We Need An Exterior Paint Job Badly...

Let's face facts...the exterior of our house is looking kinda fugly...

Well, not the entire exterior of the house but the South and West sides are looking fugly.

One the South side the paint is peeling off like its, its job. It's peeling off right down to the bare wood which seems kinda odd to me. I would think the old lead based paint wouldn't be budging...

Long shot of the south side of the house.

Closer up view.

See? Right down to the wood.

South front of the house.

This is the front corner from the house that everybody can see from the street...nice!

Here's what the window sill looks like in the front of the house.

But hey, check out the new curtains Mrs. Madmadscientist put up.

I forgot to take pictures of the garage doors but they look just as bad...

So far we've had one painting contractor come out and give us a bid on repainting the house....

How Not To Impress Us.

1. Miss the first appt.

2. Miss the 2nd appt.

3. Show up 2hrs late for 3rd appt.

4.Then walk around the house with me constantly trying to down sell me on the type of paint job I want done. 'You don't really need 3 colors do you??'  You don't really want me to scrape off all the old paint do you?? 'Restore the trim?? It'd be a lot faster/cheaper just to remove it!'

5. Take a phone call while I'm with you and proceed to argue about not paying a bill to a supplier for like 10 minutes!!!

6. Spend all of 5 minutes actually looking at the house..don't measure anything...and then come up with a price right there on the spot!?!?!?!?

Argh!! I swear the dude just pulled the biggest number out of his ass that he thought he could get away with... When he said it he even kinda looked at me sideways to see if I blinked... Like he was calculating in his head what the up charge would be because we're in a fancy neighborhood....

Any who, we will not be using this contractor. We need to find someone who is respectful of old Victorians and their special needs.

If anyone knows of a good, quality local painter I'd appreciate hearing about it.

We Need A New Roof!!!

And Now For Something Completely Different.

An entire post about roofs!

We've been talking with roofers recently about getting Chez 3.0 re-roofed....

Here's the situation.

The roof on the garage looks totally shot to us and you can even see where the cap shingles have disintegrated....

We've had two roofers come out so far and look at the house and they both said that the garage roof is completely shot. That the roof was most likely a cheapo 20yr 3 tab shingle that got cooked to death by the lack of venting. I have to admit the garages are SUPER freaking hot even when its not really hot outside.

Here's some shots of the roof of our house from space (don't you just love google!)

The West or front side of the house.

I didn't realize our roof line was so asymmetrical.

Do you see on the front of the house on the second floor between the two sets of bay windows what looks like a flat walkway? It's odd it a little flat roof that is tongue and groove!! Like a floor! Here's a pic.

It doesn't appear to be leaking now but wow, how to insure that it lasts a long time and still looks good?

Also, if you look closer at the little roof over the porch on the left hand side of the picture above you see some more interesting issues.

The north side is quite mossy.

The metal drip-rake edge is put on wrong. Its not supposed to be on top!

Here's you can see the built-up layers of roofing against the fish scale shingles. With no flashing in between. If water runs down that wall where's it going to go???

Here's another shot of the porch roof showing the condition of the shingles.

The East or back side of the house.

Looking out the little window in the gable you can see the shed roof. Which looks like this.

You can also see in the above the weird little flat roof the PO put on the house in the lower left corner. They enclosed an exterior stair well.

Here's a shot of the flat roof from the deck.

Here's a shot through the window.

Both roofers who have seen this say that its a piss-poor job and they are surprised that it doesn't leak.

One issue with fixing this roof is how close it comes to the existing window. Figuring out a way to flash this is going to be difficult I bet.

The North side of the house.

The South side of the house.

An odd thing about the south side of the roof. there is this little ledge that is covered in seriously deteriorated metal. Here's a shot of it through the window.

We've met with two roofers so far and have gotten back proposals from each...

Wow, getting this roof done right is going to cost a pretty penny.

I've got one more roofer scheduled to come by and quote the job but so far the two bids are about 10k apart.

The cheaper bid is from an older established roofer using what I think are old fashioned and slightly substandard materials and methods. The higher bid is from a younger guy and he appears to be using modern materials and methods that are more in line with what my research is telling me a quality roofing job should entail.

I told both roofers that I wanted a quality job that would look nice and be in character for the house/neighborhood and would last at least 40yrs.

Even though its more expensive I got a much better vibe from the younger guy. One thing I liked also about the younger guy was he thought the roofs on the house had a couple of years left in them...the garage shingles are dead he said but the house roof wasn't in super horrible shape.

What might possibly happen if we can't swing the roof is we'll band aid the garage roof through another rainy season and hopefully get the entire place re-roofed next spring.

We'll see what the third guy comes up with.

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YAY!!!!! WE'RE URBAN BEE KEEPERS!!!!!!!

