in the model when we drove through the neighborhood a few minutes previously.

Olivia and I couldn't contain our curiosity. We jumped in the car and went back to the model to find out if they messed up or if we had been misinformed. I felt like a crazed lunitic when I barged into the model, demanding an answer to our burning question, but I managed to contain myself and ask our question in a (fairly) calm manner: "Sascha: In the great room floor plan, if you have hardwood in the dinette and in the foyer, what happens to the first floor hallway?" She replied without hesitation, "It's also done in hardwood." AHH. She had given the correct answer. I'm not quite sure what I would have done if she had said anything else. I don't think I would have been prepared for anything besides what she said.

So, it looks like our builder buddies have a little flub on their hands. I'll call them in the morning to alert them to this problem. I kind of wonder how they could have screwed this up. Putting the grey carpet in the hallway butts it directly against our beige-ish berber carpet in the great room, creating a terrible clash of carpet styles and colors. I am expecting some resistence to my argument tomorrow when I call. In other words, I expect that Bob the Builder (that's not really his name; I just wanted to put that somewhere on this site) will argue that they are correct in installing grey carpet in the hallway. But I'm prepared with ammunition for that battle. Sascha has said that she will back me up on this one...and the way I look at it, if the salesperson sold it to me as a brick house with a sea of hardwood, then by golly that's what I'm going to get. Look for the outcome on this tomorrow. Until then, I've uploaded a butt-load of photos into the house photo gallery, so go check it out!

One week to go

I can't believe it's only a week until we close. I'm starting to really get excited. You know, excited like when you were a kid and couldn't sleep on Christmas Eve? Exactly like that. Maybe more.

We checked in on things Saturday afternoon and found the wood floor dood in the house putting our wood flooring down. It looks AWESOME. It's going to look so amazing in our dining room and foyer, I can't wait. They also had put in all of our toilets, countertops, sinks, and other water fixtures. I took a roll of blue painter's tape in Friday evening and marked some of the spots that we have founf that we've been unhappy with. Amazingly, they've already started fixing some of the drywall flubs that we found, however I'm not sure if I approve of their methodology. How did they patch many of these holes? Tape. Now, maybe it's some special drywall tape or something, but it's still tape, so it bugs me. We've also found a couple more smallish problems that I'll probably be calling them today to voice my displeasure. I struggle with myself everytime I think about calling them to tell them about the problems. I feel guilty that I keep bothering them, but damnit, it's my house and I want it to be right. They'll hate me for bothering them, but I don't care.

This weekend was an extremely productive weekend for me. I accomplished just about everything that I promised myself that I would: change the oil in Olivia's car, post the previous XMUG meeting photos and upcoming meeting info, buy $2,000 worth of appliances for the house, create and post some recruiting materials for CustomTacos.com, and fix various other oddities on CustomTacos. And, I still had time to watch Monsters, Inc., plus the hours of extras that came on the 2-DVD set. It's such an amazing movie. I can't wait until the next Pixar film comes out.

And now, the highlight of the weekend: Friday afternoon, we went and got the mail like we always do. But, in the mail was something very special. A check from CafePress.com. I couldn't believe my eyes. I must have just bareley met my 3-month $10 minimum profit amount. You see, when you sell stuff on CafePress.com, you don't reap 100% of the profit from sales, which sucks. In fact, you ONLY get paid if your store manages to bring in $10 profit in 3 months. So, apparently my CustomTacos.com merchandise store made more sales in the last few weeks that I thought. Amazing!

So, about the appliances. We went to Lowes on Saturday and decided that we were tired of shopping around and just bought our washer, dryer, and refrigerator. Here's what they look like:

Washer

Dryer

Refrigerator

So there ya have it, folks. I'll post some more photos of the house tonight.

The Excitement Intensifies

Every day when we go out to visit the house this week, I get more and more excited. They've really kicked things into high gear since the drywall went up. Here's the skinny:

- The wallls and trim have been primered.

- Our kitchen cabinets are in. They look SOOO good...except the gold knobs, but we've already got our eye on new brushed nickel ones.

- Our dinnette is filled with goodies including our stove, dishwasher, toilets, sinks, light fixtures, and more.

- Some light fixtures have already been installed and most power outlets, light switches, and wall plates are installed.

- Our linoleum floors in our kitchen, bathrooms, and laundry room are done, although they may have some work to do on the floor in our master bathroom.

I guess that's about it. It's hard to believe that we're going to be closing in just 12 days. I'll be getting our homeowner's insurance papers signed today (we ended up going with MetLife - they gave us BY FAR the best rate with good coverage).

