The past week has been very stressful. I say that as though I expect moving to be the most pleasant thing in the world. Of course it isn’t! There’s something to be broken or damaged for sure, and even without that it’s just exhausting. You’re taking all your possessions in the world and moving them from one place to another. Most people tend to upgrade when they move (unless of course the kids move out), so with every move and every bigger living space you acquire more items to take with you to the next place. This was, of course, no different for Patrick and I. We moved from an approximately 550 square foot apartment to an approximately 1,300 square foot loft. Quite an increase! So over the past year and a half of living there we have acquired several pieces of furniture. That is why we decided that since we don’t anticipate on moving again anytime soon, and since we have a bunch more furniture (including heavy and big pieces at that) that it was time to spend a little extra money and hire a moving crew…

Monday, January 29th
We had been procrastinating on doing too much packing until the weekend before the move. Of course most of our packing was done on Monday, probably until about 2:00am. Then again, in our defense, we had been to the house probably at least twice a day for the past week before to check up on the final touches (or well, I shouldn’t jump ahead of myself here since we are now in the house and the final touches are still being worked on!). So if you take that time into consideration we didn’t have much other time left to worry too much about packing. I think there is not much more to be said about packing – it was unpleasant and we realized, as with every move, that we have way too much crap that we don’t use. (Did we throw it away? Of course not, teehee).

I will however add that liquor stores make an awesome place for free moving boxes!

Apart from moving we had a house dilemma (the day before moving in? Of course there had to be something coming up!). Since we had to get all our utilities transferred from the loft to the house we thought it would be wise to get the gas hooked up on Monday. That way the heat could be turned on Monday and the house would be warm by the time we would move in Tuesday. Seems to make sense, right? (Items such as electricity and water had of course already been turned on a while ago) So we called the previous week to inform the gas company of our change and arranged the Monday gas installation. Since the house had been sitting empty the gas company had taken away the gas meter, so that was something else they’d have to bring back. Sometime Monday morning we received the call that the gas guy was on the way. We jetted to the house and arrived after him as he had been right around the corner. We came there just in time for him to inform us that there was a leak in the house! He mentioned leaks by the new range outlet, the living room fireplace, and I think also something about the crawl space. After speaking with his office he was asked to take the newly installed meter back out until the issue was fixed! In addition he thought that we wouldn’t be able to get anyone back out until Wednesday or Thursday!! This of course to our horror after our landlord had just told us she heard that an ice storm was due to blow through Georgia Wednesday evening, and one of the subs speaking of 19°F temperatures as well! Not good. We of course immediately called our contractor, Melisa, and informed her of the bad news. She was a little surprised as she had told the HVAC guy (who was in charge of gas related items), to pressure test the lines. This of course meant he had not done so. She said she would get him to come over right away to address the issue. In the meanwhile we drove back to the loft and Patrick was on the phone with the gas company. He explained our dilemma and of the need to please get the gas turned back on based on the promise that the leaks would be fixed. The person was able to arrange another visit for the next day, Tuesday – moving day. That was of course quite a relief based on the “Wednesday to Thursday” estimate by the gas guy that had come out (whom, I may add, was a very nice guy despite the frightening news).

Tuesday, January 30th
Moving day! Based on recommendations from a former co-worker we hired Buckhead Movers to do the work for us. They charged $120/hour with a minimum of 3 hours. I filled out their little estimating form online and received a call to have the details worked out. The 3-man moving crew was scheduled for 9:00am. They called probably an hour before to tell us they were on their way but may be running a few minutes behind. That was fine with us since we still had to try and get a few more things packed up as well. They showed up at about 9:10 and had Patrick sign the paperwork at about 9:13 and the clock started ticking.

Patrick and I had tried to move as much of the furniture by the door so that they would be able to quickly carry everything to the truck (Photo). We tried to protect some items such as mirrors with bubble wrap, but they additionally brought blankets to wrap most of the furniture, and some big plastic wrap to cover the couches. So the 3 of them got everything packed in the truck fairly quickly. Items that we did not allow them to move were things such as the computer, TV, DVD player, art work, etc. In other words electronics and other valuables or breakables that we just didn’t want to risk having anything happen to.