Oh, Wait, No.......

Here's an update to the bees in the wall story.

Well have we got bees....we gots lots and lots and lots of bees....

Y'all will remember from an earlier post that we have a bee hive in the wall on the North side of the house.

When we bought the house it was cold outside and there where only like one or two bees that we'd see.  We knew we had to remove it but we didn't think it was anything that big of a deal...

Well, now that its warm outside the swarm of bees outside the hive entrance is quite HUGE!!!

You can actually see the cloud of bees quite clearly in the afternoon from the neighbors yard....if the cloud of bees is proportional to the size of the hive then...we have a fricken huge hive!!!

Turns out its really hard to take pictures of bees, even with Mrs. Madmadscientist's fancy pants camera but here are a couple of tries.

Those shots were taken in the morning when the swarm was still small. 

I think I've figured out where they are in the structure of the house.

Take a look at this pic.

I can hear a clicking/water dripping noise from that area. I think the bees came in at the pipe penetration and expanded horizontally into the joist bay.

But Wait, There's More!!!

A couple of weeks ago there was like a freaky horror movie sized swarm outside the house for a couple of hours....guess what that means??...yep the original hive got too big for its britches and divided!!

Where did the new colony go???

Oh, about 10 feet to the left and started a new hive!! Also in our walls!!!! Hurray!!!!! We're urban beekeepers!!! I don't know if this is normal but the ground outside the old hive was literally covered with dead bees? Maybe it was a bloody coup?

Here's the entrance to the new hive.

That's the exhaust pipe for an old gas wall heater that was in baby madmadscientist's room at one time....somebody removed the heater and patched the wall but didn't bother to remove the venting pipe!!  I guess that they thought that the single layer of duct tape would be a sufficient barrier....

Here's a shot from the inside. You can just make out the ghosted outline of the old wall heater.

If you put your ear to the wall here you can totally hear bees buzzing and going about their work. It looks like they have access to this entire stud bay....Hurray!!!!!

So, now we've got two hives....all we need now is a chicken coop and we'll be super hip urban farmers!! Hurray!!!!

Help!!!

We need to remove these bees ASAP. My neighbor on that side is getting pretty pissed off at us for not doing it sooner. The bees poop all over their car (it's yellow) and they wash it a couple times a week now....

Also, we can't really reroof or repaint until they are gone...

I looked into having them removed safely by a pro.

It seems like such a raw deal for us. Here's how it works. You pay them ~$600 per hive and they will come out and bust into your walls and remove the bees and the comb and the honey. Then you are responsible for cleaning up the rest of the mess (which I've heard is substantial) and repairing the damage yourself!!! We don't even get to keep the honey!!! All told, I'm estimating that it will cost like $3k to solve this issue....

OR...

I can buy some poison and nuke both hives and be done with it for under $100....

I don't want to do that. I understand how important bees are to the survival of the human race. If the bees go, we go a couple of weeks later...

But c'mon bee keepers...do you see why more hives get nuked than safely removed?

My ideal solution:

I'd like to work with the removal team to remove the portions of the house that need to be in a way that will make it as easy as possible to replace. Then I want the dang honey!!!! We could give it away as gifts to our neighbors to make up for the inconvenience. Then, well, I don't want to pay for it of course...

What I find funny about urban bee keeper folks is when you tell them the situation they really, really, pour on the 'don't kill them please!!!!' stuff but then when you ask them to remove them they're like, 'oh we only take hives if they are in a bush reachable without a ladder'!?!?!?!!? LAME!!

C'mon beekeeper save-the-bees types. Put your money where your mouth is!!!

Realtor Schenanigans Part 4.

This was also written a while ago but I was persuaded not to publish until we closed on Chez 2.0

Good Lord, is this going to be a never ending series?

This next Realtor Story is something that I just think is weird-lame.

I don't think I know of a single Alameda-based Realtor that showed Chez 2.0 to a single client??? Wait, I can think of two off the top of my head....

Okay but here's the weird part.

I know that for sure there were at least 8 potential buyers who wanted to tour Chez 2.0 and their Realtor couldn't be bothered to show it to them!?!?!?!?!?!!?!?

They either had their clients contact my Realtor for a showing directly, or they called him up to arrange for him to show it to their clients??

Seriously, WTF is up with that???

Is that not their job? What's the good reason these people could not show the house to their clients?

I know Chez 2.0 was a unique case where it wasn't going to appeal to a ton of people. In fact, I'd say that these 8 Alameda-based buyers with Alameda-based Realtors who were interested in the house enough to want to schedule a special tour were probably the majority of that pool....

So I ask again, what's the good reason for the Realtors to not do their job? Laziness? Animosity towards me? It's not like Chez 2.0 was very far for any Alameda-based Realtor to go???

