Miracles of Science

I swear to God, my new space heater is some sort of high-tech wonder created by NASA. It has to be. Or it was made by God, for me personally. Nothing else makes sense.

One of the many reasons I've wanted to purchase a house is how absolutely and utterly miserable my apartment is in the winter. While the building has some fantastic architectural details, it also has (numerous) drawbacks. Most of the windows are single-pane glass. The insulation is pathetic at best and non-existent at worst. Shortly before we moved in, the gas radiators were removed and replaced with electric baseboard heat. Not only is electric heat incredibly expensive, if it's ineffective in largely uninsulated spaces. I've literally spent $300 trying to heat a one-bedroom + den apartment and, if I'm lucky, can get my apartment up to a toasty 55*F. Lovely!

I've tried everything. We have thermal curtains in our bedroom. I've put plastic on the windows, though mostly that just gets shredded by our cats. My mother has generously given me some bad-ass industrial style space heaters. (Ones which our ancient electrical system fried in a single season, thanks to a lack of ground wiring in our building. What that has down to our computers, my friends' TVs, etc. is a whole different story....)

And then, with this weekend's snowfall, I got desperate. It was down to 51*F in our bedroom on Saturday night. I was freezing, despite flannel PJs, multiple blankets, and two pairs of socks. In an act of desperation, I went out to by a space heater I saw advertised in Target's weekly flyer for $59.99, plus tax.

And I swear, this thing has left me feeling like Moses on Mt. Sinai. I'm half-expecting the heavens to open up and beam of light to shine on my face while the voice of the Metatron announces, "And lo, on the eighth day, God created this space heater. And it was good."

You might suspect this is hyperbole. You'd be totally freakin' wrong.

I brought this space heater home and plugged it in around 11PM last night. It was so warm and comfy, I proceeded to fall asleep on the couch. I didn't even make it to bed, I was so snuggly-toasty-puddlefied. I almost regretted leaving for work this morning. And then when I came home from my classes + science lab tonight, it was still on...

...And my apartment was so warm, I was almost uncomfortable. The heater has been placed in the largest room in my apartment, which is this weird conglomeration of kitchen/living/dining that leads through an archway into our den. Two rooms over, through the bedroom, is our bathroom. It is, without fail, the coldest room in the house. It's combination of the single-pane glass window that doesn't shut quite right and the tile floor, I'm sure. And it was 64*F in there. I know because I have a fancy-schmacy clock from Walmart with a theromometer. And it read 64*F -  a full thirteen degrees warmer than it was in my apartment the day before and a solid ten degrees warmer than I can usually get it with the baseboards cranked to high. Bear in mind, the space heater has settings from one through seven. It was set dead-center, on four.

I don't know what my electric bill will be. I'd like to pretend I won't care. (Although it's far more likely I'll cry than not.) But for the very first winter in the three-plus years we've lived here, my apartment is warm.

I don't care if it's blasphemy. My new space heater was sent by God. Try to convince me otherwise and I will you stab you with one of last year's icicles from the bathtub faucet.

Because a House Isn't a Home Without a Dog...

...My boyfriend and I adopted one about a month ago. Since we're sadly not allowed to have dogs in our apartment, he's been living with my parents and will be staying with them until the renovation is finished. It's very generous of my parents to take care of him for us. It's also totally their fault. You see, the way some people are crazy old cat ladies? My mom is a crazy dog lady. No, this is not an exaggeration.

My mom is involved in dog rescue. She has been for years. She used to help transport dogs out of shelters with high kill rates, largely in the South, and puppy mills in the Midwest, mostly in Missouri. (Although there's plenty in Pennsylvania. And, if you live here, you support legislative efforts to shut them down. They are horrible, horrible places and I could tell you more heartbreaking stories than any one person has the right to know.)

Ultimately, my parents decided this wasn't enough. They started fostering dogs for rescues and, eventually, opened one of their own when I went off to college. It was called Love-A-Lab rescue and, in the year that it operated, my family personally rescued and found permanent homes for about sixty dogs. This doesn't include the ones that my family ultimately kept when we had to shut the rescue down due to my grandmother's failing health, who lived with us at the time.

Being as I'm an only child, I suspect this was my mother's manifestation of empty-nest crazy, as I came home from school to discover that I had been replaced by a pack of slavering, half-wild wildebeasts otherwise known as my parents dogs. And it's only continued since then, long after I moved home for a few years and moved back out. My parents have a ten acre property in a fairly rural/suburban area and a massive house, so they can manage things like this, but it's almost impossible to walk around their house without tripping over a furry butt, or stepping on a tail, or having some little beastie pounce on you in an attempt to OMG PLAY. And if you're going to visit? You'd best stock up on lint-rollers.

