Fort Worden with family

My aunts and uncles from Texas and my cousin and her family made the trip out to Seattle in August.  While they were here we all rented a five bedroom house at Fort Worden State Park, on the NE part of the Olympic Penninsula.  We hiked a little, played on the beach, did a puzzle and enjoyed the time together.  D and his cousin had a lot of fun together.  Earlier in the week, we enjoyed the blackberries and swings at Luther Burbank park on Mercer Island.

house stress send-off

 

The construction of our house spanned the 13 months between my 32nd birthday and Jack’s 32nd birthday.  It was literally the fulfillment of a dream we had shared for many years, but it was also the most stressful period of our lives.

In this post I’m going to detail the worst parts of the process, not out of macabre self pity, but because I want to remember all of the things we overcame and to give myself a break for the effect that prolonged stress had on us. 

Oh and next time someone (who isn’t already a client) asks us if we think they should build a house, we’ll be able to point to the type of things that can go wrong.  My favorite architect tells me we could have had it much worse.

 

The stress came from a sour and bottomless cocktail of prolonged busyness, acute panic-inspiring revelations and on-going interpersonal conflicts.  The moments of sheer panic began about nine months after we purchased the land in the fall of 2012.  Roughly in order of descending stress they were:

• when the water wasn’t already available on the street when the easement for sewer and water through our neighbors’ side yard was rejected by the city
• Before we bought the lot, we confirmed the side sewer’s existence with the city.  The old sewer was never location during construction, so we can only assume the records were wrong.
• The real estate listing said “water available in street” and “sewer available”
• We submitted a pre-application to the city with a basic site plan and Seattle Public Utilities said we’d need to build a water main to do the project, and that there wasn’t actually a sewer so we’d need to build a sewer main too.
• We appealed and proposed an easment through the neighbor’s yard, which the neighbors agreed to verbally
• The city rejected it and said “build a main to improve the whole water system”
• We figured our another solution where we reclassified our lot and our neighbor’s lot as unit lots of a parent lot, with an easement. (See http://aglie.blogspot.com/2013/09/building-permit-first-pass.html)  We justified the absurdity of the cost of the main relative to the value of anything built on our small lot.
• SPU grudgingly agreed, at the end of 2013 http://aglie.blogspot.com/2013/12/wac-we-acquired-clearance-water.html
• when a strict interpretation of the code said we could build zero houses because we couldn’t round up to one on land use calculations
• While we were dealing with the water and sewer issues, we faced another problem with a strict interpretation of the code that said we could build an apartment complex but not a house on a lot of our size.  See http://aglie.blogspot.com/2013/09/building-permit-first-pass.html for more.
• when many neighbors chimed in on the neighborhood email group to criticize us for the exceedingly long (but totally legal) closure of the alley.  Many people did write supportive comments, but the negative ones really got to us.  I’m clearly not cut out for politics.
• the contractors schedule called for the alley to be closed for about one month, but as you can see from an irate neighbor (who doesn’t live on our section of the alley) on a large group email thread, it was over 8 months.
• Thanks for updating us, but really you just need to clear the alley and repair where you caved in road. It has been over 8 months. You need to stage your construction work on your property. It looks like there is room on the west side of the home for you to do so. That is what everyone else has done. There have been many other homes built with alley access and NONE of them have required closing the alley. Every other construction site has staged their work on the site they are building.

I am surprised the city has allowed this for so long. It could possibly impair emergency vehicles, and certainly inconveniences greatly your neighbors …

I am sure your intention is to truly apologize. But both emails have said sorry and then said why it is not your fault and how you yourself are suffering by having to pay the city to keep a public alley closed or because you couldn’t afford to higher better contractors (not nice to say about these guys that are building your home). This is not a hallmark of a sincere apology.

I am sure the city light department has good reason to legislate how close homes can be to utility poles. It is unfortunate that this didn’t come up when you designed the home. If you can afford to build your own home, close a public alley for 8 months then probably paying to get it fixed is your best option. Seems rather privileged to hope the city will "just let it go".

I know I am sounding hostile and really I am a relatively nice person but I think you just need to get your stuff out of the alley.