The guys then followed us in the truck to our house. The subs were already there and at work, so they had to work around the movers. Patrick had the idea to move all of our belongings into the 3 bedrooms. We knew how dirty and fingerprint covered all the doors and door moldings looked, so we didn’t want the same look/trend for our couches, etc.! So we had everything crammed away. In the meanwhile the clock started moving awfully close to 12:10 … the 3-hour time minimum. The truck was starting to look empty, but you never know when movers may start taking their time to unload in order to extend the time. I was really holding my breath towards the end, but they finished at 12:15, so essentially 3 hours and 5 minutes since he said the time had started. Now 5 minutes may not be over by much, but you never know what these guys are told, so if someone’s a real anal person they could have said that this is essentially the next 15 minute increment (which I believe was the rate after the initial 3-hour minimum). Thankfully the crew leader left it at that rate, which I was really happy about. Our old co-worker had mentioned something about a tip, but we didn’t really have any idea what was appropriate. Patrick thought $20 a guy, I thought $10 a guy – so we compromised and gave them $45 ($15 per mover).

Since I was curious how close we were with our amount I thought I would look it up real quick. This is what I found at www.findalink.net/tippingetiquette.php:

Tipping occurs at the completion of the job. Consider providing lunch if the move extends over lunch, and always provide beverages for the movers.

* One mover – limited move – 1-10 items and nothing over 20 pounds – $10-20
* One mover – difficult move – The degree of difficulty changes based upon stairs, narrow passages, small elevators, large or heavy items, appliances, etc. – $20-50.
* Multiple movers – Basically tip each mover the same as above, but lower it by $5-10 for each mover. Feel free to pool the tip and give it to the supervisor for distribution, but don’t lower the amount because you combined it. The problem with combining the tip is that you cannot reward people based upon their individual performances.
* Car Shipping – There is not much information available about tipping the truck drivers. $20-25 is probably appropriate.

Based on this “tipping etiquette” I think we did alright with our $15 per multi-mover. One thing that we didn’t provide is beverages – oops! Not like everything was pretty much packed up anyway. Oh well. Maybe I at least helped someone else out by re-posting this!

Things are becoming such a blur based on this insane week, but I want to say that right after the movers left and we were getting ready to head back to the loft to collect some more items, we received a phone call from the gas guy. He was right around the corner and ready to come by again! So we stayed and he came and installed the gas meter again (Photo). He did whatever he needed to do to figure out if there were still leaks, and thankfully none remained. The next step was to turn on some gas appliances to make sure everything was a-ok. The subs had set up the range, and the furnace for the heat was ready to go too. So he tried to get the range going. And he tried. And he tried. And he tried some more. And he tried for what was probably 5 minutes. It wouldn’t come on. Alright, so everyone’s thought was “let’s try the furnace.” And he tried, and he tried, and he tried some more. Nothing. He crawled around the crawl space a bit and determined that the gas pipes were coming into the house at the right size, but then for some reason became larger inside the house, then smaller again around where all the appliances were hooked up. His conclusion was that due to this larger pipe the gas pressure was not able to build up enough to make the appliances get started. Unfortunately there was nothing more he was able to do at this point. He told us that he would not remove the gas meter this time. He obviously knew there were no leaks; that it was just a matter of getting this large pipe fixed to get things to work. He said he would just turn it off, so once we got this resolved we would be able to turn everything back on ourselves and have things working. The good news was that the gas was there and ready for us to use. The bad news was that we still did not have heat, hot water, or a stove to use.