I didn't have a chance to download the photos from my camera from last night, but I'll be sure to do that tonight. Check back!

It doesn't pay to be optimistic

...and here we are at Monday again. Funny how it keeps coming around. Funny how I feel like a truck ran over me every Monday morning. Funny how I always wish the weekend was just one day longer. Funny how it's two weeks until we close on the house from TODAY. Funny how I haven't gotten my butt in gear and lined some homeowners insurance. Funny how we haven't locked into an interest rate yet.

But this weekend was good. One of my main goals for the weekend was to move CustomTacos to its new server. Actually, since I've got the site split between two servers, it was a matter of combining the data from the two servers onto this new (semi-dedicated) server. And, did it go smoothly and as planned? Hell no. I started moving files over on Thursday night and testing the new front page to see what problems would arise. None of my CGI scripts worked. None of my PHP pages worked. Bummer. So thus began the troubleshooting process...which just ended last night around 11PM when I finally got (mostly) everything straight on the new server. The DNS change has been made, but it still hasn't propogated itself throughout the Internet. Now we wait.

Progress on the house was especially exciting Friday evening. I hadn't been to the house all week because of house calls, XMUG meetings, and such. Maybe we should only visit the house once a week. Then the progress would be even more exciting. Nah. We'll just continue going every single day as we have for the past three or four months (or maybe more). I've updated the house photo gallery with the latest photos of the inside doors, our baseboard installed, the bannister, shutters, and whole slew of other exciting photos. Ok, maybe not a slew. But there are 4 or 5 new photos. Enjoy.

September 11, 2002

Since this was such a memorable day in history, this is what I did today:

On a more serious note, it really was a pretty moving day. To all those people who complain that they're tired of watching the 9/11 coverage, discussions, and speculation: Maybe you should think about all of the people who never saw the live coverage the first time...you know, the people who will NEVER see the coverage. The people who will never know that THEY are part of history forever.

Wiring: DONE!

Ok ok, I'll crawl out from under my rock to fill you all in on what I've been up to lately. You know, I've taken some criticism in the past few days about not updating my site much recently. My answer to that? Tough. I've just got too much to do to bother writing much here. Sure, I have some time right before bed some nights, but I'm usually so brain-dead by that point that I can't remember what I did that day! Just for kicks, I checked my FTP list in GoLive tonight to see how many websites I've been sticking my hands on lately. Seven. Seven sites, with some sites taking a lot more of my time than others. But, I'll stop complaining about how busy I am and get on with it.

We finally got to get into the house last night and run my ethernet cable. We had our pre-drywall meeting yesterday afternoon where we marked the cable and telephone jacks on the wall. The good news is that the electrical inspector has already come and approved everything. The bad news is that the insulation guy had just started putting up big, pink, itchy insulation upstairs. We went home after the pre-drywall meeting and then came back around 6:00PM to begin running our cable. Finding power was a bit of a problem (as Eric and I expected), but we managed to pull power from the next building over using two very long extension cords. Mike showed up and (using some of his monkey-man) skills was able to climb up into the rafters of the house to help us pull cable. Olivia was extremely helpfulas well. She pulled cable, tacked down cables, and showed us how Go-Go dancers would shake their booty in an unfinished closet. Most of all, thanks to Eric for his guidence and knowledge of all things electrical-related. I'm really glad to finally have this done. I had really been looking forward to it, but the waiting part was killing me. Drywall should go up either today or tomorrow. The Ryan guy said that we should be getting our sidewalks next week sometime. He says that we're still on schedule to be closing on the 30th of September.

Work has been going well. It's been pretty busy the past few days. I've been trying to find (and make) more work for myself to do on the Intranet. For example, I took a (proverbial) step back and looked at our Help Desk section of our Intranet the other day and almost lost my lunch. It's hideous! And half of the stuff is either outdated or not relevant anymore. So, I made up my mind that I was going to begin re-designing the Help Desk portion of the Intranet and make it really great and useful. I did what I always do: think of ideas that push the limits of what our department thinks we should do...and then I try to think of things just outside that area. For example, I think it would be great to have a page where Martin folks can submit a Help Desk call ticket via a web form. The idea has been brought up before and shot down. However, when I suggested it to our project manager yesterday, she seemed to think it was a pretty cool idea. It's simple to create, easy to use, and it just creates yet another method of communication between our customers and us. In other words, it's just another medium for them to inform us of their problems. I can't see how it could go wrong. I really love brainstorming for new ideas. I really miss our late night Whim brainstomring sessions we used to have back in school.

Ok, back to work.