• when the electrical lines turned out to be too close to the already framed out house
• In March, 8 months in to construction, a Seattle City Light inspector driving by noticed that one corner of our house looked a little too close to the electrical wires.  The house has to be 10’ away, and workers have to remain 10’ away while doing the siding etc.  We had a land survey done for permitting, which marked the foot of the nearby telephone poles, but didn’t note that one pole leaned towards the house significantly.  Based on land survey, we expected the house to be parallel to the wires, however one corner was 11’ away and the other was 9’6” away. 
• This posed two problems, first that workers couldn’t continue siding because of the proximity and second that the already built house couldn’t exist, where it already did exist.  The off-the-cuff estimate from the myopic SCL engineer was something like 70k dollars to raise the poles up 17’ or so, so that the wires would be far enough away.  He suggested moving the wires away from the house on the cross piece of the pole to allow work to continue on the house that couldn’t exist.  Jack asked if that could be the permanent solution and he said it was impossible.  Jack pointed out the dozens of houses in a four block radius that are in violation of the 10’ rule.  He said “but they are already built”, as was ours.  There was an implied threat that we’d never be able to get electricity hooked up.
• After much worry and discussion (and weeks of construction delay), the solution came back to Jack’s reasonable original suggestion.  We spent about 3k to have them move the wire a bit further away from the house, on the same cross piece at the top of the pole.  
• It took three months to reach an agreement and actually get SCL to write a letter explaining the agreement that we had reached.  There was so much bureaucracy that without the letter we didn’t trust that the problem would not resurface, preventing our electrical hookup. 
• when the (admittedly long-suffering) neighbors who granted us the easement announced, in the thirteenth month, that we couldn’t bring any equipment in to dig, or disturb anything in their yard when we were already past the one year construction term granted by the bank
• We really do understand how it wasn’t a fun process for them.  They were the most affected by the whole process and the communication warp between us and them and the contractors and sub contractors and the city made things worse.
• The schedule was so at-risk that we felt our only choices were to hire a lawyer to enforce the easement, which would have been expensive and aggressive and maybe not even efficacious enough, or to pay even more money to solve the problem by boring underneath their yard for sewer and water.  We did the latter and then other neighbors complained on the group email list about one day’s worth of noise from the boring machine.
• when the permit of occupancy was finished a few days before the bank would have charged us 28k for being late, after having already given us a month of grace time
• it was completed four business days before the last minute
• http://aglie.blogspot.com/2016/08/hallelujah-we-have-our-certificate-of.html
• when the change order for the type of radiant heat wasn’t as comparable as everyone expected
• Many people gave us the impression that two types of material were similarly priced.
• The more expensive was in the plans but the less expensive was in the fixed-price bid from the contractor.
• Because of already completed engineering work and specs, we stuck with the more expensive type and it turned in to an unexpectedly expensive change order.
• The compromise with the contractor was that we bought the material directly to avoid the contractor’s mark up.
• when we had to get five other house holds to sign a document saying that we would all split costs of repair on the shared side sewer
• In Seattle home owners are responsible for side sewers repair all the way up to the connection with the main, even when it is under the street or sidewalk, and off of their property.   When houses share side sewers, the city requires them to have to have an agreement saying that the owners will split the cost of repair on the shared side sewer.  We became the 6th house on a side sewer, but through some fluke, the other five houses which already shared a sewer didn’t already have this very standard agreement on file with the city.
• We had to convince all of them to sign it.  Most people were agreeable but it took a full three months and by the end, I think some folks who were ready to sign it initially, felt that there must be some hidden downside to signing it. 
• One neighbor was told incorrect information about the responsibility extending past the property line.  The neighbor directed us to her friend, who turned out to be her lawyer.  The lawyer wouldn’t call us back at all for a long time and we became quite desperate, further souring relations.  When we finally talked to him, he hadn’t talked to her about the issue.  It was all very fishy and stressful. 
• In the end we could only get it signed by taking on another home owners share of responsibility for the shared portion.  I have never worked so hard to convince someone to do something.
• This issue really represents a lot of our troubles.  The neighbors signed three separate documents related to sewer, water and the easement.  The first was signed long before we started, during the permitting phase but we only learned of the other two from the city mid construction.   We were in a pickle, with all of our resources already invested in the house, needing signatures on closely related documents in order to proceed with construction.  We couldn’t walk away and the neighbors had no incentive to sign.  If the many many discussions with the city had made clear all of the required paperwork before we started the process, our relations with our neighbors would have had a much better start.  The plan was to do the sewer/water digging at the beginning of construction, but because of all of the paperwork delays and necessary harassment of our neighbors, it was literally the last thing that was finished.
• when the contractors demolished the rock wall shared with our neighbors and then said the rocks were too big to move causing another massive neighbor-affecting delay
• Those rocks that the contractors said were too big to deal with without an unavailable piece of equipment -  well Jack, Kirk and I rolled 95% of them to the curb and disposed of them two or three at a time in to the back’s of people’s Subarus and trucks, after posting them repeatedly on craigslist.
• Meanwhile, the neighbors dealt with the 4-5 week absence of a fence (with dogs and even less privacy than before) when they’d been told it would only take one week. 
• Jack preemptively insisted that the contractors not start on the rock wall demolition until they were sure they could manage it quickly.
• This debacle also delayed the sewer and water digging.
• http://aglie.blogspot.com/2016/06/construction-month-ten.html