I can’t say for sure what happened next, but I imagine that we called our contractor to let her know the situation, then headed back to the loft to pack more items and returned to the house. What I do remember is that it was around 6:00pm – at some point Patrick and I had talked about contractor etiquette based on a conversation I had had with my 86-year old German g’ma. When I had moaned to her about some of the construction troubles she said “why don’t you bring them a beer or some lunch or something … that will make them work better.” For those not familiar with European contractor etiquette, this is the norm over there. At least I know it is in Spain and Germany. I had to smile and tell my g’ma that this was “not the way we do things in America.” I think she still did not quite “get” that you can’t do that kind of thing in America. In any case, Patrick was determined to try it out on our American contractors. We ourselves had had a tough day with the move and everything and could use a beer, but he also wanted to offer the contractor and the HVAC guy and the plumber a beer. All of them were in the crawl space. The HVAC guy was busy laying a new gas line that would solve the gas pressure issue (of course to our shock he told us it was about $320 for a roll of this pipe alone!!). The plumber was busy installing the hot water heater. But of course this isn’t Europe, this is America (the land of the free and the home of the sue-happy), and you just don’t do this. Our contractor laughed and said politely that they don’t drink on the job and not to give the guys any wrong ideas. So Patrick and I chilled in the crawl space with the guys and our beer, and watched them work. Finally, at about 6:30pm, the gas line was installed and everything worked fine. The heat was turned on!! We had already pictured such horror stories of having to find our sleeping bags and spending a night in the loft on the floor and what not, but thankfully we would not have to go that route. All we had to do was open the windows for a little while to let everything burn off the pipes. Then things were slowly getting warmed up, woohoo! No Patrickicles or Stefficicles.

Our house was a mess, we were exhausted – but we had heat, we had a set-up bed (Photo), we had each other, and we had a house. Our house.

Wednesday, January 31st
I think neither Patrick nor I slept very well the first night. You would think we would have been so exhausted it wouldn’t have mattered. But I think the change of environment, the light peeking through the blinds in the morning, and the paranoia of the contractors showing up early left us with some uneasy sleep. So we got up, unshowered and putting on our dirty clothes from the day before, and I managed to scrape together a few things to make us bagels and milk for breakfast (Photo).

Again, things have become a blur and all I remember is that we went to the loft to take a shower (but put our old clothes back on since our clean clothes were somewhere among the insane pile of never-to-be-found items crammed in one of the three bedrooms), and probably pack a bunch more fragile stuff to take back with us to the house.

Maybe this is a good time to mention that I think the plumber had come back Monday and Tuesday to work on the stuff that he should have probably worked on ages ago. Of course I remember him working on the water heater the night before. I think just about every plumbing related item had something or another wrong with it. Everything’s such a big blur that I don’t even recall what I have and haven’t listed that has been messed up. I think our list included items such as:

– Little hot water pressure in kitchen sink
– Leak in kitchen sink – leaving lake in cabinet (Photo)
– Toilet is leaking
– Bathtub faucet sprays funny
– Shower has to pressure
– Bath/shower nozzles turn wrong
– Bath/shower nozzles stick out too far

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other items, but I just can’t think of them right now. Brain’s exhausted and all.

Thursday, February 1st
The new month greeted us with some nasty weather. It was cold and wet and gross. The subs Gus and Jim were supposed to bring over wood for the kitchen-built in, but we talked to our contractor and she said the guys weren’t going to come by that day because of the rain. The wood would get wet and nobody wants that.

In the meanwhile we found a few unpleasant things. For one thing, due to the rain, our back door was leaking again. Since there are no drainage pipes the water seems to be splashing onto the back steps and then back towards the door and into the house. This has been leaving somewhat of a puddle every time it has rained (Photo). However, there was also water coming down the drywall (Photo), a place that I had seen water once before, but not really again after, so we thought there was no longer a problem with it. The wet streak down the wall proved otherwise. Melisa asked me to draw lines with a pencil how far the water was going, and she was going to have her roof guy come out at some point.

Additionally we realized that the kitchen sink was leaking water into the base cabinets. Thankfully we noticed and hopefully there wasn’t too much damage to the cabinet. And the third unpleasant item was the fact that our bathtub had a crack! Considering how much trouble we’ve had related to the damn tub we were not very excited at all to see the crack. Of course at this point we freaked out while we thought of the worst scenario possible – the tub would have to be taken out and the snowball effect that would have, and who would pay for this, etc. We called Melisa and she calmed us down when she said this happens quite often and that she will get a “tub doctor” out that can patch it up. Since we have no way of knowing who actually cracked it (since there’s been so many people standing and working around that tub), so it looks like it’ll be a cost that will fall back on us. *sigh* At least that’s better than hearing that we’ll have to replace the entire tub!