Way to go Realtors, earn your pay!

I learned another thing about the business.
In past reviews, I've often said how annoying it is when you go tour an open house and the Realtor showing the house is not the selling Realtor and they don't seem to know a damn single useful thing about the house?  I was always like, what's the friggen point of you taking up space then???

Well, I recently had a Realtor set me straight about why that happens. According to this source, doing open houses is the #1 way for Realtors to get new clients. That sorta makes sense from my experience. Usually when I'm trying to ask the showing Realtor a question they interrupt me half way through to press me about whether or not I have my own Realtor. When I tell them I already do I can see them slump and then they start to act like I'm wasting their time!!!

So, I get why a Realtor would want to show a house which is not their listing. Now I also get why they usually don't know a damn thing about the house, they don't care. They are not there to help sell the house they are there to primarily get new clients. Okay I get that.

Here's what I don't get: The listing agent knows that too!! Why in the hell would they ever, let anyone else show the house?

Seriously, I don't understand this....

Realtor Schenanigans Part 3

This post was originally written on 4-13-11 but I've delayed publishing it until today as I was convinced that I should do nothing to further piss off the Alameda Realtors. I think that I've vagued it up enough..


The title of this post probably should have been...

Third Open House Not Such A Success

What I'm about to relate to you, dear readers, has me sooooo pissed off that I just want to, I don't know what....and the fact that it happened in my house during my open house really makes is personal.

The Story

My Realtor had a personal emergency and couldn't make it to our third open house...so he asked around the offices at blah-blah Realty and got a very eager volunteer to do the open for him...when he told me who the volunteer was I had instant misgivings as I personally do not have a very positive view of this Realtor's character....

Apparently the open went okay with ~25 groups of people attending down from the 35 we've had at previous open houses.

Now, I know that my neighbors have been thinking about buying our house..which we were really excited about as we think that they would be good owners of Chez 2.0. They'd been to every open house and had been working with my Realtor. He'd shown it to them several times and their brother and their father. Point here is that he'd already been working with them for a while.

On that day they went to the open expecting to see our Realtor there and to talk to him about making an offer on our house....instead....that dirtbag Realtor, who was doing my realtor a 'favor', convinced them to drop him and use the dirtbag as shim could 'get them a better deal' or that 'my realtor would screw them over'.  Now I happened to see these neighbors a couple days later in front of Blah Blah Realty as they were waiting to write an offer on my house!!! I chatted a bit with them and that is when I learned what had happened.... Now, I don't blame them, they are first time home buyers and this is their first time EVER making an offer on a house...I know what that's like, they were totally freaked! Up was down, down was up, and they were just terrified....and this dirtbag Realtor took advantage of them while they were in that state and that really pisses me off...as these are nice folks.

Annd shim did them no favors, we know these people, we would love to have them own our house and the process didn't need to be adversarial... we all could have sat down and figured out a price we all could have lived with...helped by the fact that with my Realtor working both ends of the deal I was getting a break in commission which I was hoping to pass on to them in the form of a lower price....now, all that's out the window...

Our History With The Dirtbag

A couple years ago when our Realtor was going through some health issues, this dirtbag Realtor tried to steal us away by telling us: ' Your Realtor is having some health issues and can't give the job his all. You should really go with me as I can give you my all'...not an exact quote but it was something to that effect.

But Wait, There's More

At the same open house he tried to steal another Realtor's clients away!!! I'm told that when this second Realtor found out this Realtor gave shim a good dressing down in front of the entire office.

So, for those of you keeping score, this same Realtor tried to steal us away from our current Realtor in the past, managed to steal away one of our Realtor's current clients and tried unsuccessfully to steal another Realtor's clients during our open house...

Is this Realtor not indicative of everything wrong with this business???

I talked to the boss

I was so pissed off that I called shim's boss and we had a nice long chat where I outlined everything above.

I don't know if anything useful will come of this but I seriously hope they do something about this.


Update
Nothing to update, 'the boss' never got back to me, which he said he'd do. So I've never learned if the dirtbag was disciplined or what...it's been three months since our phone conversation and the only thing he did was ask my Realtor to ask me to not run this piece...


I think the dirtbag is still working there.
Here's the crazy thing...this Realtor has a rep. Talking to other Realtors at other agencies' they knew of DB and knew to steer clear of shim. What I heard most was, 'DB'll try to screw you any way s-he can.' I even talked to several of DB's fellow employees and wow, is this person bad for morale.

In sales, you would never keep a salesperson around who has a rep as a dirtbag and who has tried to, or actually has, stolen their fellow employees clients. Geez, in my former line of work someone like that would have been shit-canned so fast and rode outta the office on a rail.