The interpersonal stress was surprising to me.  For most things in life, making the best effort to do the right thing, seems to work.  What’s more, the dynamic between all of all the many stake holders in my venn diagram is just a mess.  The neighbors held us accountable for things far beyond our control.  Empathizing and apologizing didn’t help and any explanation we gave was seen as shirking responsibility, despite the fact that we were trying as hard as we could to make things go according to plan.  Being in situations where we needed things from other people, who we had only recently met, was really tough. 

Though I have no plans to do this again, the things I would do differently are:

• Believe much less of what the contractors said about schedules, from the very start.   I personally liked our G.C. but we absolutely should have had a contract with penalties for delays.
• Push back on the contractor much more on everything as it related to the neighbors.
• Ask all the questions we didn’t know we needed to ask, like “is a ground survey sufficient for the power lines?” and “is the easement paperwork the last thing we’ll need from the neighbors?”

Jack had worked in residential architecture in Seattle for three years before our construction started.  He says he would now know enough to better handle some of the issues we encountered, but many of them, like the power-line issue just come down to bad luck.

With that, I will lock up this stress and throw away the key!

two good books about olfactory delight

 

A good kids book is one you don’t mind reading over and over again, so spoiling the plot isn’t a faux pas like it would be for other types of stories.  So, allow me to simultaneously recommend and spoil these excellent picture books for you,

Both of these books have peaceful resolutions because a character is overcome by the wonderful smell of flowers. 

 

The first book goes beyond the funny role reversal of the wolf and pigs, with great pictures and good details.  The moral of the story is that it’s not possible to build a fortress and be perfectly safe from the outside world.    Though they didn’t intentionally change the big bad pig’s character with the flowers, they were forgiving when they befriended the newly minted big good pig. 

I have some vague memories of being read Ferdinand when I was a kid and it’s one of the few books my dad remembers from his childhood, so it has survived the test of time.  The pictures are excellent and it has a good message about staying true to oneself, despite outside pressures to conform. 

I would have liked to round out this post with a third book, but I don’t want to water down the floral scent denouement theme!

race, gender, elections and boats

With national politics in such a horrific state, local affairs have become more interesting of late.  I just voted in the King County primary election and I am pretty excited about the diverse group of people running for office.  There are 61 names in our booklet and 43 of them are women (70%).  There are homegrown people and immigrants with all kinds of backgrounds, including one city council candidate I voted for who is a gay Muslim, Arab-American doctor (in mental health) with a husband from Peru.  Last year the city council was majority female and this year it seems likely we'll elect our second female mayor.  The first was Bertha Knight Landes from 1926-28.

It is not that individual people of color or women are more qualified, but electing people from all parts of the population does lead to better government.

I have one last thought on race.  As an adult I'm often struck by how white my childhood was and I'm happy to see changes on that front.  When we go camping I see more people of other races enjoying the parks.  The other day, I saw a family including three women in hijabs bringing a power boat through the locks.  Boats are great and I'm happy to see all kinds of people enjoying them.

progress on a few little projects

It's very satisfying to finish projects around the house, no matter the size.

This window is on the fourth floor penthouse (access to roof).  By mistake, it so low that it is a code violation (that they didn't catch), but at this height, even code compliant windows are scary.  We used metal pipes and I'm really excited to be able to leave this window open because it is very good for ventilation, has a screen, and is less of a concern if it rains unexpectedly.

We'd planned to put a food poster of some kind in the kitchen, and we finally found one that I like, from Pop Chart Labs.  It's a diagram of edible plants families.   There are a lot of tacky food posters out there.

This towel rack is a detail I've been looking forward to.  On the kitchen island, there is not a good place for a towel rack, so we came up with an unconventional spot under the counter.  It's also where we have the garbage disposal switch and a kitchen stool to access high storage and windows.  It is on the kitchen side of the island so it's not visible from most of the room.

