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04/08/2008: "Good morning. Your house is ugly."
Sometimes things fall into place in weird ways. Take yesterday for instance.
Actually, I should back up a little. Dave and I have been in this house since October, 2001. Slowly, slowly, we're doing those home improvements all homeowners are faced with. We redid the guest bathroom a few years ago. Last year we redid the kitchen. At the same time, we removed all the pink tile from the landing and family room and replaced it with Amtico linoleum that looks like wood flooring but doesn't scratch like it (the stuff is amazing). We replaced the aluminum framed windows with double paned. Got new blinds and curtains.
The List of Things To Do Around The House (known around here as just The List, as in, "Crap, that pipe is leaking. Put it on The List"), ever lengthening, gets tackled in one way or another every spring. We never get everything done, because then if we did we'd have to die or something, right? Isn't that the rule? You buy a house, you work on it and work on it and work on it and when you're finally done with everything... you're too old to enjoy it.
This spring we're again looking at The List and prioritizing. We have the ability to do some bigger stuff than usual at the moment, and Dessa's arrival has spurred us to look into redoing our yard in a major overhaul. Currently the yard is weedy and generally crappy looking but even at its best it's not ideal. There's a smallish patio consisting of these rough paving brick-stone things that are actually meant for building retaining walls. Dangerous when you're wearing high heels and impossible to ride a bike or Big Wheels over (not that I'm doing any of that. I'm thinking of my kid). These stones-cum-bricks, in fact, make up the better part of our non-organic landscaping, front yard and back. I hate them.
We've been trying to get our regular landscaping guy to come out to talk about redoing the place for weeks. When he finally did make it down our way, the conversation led us to believe it was going to be too expensive in any case, but we're still waiting to hear back from him about a proposal and estimate. That was weeks ago.
And so we come to yesterday afternoon. There was a knock at the door and when I opened it there was a husky Islander on my porch (Samoan, maybe. Possibly Hawaiian. I dunno but he has a really cool tattoo on his arm...). Anyway, he introduced himself and said he owned a concrete and landscape company and was working around the corner from us. He'd noticed as he was driving by that we had these rough paving stones in the front and that we must have a baby because the stroller was on the porch. The paving stones would be really bad with the baby. Would we be interested in getting an estimate on replacing the stones with concrete?
Boy howdy, would I! I called Dave down, telling him, "Wow, our house looks so crappy that strangers are begging us to let them fix it!" And to some extent, that's true - the effect of these stupid bricks is very 1970's and not in a retro-kitchy-keen-neat-o way. Between them and our avocado green housepaint, our house looks sort of... fugly. (Never fear. Getting the house painted is very high priority on The List). He left us with a book of pictures of work his company had done and promised to return in the morning to talk further.
This morning he came back, took measurements and we tossed ideas around. He spent a while adding up square footage and... whatever else one does when making an estimate. Then he spent a few minutes explaining everything that the estimate would include. Removal of all the bricks - front and back. Pouring of concrete to replace the bricks in the front. Extension of the patio to about double it's current size. Redoing the lawn and sprinkler system. Adding a cement mow strip around the lawn. Etc, etc, etc. The more he said, the more astronomical I expected the cost to be.
And then he quoted a number so reasonable I almost passed out. Needless to say, he got the job. He's drawing up a contract at the moment and will be back with it this afternoon.
Timing is everything. I guess sometimes it pays to tell people their house is ugly. It's certainly going to pay off for him!
[Edited at 3 pm to add: Speaking of timing, he's got his guys in my backyard right now, demolishing the patio. When I said he works fast, I meant light speed.]
Notes from a Yarn Hacker
