The Renovation Dissertation, Part 6

Our group continues to expand and become even more international. Tony, Luke’s brother and our master carpenter, returned from Miami this week to be on hand to supervise the framing, cabinet and millwork installation, and to give me a hug since I hadn’t seen him for about five years. Freshly back from the Sunshine State, he noticed it had started to rain and then, in mid-conversation, ran out to his new car to find he had left his sunroof open – soggy seats and a wet ride home for poor Tony, I expect.

Mack’s crew of electricians came as a surprise – they’re from the Ukraine! One of them reminds me of the bad-guy-from-another-planet, Talec, played by German-born actor Matthias Hues in the 1990 Dolph Lundgren movie, I Come in Peace, albeit with more hair and less muscle. (Hey, I never claimed to be a highbrow film enthusiast!)

Tomorrow we order the kitchen cabinets, a beautiful tight-grained Alder in a flat panel, frameless design with a warm brown, Chestnut finish. Yum! The open den on the second floor will contain a built-in office credenza and bookshelves in a similar style with a finish called Rouge, slightly redder than the Chestnut as you might imagine, but very elegant. To top it off, the cabinets in the master suite “refreshment center” (see photo) will echo those in the den, and that area will be outfitted with a bar sink, a small refrigerator and a mini-microwave for popcorn, sodas and a movie in bed or that first cup of coffee in the morning. (Sounds like a real estate ad, doesn’t it?)

Karen and I had great fun at the condo board meeting last Thursday. Everyone welcomed us warmly and we got to meet several neighbors. We learned that the condo is incredibly well-sustained and has reserves of $94,000 – not bad for a group of only 53 homes! We also got a parking pass and chatted with John D., the appointed “enforcer” of parking and monitor of work done by the condo’s subcontractors. Good man to know. With any luck, we’ll not encounter him in his official position.

So far, we are on target for plumbing and electrical inspections by the middle of the coming week. I am headed over today with four new bathroom fans to be roughed in before inspection and on Tuesday, I will be meeting with a representative from a company that fabricates cable railings to price out our contemporary staircase rails and posts. What a treat! Then I can post a posting about posts. Whaddyathink?

The Renovation Dissertation, Part 5

Greetings to all from Valerie (a.k.a. Bobbie Vila) Blake! Yes, This Old House is now on target to become Someone’s New House. It is now affectionately known as “The Job Site.” Karen also has a new title – The Queen of Riggs Street. Yes, Riggs Street at 14th in Logan Circle. We finally settled on February 27th and I’ve barely had time to take a breath since.

In the past two weeks we have accomplished the following:

* Obtained permits,
* Completed demolition,
* Finished about 15% of the plumbing,
* Finished 50% or more of the electrical,
* Designed the kitchen & baths,
* Ordered gobs of materials & supplies, and
* Spent an obscene amount of money.

The general idea here is to make a profit while using high quality construction techniques and materials deliver a superior product. I know we have the latter well in hand, but I will reserve judgment on the former until we have finished the purchasing phase of the project and see what the spring real estate market has in store for us.

The construction crew is a cast of characters. Our general contractor, Luke Stewart of Luma, Inc. (lumainteriors@comcast.net), refers to working on my projects as “creating art with Valerie.” Luke has done tons of projects for my clients and me over the past eight years. He is also affectionately known as “Sweet Baby Luke,” lead crooner of Black Sheep, to those of you who moved to the island beat at my welcome back and anniversary party last summer. Although he has lived in this country most of his life, he can still break into his native Jamaican patois at will.

Mack, the electrician, originally from the island of Greneda, is a man on a mission. Give him a plan and he’s the executioner. Bobby, our Jamaican plumber, says, “Tell me what you want and leave ma alone, Mon.” He’s a perfectionist who works his magic based on photographs and specification sheets.

David is our Demolition Man (and framing and drywall guru). He is Hispanic and supervises a small contingent of equally talented construction guys. Luke refers to him as his “right-hand man,” an inside joke if you haven’t yet met David, who his left arm below the elbow years ago. It’s simply amazing to watch him heft construction debris onto his left shoulder and balance it all the way out to the dump truck. This is one man who has not let anything stand in the way of success!

Lorrie Addison (ladesigner1@verizon.net), our kitchen designer, has done 8 kitchens for me in the past 10 years. She switched companies just as we were beginning this project and now works for Stuart Kitchens in the Lorton area. Lorrie’s best asset is the ability to take a semi-custom cabinet product and add just the right touches of glitz to make the entire project look high-end. We thank you, Lorrie, from the bottom of our pocketbooks.