Ugh...

That's It! Its Official!!!!

Chez Neumansky 2.0 Is Now Officially Someone Else's Problem.

Over a week late but it's done. The title was transferred, some funds were transferred, and now 1310 Pacific Ave. is somebody else's problem.

Originally we were hoping to clear enough money to get the new place repainted and re-roofed....but that's not going to happen...then we were hoping to clear enough money to get one or the other done....but that's not going to happen...Now, we just hope we cleared enough to pay for the legalization of the basement unit...we've already paid over $8k in permit fees for that so far...

At least now with only paying one mortgage, our income is going to be slightly higher than our outgo and we will stop bleeding money.

Sale Post Mortem

Well, let's see....it took waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay longer to sell Chez 2.0 than we ever thought....

I don't have the official MLS info but Zillow says it was on the market for 112 days! Yikes!!! I don't know if the 'days on MLS' figure is to the close of escrow or to when the house is marked pending or what? But still, that's a lot longer than we thought.

Why we thought it would sell faster.

We put the for sale ads up on Craig's list and within a couple of days we had a nice couple tour the house and agree to buy it for the then asking price of $495k!!! Wow, we where stoked!!! The wife was an architect and the husband was a contractor seemed like the perfect fit! Then reality sunk in....they where both in foreclosure on two separate houses!!! No bank in the world was going to loan to them...

This literally happened within 2 days of posting it on Craig's list. We thought, 'dang we must have priced the place right.'

Rundown on Buyers.

Yep, we had more than one group of people interested in the house.

Besides the above.

Then we thought we had it sold again for $475k.  Things were looking great and the buyer was well-qualified for a loan...when it became clear to the buyer that the 203k loan requirements were not going to allow them to use illegal contractors and skirt the permitting laws they bailed as they felt that doing it legally was going to cost too much...

Then we thought we had it sold again for $465k. This time to a contractor who said he wanted to fix the place up for his daughter. Turns out this person could not qualify for the loan either....

Then there was the nice family from Berkeley who agreed to buy the house for $465k but that they couldn't qualify for the loan unless they sold their current house....

It gets fuzzy but it seems like that there were plenty of people who wanted the house, including some very nice neighbors of ours who we really wanted to sell the house to, but who just couldn't qualify for the FHA 203k loan.

What Worked For Us.

I think probably the Craig's list ads were what drove the most people to the open houses. It was also put on the major Real Estate Web Sites but honestly, I think it was Craig's list that drove the most people....it sure didn't seem like it was the local Alameda Real Estate agents trying to sell the house.

What Worked Against Us.

Obviously, the condition of the house. Having stopped mid-project was not a good thing for us. I think that when most people looked at the house all they could see was the mess it was in and not the house it could be when finished.  What was funny was that when people brought their contractors with them the contractors were like, 'All the hard, dirty expensive works been done already. If you are going to do this at all buy this house!!' That's like an actual quote from a couple different contractors.

The FHA 203k loan. For some reason people just couldn't wrap their heads around the idea....we never really could figure out a nice, tight elevator pitch way to get the idea across... That, and the fact that the 203k mortgage is not a cheap way to buy a house and they have pretty strict underwriting standards.

This Blog. I don't think that it's a coincidence that every single person who was interested in the house was either without a real estate agent or had an agent from a different area. I think that the animosity generated by my house reviews among the Alameda Realtor community really bit us on the ass, so to speak. And I'm sure some Realtors reading this are doing a little happy dance now that I 'got mine' but really, was it worth it? Possibly denying yourself a commission and a client a house?

Our Worst Nightmare Come True.

We sold the place to an investment group (for a low ball all-cash offer) who were not the most pleasant people to deal with. Being nickel and dimed to death is a phrase that comes to mind. They say that they are going to remodel the house as a single family and have it back on the market ASAP. One of my old neighbors said that it looks like they are already starting construction which would be interesting as they don't appear to have pulled any permits yet for the extensive remodeling they will have to do....

Of course when it does come on the market I will be there at the first open house and a review will follow.

What We Should Have Done.

Mrs. MadMadScientist did the math and if we would've strategically defaulted on the house back in January we would have come out about $10k ahead of where we are now...but hey, at least we still have our good credit!!! I wonder how much that's worth......

Even though we got screwed on price it feels good to be done with it and to only have one house to worry about...

Almost Done!!!!

The Following Pic Says It All!!!!!!

Got the very last of our stuff out and very shortly Chez Neumansky 2.0 is going to have a new owner...

Going to celebrate tonight with a yummy dinner and a yummy bottle of red wine.

I've been convinced to not write a single thing about the Alameda Real Estate Market until after the house closes...As soon as this place closes expect to see several blistering opinion pieces from me....