Last month we finally put up this mirror, fixed some wiring and installed the light fixtures in one of the bathrooms.  Drilling through tile to mount it was harder than I expected and required a diamond drill bit (who knew?).  I was happy to find the mirror at Second Use, although I managed to forget to use the coupon I had.














This totally random formatting is brought to you by Google Blogger.  I can't find any good free blogging program.  In May, Open Live Writer, which replaced the older Windows Live Writer, stopped working.   You can write blog posts directly in Word, but not with google blogs if you have Windows 7, which I do.  I find this frustrating.

house cleaning with a house

It should come as no surprise that taking care of a house is a lot more work than taking care of a one thousandishish square foot apartment.  Yet, I am still occasionally taken aback.

While I reserve the right to change my mind in the future, I'm not ready to hire a house cleaner, even though I heard that the Joneses have one.  My objections stem from a combination of frugality, pride and ideology.

The idea that I can do something productive that is not on a computer appeals to me.  Even though it isn’t much exercise, I feel called to fight against the dystopian future where we automate everything except eating and then spend grudging hours on the treadmill so that our bodies continue to function.  Or perhaps that is already the present?

One of my first jobs as a kid was cleaning houses and I found it to be fairly enjoyable.  I have fond memories of vacuuming up some pretty gnarly places such as the ceiling of a very old Irish farmhouse I stayed in.  Cleaning is satisfying, unlike straightening up, which is onerously full of sidetracks, and in our house, stair climbing.

Does this mean our house is dirtier than we’d like?  Absolutely.  There are still floors in our house that have *never* been mopped and  vestiges of construction dust, since we were so crunched for time that there was no post-construction deep clean before we moved in.

Though we’ve long held a preference for non-carpeted floors, this is the first time we had them.  With wood floors, when the windows are wide open in the heat, the dust bunnies leap about athletically in the breeze.  To combat this herd, we now have three vacuums.  The first is a backpack vacuum, which is quite necessary with all the stairs, the second is a shopvac for the car and all the projects on our list and the third is our new Roomba.

Cleaning robots like the Roomba and our beloved Cat Genie litter box somehow don’t compromise my values like a hired person would. 

Disclaimer: I fully recognize the hypocrisy of this D.I.Y. post, considering the amount of cleaning help (mostly laundry and dishes) our parents do while watching D.

preschool en français

In April, D started at another preschool two mornings a week.  It took quite a bit of research to find a school we liked which could be paired with his daycare.  I've learned that places that call themselves preschools, rather than daycare centers, tend to follow the public school schedule, meaning that they close all summer long, in addition to winter, mid-winter and spring breaks.  Giving up our daycare was really not an option and I would have been sad to give up the community we have there.  The other obstacle was that the daycare requires three adjacent days of the week as the minimum for part time, while many preschools offer only M/W/F or Tu/Th options for part time.   Finally we managed to find a great school that was flexible about dates.  His grandparents pick him up and spend two afternoons a week with him.

The school is French immersion, which is pretty exciting.  The staff is wonderful and all those holiday breaks make them very energized.  Two days a month they spend the whole morning in one of my favorite Seattle parks.  They have a great balance of structure and freedom, fun toys and a good outdoor space, and they send us pictures every day so we get to see just how swell everything is.

So the obvious question is, how much French has D learned?  The short answer is, not that much, but I'm still happy about it.

The longer answer follows.  We wanted to give him this opportunity, primarily for the mind expanding exposure to a new language during this developmental window.  Our ability to participate more in French than other languages made it a good choice, but beyond that it's not really about the specific language.

In March, before he started, I taught him to count to 10 and he picked it up quickly.  Three and half months later he says only a few other things like greetings.  Comprehension is much harder to judge.  He seems to understand some questions and instructions about food and things he likes.  Mostly though, the French immersion seems to have magnified his comfort with the idea of multiple ways to say things.  He knows "bleu" (blue) and claims that red is "reh" (it's "rouge").  He asks how to say things in French and then tells me that some random combination of sounds is how you say something else in French.  These last few months he has strongly preferred to sing his own made up song lyrics (some with real English words and some with nonsense), where he used to like singing songs we had learned together.  Now he knows that most of the time we speak English.  He is unencumbered by French spelling (think of all the extra letters) and has generally excellent pronunciation.  He's been much less frustrated by not understanding things at school than I thought he would be.  Today he told me he loves his main teacher there.

Here are some of my favorite school pictures from this spring.

Happy 3rd Birthday, D!