The good news for Thursday was the telephone. Or well, the good news in a bad situation since we were supposed to have a working phone line by the time we moved in Tuesday! We had scheduled the old phone to be switched off Tuesday, and the new one to be connected at the same time. Of course it would have been way too easy if everything had worked out that easily. So of course Tuesday morning the loft phone was dead, but the house phone was not on. This is something we had been dreading, considering that we’re a 90% web-based business and need that internet connection to make $$$! Patrick talked to our phone provider and they said it was still “pending.” In addition he found out that they somehow managed to forget to transfer our DSL. When you buy a package that includes phone and DSL and ask to get your phone line transferred you would think that it would include the DSL. Again, that seems to be too logical. So now we were told that since the DSL had been turned off and the old phone was off that the DSL couldn’t simply be transferred. So for some reason we had to re-sign up for the service, and of course that wouldn’t be possible until the phone line was working. In the late morning the doorbell rang. It was our phone provider! He was there for the DSL. We explained to him that our phone line wasn’t even working yet, so he said he would get it hooked up (yay!). It took him about 2 hours of climbing in our attic and on our roof (in the rain!) and doing some rewiring because somehow our phone lines weren’t right or something. In any case, he fixed it, and by lunch time we had a working phone line as well as working internet. Back online!

Friday, February 2nd
Friday Gus and Jim came back and worked some on our kitchen built-in. They framed it and it only needs shelves and the doors put back on now (Photo).

Since we now had internet again we tried to get back on our work schedule.

In the meanwhile Friday evening was also our first real day of unpacking. The contractors would be away for the weekend, and we would have to try to get our life back to normal. And the best way to do that is to get your belongings unpacked and stored away in a normal fashion so that you can go on with your day-to-day routine. And so I spent the entire evening unpacking the kitchen. I think I spent about 7 hours doing this (Photo). I never thought it would take me so long, but of course I didn’t just want to unpack things and cramp them in random cabinets. You have to put items in logical places. In the meanwhile Patrick was working on miscellaneous things like patching the ceiling where our chandelier had been put up (Photo). And that’s how it somehow became 2:30am.

Saturday, February 3rd
Saturday was spent doing more cleaning and unpacking (Photo). We spent the majority of the day on the office so that even if we’d have to crawl over boxes to get to our bed, we’d at least have a regular working environment. This also consisted of re-moving all those boxes that were in the office. Of course some of the boxes were unpacked, but the additional boxes were now cramped into the dining room corners. Since things were a little more calm we finally popped our bottle of champagne and toasted us living in our new house – something we’d been trying to do since the move on Tuesday (Photo).

Sunday, February 4th
Up until Sunday there hadn’t been much privacy in the house, aside from the back rooms. The living room (and front bedroom) didn’t have any curtains or blinds and you could see straight through from the street. Patrick had been very eager to get wooden blinds. When we were at Lowe’s the lady recommended the faux blinds. They looked just like wooden ones, but she said they had the advantage of never needing to be repainted and they also wouldn’t warp over time. In addition they were about $5 cheaper. So we decided to go with the faux wooden blinds instead. For now we only decided on blinds for the windows facing the street so that we could have privacy. Since they’re not the cheapest items to buy we were going to hold off a short while to buy more.

We installed the living room blinds and moved the dining room table from the living room into the dining room. Now we’d have privacy to watch TV in the living room, and a table in the dining room to eat at – even if it was surrounded by boxes (Photo).

Monday, February 5th
On Monday the port-a-potty was taken away. Our driveway is actually clear now from any construction items (Photo). In addition, the HVAC guy came out and made the gas lines for our dryer, so we were finally able to wash clothes again (Photo)! Patrick also decided to tackle the dining room bay window. He cleared everything off and vacuumed, Simple Greened everything, and removed an old electrical outlet, presumably used for a window air conditioning unit (Photo).

Tuesday, February 6th
Aside from our one-week living here anniversary Patrick became sick with a fever, so we didn’t work on too much. Except I started my essay of a blog…

Wednesday, February 7th
Since we were expecting a guest for the weekend (guests already, woohoo!) we determined that it might be a good idea to put a door on the bathroom. We ordered some replica hinges with the balls, but since those wouldn’t come for another while we put the door back on with the old hinges. The lock we had wasn’t working, but at least the bathroom now got a door (Photo)!

Melisa also had one of her guys over to do small miscellaneous installations such as putting the handles on the kitchen cabinets (Photo) and framing out the little laundry faucet box (which wasn’t quite done to our imagination so they’ll have to re-work that).