Donald Williams (billiboix3@hotmail.com) and his partner, Johnnie (the Stand-up Comedian) are in charge of landscaping and a variety of other tasks. Donald is a local, my neighbor in Brookland, and a jack-of-all-trades who runs both Williams in Brookland Landscaping and D. L. Williams Auto Detailing (a must for real estate agents).

Our suppliers are numerous, ranging from Barron’s Lumber in Rockville, to Lumber Liquidators in the College Park area to a host of Internet vendors. I know we’ve come a long way when I can sit in my home office in my jammies and order faucets, cabinet knobs, lighting fixtures and, yes, toilets at 3 a.m.

So far, I have learned three new lessons.

Don’t bother with fancy moulding on the inside of closets. We spent money on demolition there and now have to replace in kind at additional expense.

Expect things to be delivered to the wrong place. I sent three notes to the vendor to use the job site address for delivery and yet I still have three toilets sitting in my garage at home, looking like a series of plywood-encased thrones for the Royal Family of Riggs Street.

Expect the wrong things to be delivered. I returned home last Tuesday to discover that my husband had kindly accepted delivery of a package for me. Well, it didn’t look like anything I had ordered, so I opened it to find a very nice air nail gun for attaching moulding. Not that it wouldn’t be handy, but it was supposed to be a jetted shower fixture. I’d rather be sprayed with water jets than nails anytime!

Karen, I think, has had the toughest job this week – trying to get signatures from the neighbors in support of our exterior renovations that must be approved by the condo board. Luckily, there seem to be several retirees among the neighbors and she was successful in time for us to submit the request to the condo board tomorrow evening. She’s a trooper and now knows most of the neighbors.

I, on the other hand, was able to introduce her to G***, who is the neighborhood “stand-on-the-corner” guy. I always make it a point to meet the local entrepreneurs.

The Renovation Dissertation, Part 4

Yeah, OK. I know that by now those of you who have been following along are thinking, “So what happened? Why haven’t we heard anything more since they bought the property?”

Well, I gotta tell you that even agents and lenders are not immune to our own bureaucracy.

Unlike the folks on Flip That House, our contractors are chomping at the bit to begin, our permit applications are in process, our suppliers are tapping their feet waiting to ship our cabinets and fixtures, and our own creative juices are flowing like a burst pipe in an unwinterized, bank-owned property.

The problem? An obscure change in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac procedures that require that the direct lender (the bank to whom our loan will be sold) review condominium documents!

Now, I ask those of you who own condominiums (condominia?) – How much time did you really spend reading those documents? Sure, I know I told you to go over them, to make sure the reserves were sufficient, that you really could keep your 200 pound Chihuahua and that you were allowed to play your Barry Manilow CDs on full volume after midnight, but did you really go through all 300 pages? Never fear! Now your mortgage bank will do it for you.

But here’s the catch…

They have to keep from losing the documents when you send them.

First, let me applaud all the listing agents, loan processors and property managers out there who do everything possible to keep the process moving along by assembling, obtaining and transmitting these valuable documents. Most of the time, this procedure is routine. The documents are simply another set of checks and balances to raise the buyer’s comfort level with the purchase (or make him run screaming from fee increases and special assessments).

Even the bank reviewers need our sympathy. They are now buried in a ton of paper, trying to sift through ground leases and insurance forms and the impact of commercial storefronts on the ground floor of high-rise buildings. Reading War and Peace would be easier (and probably faster). They ask for only 3-5 days to accomplish this task.

In our case, we are simply asking 3-5 days from when? We got our documents a bit late due to an emergency situation that is totally understandable, but well within the timelines for closing. In this case, they were not contained in a three-ring binder, on a CD-ROM, or simply stapled together, but were bound in hard cover. Try to stick that in a copier! Page by page later, by the next business day after we received them, we had a viable copy which we gave to our processor to transmit to the bank.

Our processor scanned and e-mailed them. The bank lost them. She faxed them. They lost them. She e-mailed and faxed them again. Feeling comfortable, she took a couple of days off. Guess what? They lost them! I think our 3-5 days started about four days after she first sent them, but boy was it fun to read her e-mails to the bank once she returned to work. She was not happy and was pretty direct about letting them know it.

In the days of Bonnie & Clyde, people were taken hostage in banks. Now the banks take people hostage outside their homes. Instead of settling on Friday, Karen and I had a great lunch in Bethesda at Mon Ami Gabi, where the pommes frites are simply amazing and our waiter, Omar (a fellow Boomer), kept us in stitches with childhood references to 1960’s television commercials.

My cup is always half full. Now we will get to do it again on Monday (or maybe Tuesday if the condo reviewer isn’t old enough to have taken an Evelyn Wood speed reading course). Omar awaits.