Warm-hearted, generous, mushy people that get in way over their heads in their attempts to do good. That's my parents. That's how they've always been.

So it shouldn't have come as a surprise when I got a gleeful phone call from my mother one day, announcing "I found you a dog!". You see, I had found my breed. While my parents love labradors, and golden retreivers, and papillons - and while they're all good dogs - they've never been the breeds for me. I prefer my dogs a wee bit more independent. After all, my boyfriend and I? We have cats. So my breed was the shaggy, lovable, mud-tracking, slobbering mess known as the Old English Sheepdog. They're smart dogs. After all, they're working dogs. They're painfully loyal to their families. After all, they were bred to spend their days with their shepherd. They're independent thinkers. They have to be, given the tasks they were designed to do.

The trouble with the OES - also known as bobtails for their distinctly docked tails denoting their working status in 18th-Century England, which is a practice I wish they would ban in the US like they did in the UK - is that there's not many of them up for adoption. At least, not in this part of the country. Most of the ones up for adoption are out west or so far north they could probably bark across the Canadian border. And given my family history and all I know about rescue animals? I flat-out refuse to buy a dog. Not when there's so many that need homes. So my boyfriend and I settled on the next best thing - a pitbull.

Yeah, you read me. I said a pitbull. There's tons of them up for adoption in the Philadelphia area and despite what you've heard on the news? They're good dogs. I had one when I was little, named Pete. That dog used to let five-year-old-me feed him his kibble one piece at a time, bare-handed. I dressed him up in my ballet tutus. At one point, I decided he needed "more colors" and the big brute sat patiently still while I colored on him with Sharpies I found in my mom's desk. (The dog was brindle and white and red and blue for a week, at least. My dad still laughs.) Pitbulls are actually so good with kids they used to be called "nanny dogs" and, at the turn of the 20th century, if you couldn't afford a governess? You got a pitbull to help mind your kids. No, I'm not kidding. There's an article on it here . The US even used them as our mascot in WWI and WII. My boyfriend and I had made up our minds. But my mother...


Well, if you tell my mother you're even thinking about getting a dog? Congratulations. She'll find you the perfect furry bundle of love in some sad shelter somewhere. And then she'll thrust photos and heartbreaking stories and guilt-trips that could be in the Guiness Book of World Records at you until you cave. In less than a week and a half, "I found you a dog!" became me clamoring into the back of my parents' pick-up truck with my boyfriend to drive an hour away so that we could meet a professional dog transport service - apparently, there's people who do this for a living! - that had brought him up from a shelter in Missouri. We've heard he came from a puppy mill. We've heard he got dumped at a shelter by an old man taking care of his grandson's dog while he was serving overseas that "just couldn't deal with him anymore". Frankly, nobody knows. He was dirty, and smelly, and rambunctious. And he kissed my face the second I met him. I feel horrible for not adopting a pitbull desperately in need. I still want to, even though we don't have the space...

...But I'm in love. Wildly and absolutely. We've named him Tybalt, after the character from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. He's going to be living with two English majors and three cats. If you don't get the joke, read more. Books make you smart.

We were hit with a nor'easter over the weekend, complete with sleet and slush and freezing rain. And so here's a picture of a very dirty Tybalt, playing in his very first snow. It took fifteen minutes to get that dark, blurry picture. Because apparently, to Tybalt? Pictures should never be taken. Cell phone cameras are not for pictures. They're for licking. I hate having my picture taken, too, so I suppose that's fair.

Exercises in Not Swearing at the Top of Your Lungs

So, I realize that I haven't posted anything to this blog in quite awhile. Frankly, that's because there hasn't been very much to post. Ohh, things had certainly progressed...

Armed with the report of defects from my home inspector, I was able to go back to the seller regarding the issues with the roof. This was of particular concern and upset to me because the disclosure reported that it had been replaced in 2009 - only two years ago, when rubber roofs are supposed to last for approximately 20 years. (Fortunately for me, the seller agreed to pay for half the cost of replaced the roof via a credit to my closing costs. Whee, monies! Which, as I said, makes the world go round.)

I picked a contractor. Of the three I attempted to meet with, he was by far the best. He showed up on time, worked around my schedule, answered my questions, had the lowest estimate, and came highly recommended by my builder. The photos of his work were fantastic, as were the videos. Yes, videos. My contractor was featured on an episode of HGTV.