The HVAC guy, Mark, also came back out to work on some things, including replacing the range vent hood that had gotten damaged during the granite counter top installation (Photo). Another thing he had to do was put a liner in the chimneys based on the inspector. He then asked us when we would like the HVAC inspector to come back by for final HVAC inspection because the gas would have to be shut off during this time for proper inspection – meaning no heat in the house! We told him the next day (Thursday) would be good…that way we would have it out of the way before our friend would come in Friday. Additionally we had told our contractor Melisa to hold off on any further work until the next week since we would have our friend over.

Thursday, February 8th
We woke up a little earlier Thursday morning to ensure we could shower before Mark would come to turn off the gas at 9:00am. We were ready and prepared with winter jackets to sit through a cold day. I think it was about 9:15am or so when I called Mark to ask him where he was at to turn off the gas. He said he was just about to call me and that the inspector would not come today, he would come Friday instead. My first thought was of course “great, we have a guest coming in from out-of-town and I’m being told they’ll have to be received in a freezing house – won’t we be great hosts!” Mark explained that he had faxed the request at 4:00pm, but apparently there had been some change and paperwork needed to be in by 3:00pm instead of 5:00pm like was required before. At this point I was of course a little annoyed about the situation.

At night we decided to clean the living room fireplace (Photo). It was covered in dust so needed a good cleaning. We also hung up the blinds in the front bedroom so that our friend would have some privacy and darkness (Photo).

Friday, February 9th
We once again woke up early to shower before Mark would come to turn off the gas. He arrived right around 9:00am, just in time for us to have to leave to go to the airport. Of course this is where it turned out that Mark, whom we had told “yeah, we’ll be working at home all day Thursday, we’ll be here for the inspector,” told us that he had left no notes for the inspector to get in the house. Greaaaat! We left for the airport hoping the inspector wouldn’t show up while we were gone. Apparently a “yeah, we’ll be here tomorrow” somehow turned into “we’ll be at the house always and forever, and never leave for a single second” in Mark’s mind. In any case, we arrived back the house at about 10:30am – no sign of an inspector. We quietly worked through the day in the office in our winter coats. At about 1:00pm Patrick went outside to check the mail. He found a note from the inspector saying “No access. Door locked/gate locked.”!! First of all our car was in the drive-way, making it obvious that we were at the house. Second of all we had heard no noise what so ever from the door bell (or even a knock), third of all our friend had gone to smoke when we came back, so ironically the door had been unlocked the whole time!! I was ready to boil at this point. We’d been sitting there freezing the whole time and the @$$hole of an inspector just blew it off and flat out lied too. Mark tried to call the office and was told that the supervisor would have to take care of this, and he was of course not around. He tried calling again later, but of course it was Friday afternoon and many people slip out early – he was told the inspector would have to come back Monday. Grrrr. Well, he came back to the house to turn the gas (and heat!) back on.

Saturday, February 10th
We didn’t do much work on the house over the weekend since we were busy with our guest. We did a tiny bit of cleaning and rearranging, but nothing noteworthy. One thing that was cool, however, was the fact that Trees Atlanta came out to plant trees in our neighborhood. Trees Atlanta had contacted our neighborhood association about it. So now we have a cute little tree between the street and the sidewalk that is supposed to have pretty red flowers in the spring (Photo).

Monday, February 12th
And here I am today, once again sitting in an unheated house, waiting for the HVAC inspector. Mark came sometime after 9:00am to turn the gas off. Thankfully today had a high of 64°F, so the house stayed pretty warm and I didn’t even need a winter jacket. Mark had told us once before that if the inspector doesn’t show up by 3:30pm he pretty much won’t come at all … it is now 3:40pm. I’m getting very, very, very fed up with this, because not only does that mean I will have to sit through another day of this, but it also means that my entire day was ruined today. Patrick had to drive our friend back to the airport. I had anticipated grabbing a nice lunch or something before he would have to head to the airport. Obviously that didn’t happen. So I’m in a pretty bad mood. At least tomorrow’s high is supposed to be 61°F, but with a high of 43°F looming over our heads for Wednesday. I guess the 4th time was a charm for our bathroom sconce, so hopefully the 4th anticipated time will also be a charm for our HVAC inspector.