Wide variety of tasks

Have had several doors installed now.  Hardie concrete board siding has gone up, has been caulked and painted in those places that were damaged by the siding removal and new installation of those afore mentioned French doors. The window installation team has also done the siding.  This is as we bought the house, in the laundry room.  The washer and dryer electrical are run through the plywood.  The lattice covers termite damaged wood.  The openings around this door allowed pests to enter, such as mud daubers, rats, and cockroaches. 

The installation team had to rebuild some of the framing around the door, to add back wood to the structure.  

I buy materials, and pay for the labor.  However, their bread and butter is windows, so they are showing up less frequently for siding work.  In fact, as local contractors are so busy with new construction, it has become much more difficult to get anyone to show up, in nearly every trade.  

Called Studio Tile and had discussion about tile installation timing. We have chosen a Versaille laid pattern, in porcelain.  At the end of this journal entry it all looked beautiful as it sat in the shop, but there was trouble in paradise.  The tiles are imported from Italy, and before it was delivered to us, the pallet was dropped.  For some reason, we were not notified, so we had inevitable delays.  The tile company had to trouble-shoot this on their end.  The tiles were finally delivered, but by this time Studio Tile had obligated themselves to do all the flooring in a new condo development and didn’t have spare resources for our installation.  So...we will get back to that in a future post. 

Have an electrician coming to give bid.  He is the only one since the hurricane who has been agreeable to work. I called upwards of 20 electricians before getting a crew to say YES.  In an epiphany, I kept hearing the words from the electrical crews: the project is too big.  The house is too big for us.  Upon hearing this several times, I pressed for more information.  It turns out that many of the local electricians’ bread and butter is servicing generators.  When they are obligated on a “big” project, they don’t have time to service those generators.  I understand! This is like the income for a property manager, or pool servicing, or similar.  So, when the next set of electricians answer the phone and come in to give me a bid, I ask if they can rewire the house, one room at a time.  He blinked a few times, and told me it was an odd question.  But he said YES. At $120 to $180 an hour, and room by room, as they had resources.

Had a Realtor out to do a BPO, or broker’s price opinion.  We are shifting from seller financing to hard money lender.  The hard money underwriting requires an appraiser to verify value.  He said the house is a money pit and the value is in the land. The house came in at the value we needed, and the hard money came into play.  Our monthly is going up from $1500 a month to $4000 a month.  Nice.

I had a plumber stand me up; I had an electrician stand me up.  And so it goes.