Wet Basement: Lakefront Property

I got a pretty decent amount of sound sleep last night, nearly 10 hours, not quite as much as needed, but in the ballpark. This morning two friendly young women came to do a deep clean of the house. It was a lovely day: sunny, clear, warm and later hot but not searingly so, not humid, fresh breeze. The paint smell is pretty much gone, and I have realized there was a major silver lining to that experience, which is that I’m now in the habit of having a lot of windows open. Over these four years of being here half the time, I had come to think that you had the heat on about six months of the year, and ditto the A/C, and that there were about four days when you could have the windows open, two in the fall and two in the spring, but that is wrong. I am now thinking of routinely setting the air conditioning very high so that it rarely runs, and just having the windows open a lot.

We didn’t have air conditioning when I was growing up in Ann Arbor. It was often extremely hot and humid in the summer. My mother said another problem with this was the annoying sound it made, that of someone whining, “I’m hot!”

Yesterday I was walking through the back yard and the happy thought arose: My own little piece of paradise.

The cleaning people did an outstanding job, including making it so you can see through windows that have been nearly opaque for years and leaving two ovens spotless. They made a lot of dead insects disappear, including between the windows and the storm windows. They folded the towels and toilet paper the way they do in fancy hotels, and carefully put a small Nalgene container of hand lotion inside a nearby roll of masking tape. I was prepared to deal with the smell of cleaning products, but there was almost none. I was utterly delighted with the whole thing, with one very small exception. I asked a couple of times that they be extra careful of the new paint, but found a metal ladder leaned against the wall after they had gone, and a minute bit of damage to the paint. The painter is coming next week to do some things, so I will ask him to retouch that spot.

Another person who came today was the boiler, hot water heater and baseboard radiators guy. The baseboard heaters in the basement are basically piles of rubble, so he is going to send a quote for replacing them. On the other hand, I probably will rarely go down there except to do laundry, so whoever buys this house when I depart for memory care later might inherit those vintage appliances.

The boiler guy said you never really flush a boiler—this is the thing that provides heat for the house; some houses have a furnace—but he can do routine maintenance; he noticed some smaller parts that could stand to be replaced.

He said the hot water heater is too ancient to flush, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not that bad since my father flushed it out quarterly. My sister said that someone who came to work on it once said it was the cleanest water heater they’d ever seen. However, it has been at least three years since my father did that. He moved out of here four years ago, but I would bet $100 that he drove here from the retirement home to attend to that particular task for as long as he could.

The boiler guy mentioned a reasonable sum for installing a new water heater and said he can teach me how to flush it out.

I spoke with the accountant about the estate’s tax return and about the estimated taxes pertaining to the withdrawals from my various accounts. I also asked if she could do my taxes next year. Normally I do them myself, but with health insurance from the Affordable Care Act in two different states and the purchase of a house, some assistance may be needed. Then I can learn what sorts of things are deductible for future reference. She speaks mighty fast, but I think I gleaned everything I need to know, and she said she would do my taxes.

In the late afternoon, I went out for a walk. 

I received the proposal from the home renovation people and have a million questions, but it is more or less what I would have estimated, and includes a quote for the deck work that is considerably less than I thought I would have to spend. The main item is the “cat lock” or new screen porch outside the front door. Their quote even includes painting the new porch. When they said it would look less stupid if it were painted the same color as the house, I assumed I’d have to find someone to do that.

My sister and I agreed quite some time ago that we would follow the same course of action in regard to the house regardless of the eventual purchaser: put on a new roof, install new air conditioning, empty it out, have it painted, have it cleaned, and have the windows washed. The only remaining item now is washing the windows, scheduled for next week. We went back and forth on fixing the wet basement. My father wanted to do that, and my sister would have liked to do it in his honor, and the realtor was greatly in favor of that, especially if we were going to put the house on the market, but we don’t have enough cash left in the checking account and I do not have a strong feeling about it.