I submitted my paperwork to the mortgage company. To my surprise and dismay, it was decided that the property wouldn't qualify for a 203K streamline loan and had to be submitted as a regular 203K loan. This involves taking on a 10% contingency to the project in the event of problems and hiring a consultant to oversee the work done by the contractor before payments (known as "draws") can be made. And that was right about where the swearing started, because this change was announced to me by a consultant calling me at my office telling me he'd been hired for the job - by my mortgage broker, who neglected to tell me any of this. Needless to say, I was upset to the point that several of my co-workers here in cubicle land probably know way more about my finances, my home repairs, and my grasp of four-letter words, both foreign and domestic, than they ever needed to. Fortunately, it turns out that this consultant also came highly recommended by the home inspector, who it turns out the broker had called on my behalf. Now that I've been working with him for awhile, I actually like him a lot. And, lucky lucky me, he seems to have long-since gotten over the fact that I shot the messenger when he called by basically demanding, "Who the hell are you and how did you get my phone number?!?"

And then... everything ground to a halt. What was supposed to be a 45 day closing was pushed back three times. They needed this piece of paper. They needed that piece of paper. They needed that other thing over there that I had already submitted three times. At one point, when my boss asked how the process was going, I told him that I was expecting the mortgage company to ask me for my tax returns from 1979, bearing in mind the fact that I was born in the day-glo days of the 1980s. There were multiple agitated emails and phone calls to my mortgage broker who, although apparently fantastic at pushing paperwork through and cutting fees, seemed to have no concept of returning phone calls. Or emails. Or texts. At one point, the processor at his company actually told me he was no longer working there, less than a week before settlement, and that was why no one could answer my questions or explain my closing costs to me. (I think that was the point when I finally went "WHAT?!?" and actually yelled at someone on the phone. And once again, I'm sure my co-workers had a new-found discovery of my ability to morph into Megabitch, the Mortgage Mashing Monstrosity.) My closing costs had ballooned to almost twice what they were estimated to be and totalled more than I actually had in my bank account. There were at least three tearful phone calls to my mother, one massive blow-up with my boyfriend that almost resulted in him moving out, and more panicked texts to my realtor than I'd really care to count. (Thank you, Verizon text-messaging plan!) I had to threaten to back away from the deal more than once, probably gained close to five pounds from the sheer force of freak-outs messing with my eating habits, and got at least half a dozen stress pimples - which is the only time I have problems with my skin, which seems to be the one good gene I inherited from my parents. (Thanks, Mom!)

Things were pushed to the wire to the point that I was literally at the bank 45 minutes before closing to get my certified check, because that's when I found out what my closing costs were going to be. The office where I needed to go to settlement? Half an hour away. With my realtor waiting in an agitated panic outside, texting me to see where I was! And it turns out my closing costs were still wrong, thanks to them forgetting - despite three reminders - that I had paid the 203K consultant out of pocket and not to include that cost in my totals. Ultimately, the mortgage company owes me $700 for that and I keep making cracks about how if they don't pay up, I'm going to foreclose on them like this fabulous couple that foreclosed on a bank, found here. I think most of the problems I encountered can be traced to the processor and her spotty record keeping and, needless to say, I'm more than a little tempted to shriek that if this what every home-buyer has to deal with, it's no wonder the housing market is tanking. Frankly, it's a wonder I'm not bald from practically pulling out clumps of my hair. (Really, the woman deserves a good ear-blistering fit. Everyone involved in the process has looked back at her communications and record keeping and pretty much gone, "Umm. What the hell?" ) After all, this little blurb is just a tiny summary of the sheer amount of - let's be blunt here - bullshit I had to go through as part of this process.

But in the end, though, as of about 2:30 PM on October 25, 2011... I officially own a house. Let's hope it was worth it!

PS - A big thanks to the following for not choking the crap out of me while I was going on my Godzilla rampages through Philadelphia:

My Boyfriend, Who I Literally Shrieked At for More Minutes Than I Care to Count
My Mother, Who Doted and Fretted and Consoled Me Through All My Tearful Phone Calls (And Offered to Let Me Move Back Home)
My Realtor, Who Dealt With Every Fit-Throwing Text With Aplomb and Grace
My Mortgage Broker, Who Must Have Worked Some Kind of Space-Magic on Keeping My Closing Costs Low (Even After All My Cranky Emails)

You can find my realtor, Deb Nye, at Elfant Wissahickon Realty. 

She's an awesome lady and, if you're buying a house in the Philadelphia area, should be your go-to girl!