 

For this momentous occaision, we had a big family part at our house, with slot cars, ballons, cake and “things on toast” (bruscetta, chicken salad, bean spread, and tuna salad) which I thought worked out pretty well for party food. The birthday boy had a blast.  Jack and I had fun decorating the windows.

 

We also celebrated with our PEPs group, which is always fun.  It’s fun to be at the park, even in the rain and they kids are now old enough to enjoy games like What Time is it Mr. Fox?

spring celebration

 

In many ways, Easter is too Christian for my taste, but I do like getting together with family and welcoming the change of seasons.  Now that we are in our house, in a centrally located neighborhood, we are often the hosts.  It’s nice to see our house and kitchen rise to the occaision (how many people can be in the kitchen at one time?) and it’s certainly convenient to have D at home for sleeping times that overlap with gatherings and preparations.

I had fun dying eggs with beets, blueberries and turmuric, with a little help from my favorite almost-three-yea-old.  One lesson for next year is to not decorate eggs too early because after a few days these natural colors converged on brown.

indoor projects

 

Here’s a loooong list of house projects.  There is enough to do that prioritizing the time and money can be tricky, but we’ll get them done eventually.

Kitchen

Completed:

• flipped refridgerator door swing
• electrical
• built ikea cabinets for kitchen

To Do:

• add panels to conceal the litter box area and contain more of the litter pellets
• install instant hot water on prep sink
• install a hand towel rack in the kitchen
• assemble and install cabinets in dining room
• create an awesome light feature above dining area
• replace prep sink faucet, which is too small and low flow to use
• build a “barbecue cart” that will roll in to the empty under-counter space
• install a water filtration system (pending discussions about what it is worth to us)

 

Bedrooms and Bathrooms

Completed:

• built ikea cabinets for bathrooms
• electrical
• hung one mirror and one plant
• installed a bidet
• installed master bedroom closet system
• installed most of smaller bedroom closet systems

To Do:

• put in a mirror or medicine cabinet and light fixtures in bathroom
• build sliding closet doors for master closet
• install three toilet paper holders (one actually needs to be moved)
• add tile on wall just outside of master shower which seems to get a little bit wet
• assemble and install cabinets in master bedroom, master bathroom, second bathroom, which will include the laundry chute
• build a storage bench along the windows

 

Rest of the House

Completed:

• assembled two futons
• put up coat rack in entry way
• attached shelves to walls (baby/earthquake safety)
• hung up pictures (just the frames we already had)
• put peephole, chain and chain guard on front door
• put up mailbox
• put up two hanging racks in the basement (my parents did)
• installed doors and inner shelves on staircase bookshelf
• installed peg board for tool storage

To Do:

• build a desk
• diagnose and fix electrical issues (flickering lights, master bathroom lights, some stair lights)
• put in more outlets in basement
• put safety bars over the terrifyingly low fourth floor window
• put in drywall on basement interior walls
• install a doorbell and perhaps security features
• install a cell phone docking station
• install speakers and clean up the routers using all the low voltage wires we put in
• finish or replace the supports for the clear moxy pannels next to the stairs
• buy and install blinds for whole house (currently we have hardware store temporary blinds)

 

Bloedel Reserve

 

Yesterday, Becky, D and I took three hours to walk the two mile loop at the beautiful Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island.

We saw lots of native plants, a broody goose, a mansion and some ants.

outdoor projects

 

Here’s a look at the outdoor projects we have done and what we have left to do.

Completed:

• installed turf in “the boite,” which is our little boxy yard
• put up mailbox and house numbers on the fence
• painted neighbor’s replacement fence, which required trying to match the paint color of a lichen colored ten-year-old fence, and rebuilt rock terraces
• transplanted one hand-me-down tree from my parents (Hinoki False Cypress) and got two street trees (Japanese Snowbells) planted
• installed bars (with security screws) to lock up bikes in the bike garages.  Hooray for not having to bring bikes in to the house!

To Do:

• figure out how to mitigate the pooling water around the roof drains, which is very disappointing for new construction
• install concrete roof pavers and planters
• landscape along the sidewalk
• add plants to be chosen by neighbors next to our parking spot
• build doors for the bike garages
• install a retractable net around the boite to keep whiffle balls in
• put up an address sign on the alley to help lost delivery drivers
• keep our trees alive for the next few critical years!
• knock out a small interior wall so that Emo can access the cat door to the roof
• add louvres (horizontal slats of wood) to outside of house to fulfill Jack’s architectural vision

 

The roof and keeping the trees alive are at the top of our lists for outdoor tasks, though there are a few indoor tasks that will take priority.  I’ll save those for another post.