Water Heater
On the first day of being in our "new" house, we had a little incident with the water heater. It was moving day and Edwin had scheduled for PG&E to come turn on the gas. They told him that someone had to be at the house from 8AM-5PM. The cable company actually is better because they it's at least only 4 hour time windows! Given that Edwin could probably lift more than me, he got to move our furniture while I waited at the house. This is after we had about 3 hours of sleep each because we were packing until the wee hours of the morning. Though we had started packing a month before, we were unable to have everything packed when the movers arrived at 10AM the next morning. Back to my original story, I'm waiting at the house for PG&E. What time do you think they showed up? That's right, 4:45PM.
The guy goes to look at the gasline and then returns saying that he was able to turn on the furnace, but not the water heater. He said that there was a leak in the water heater assembly because the screw is stripped. (???) Translated- that means that we will have no hot water. He says that we need to have a water heater technician to come and repair it before we PG&E can turn on the water heater. Edwin calls PG&E to schedule another visit and they tell him that the first appointment they have available is Thursday. (It was Saturday.) I tell PG&E guy that Edwin is pretty handy, so I asked him if the repair was something that we could do ourselves. He tells me that we could just purchase a pilot assembly from Home Depot and do it ourselves for about $100. (Imagine how much it would have cost us if we needed to pay for labor in additional to the materials.) I remember that we have a home warranty, so I called our real estate agent Tony to ask him if this qualifies.
Tony is out at a construction job (he is a construction contractor by day.) He offers to come over to take a look at the water heater when I tell him what PG&E had said to me. He takes out some plumbers tape and repairs the stripped screw, connects the gas to the water heater, lights the pilot light, and checks for leaks by spraying the line with soapy water. (I had seen this done many times in HGTV, so I know that this is good.) He does this in less than an hour. Have we told you all how much we love our real estate agent? How many agents do you know who could and would do this for you? So if you're looking for an AWESOME agent in the East Bay, let us know...
Sidewalk
About 2 weeks after we had moved in, the city of Alameda started repaving the sidewalks on our street. We were pretty happy that they were going to do this because the sidewalk in front of our house was very uneven and we didn't want to have to do that ourselves. After they removed the sidewalk, we discovered a leak in the main water line coming into our house. The city came out to take a look at it and patched the leak. However, we decided that since the pipe was old and they had already removed the sidewalk, it would be a good time to replace the galvanized steel pipe with a copper one. Since it had already leaked and we were seeing signs of corrosion, there was a good chance that it would leak again, but then we would have to dig up the pipe and sidewalk again and on our dime. To save some money, Edwin decided to dig up the ditch himself on our front lawn (with some advice from our man Tony.) Edwin met a plumber friend of the guy that we bought our refrigerator from who happened to live in Alameda. So we called him up and he gave us an estimate and told us that he could finish replacing the pipe in about 6 hours. He works for a plumbing company, but this was a side job for him and his brother, so that he could help pay for his upcoming wedding. Given that we just finished paying for a wedding ourselves, we were eager to help someone else out (and his pricing was very reasonable.) All of this happened while Jeannette was in town, so we were relieved that this did not monopolize our entire weekend. Afterwards, the water pressure to the bathroom sink improved significantly, so we were happy with our decision.
It is now 6 weeks later and the sidewalk has still not been replaced. The city noticed that there was a sinkhole next to the manhole on our property. They said that they could not repair the sidewalk until the sewer people came to repair the sewer which had a crack in the main. We were worried that someone would fall or get injured on the missing sidewalk because we were expecting so many kids. Friends we told joked about telling the city that someone had fallen in and they wanted to know who in the city their lawyer should contact. We were prepared to put in a cardboard coffin with signs saying "Fresh graves- Keep out!" in an attempt to use it as a decoration so that people wouldn't walk into it. Someone must have said something to the city because on Halloween, the city came in and filled in the sidewalk with gravel so that people wouldn't fall in. The sewer has been repaired, but the sidewalk still is still not paved.
Painting
So we have completed painting the living room, entryway, and bathroom. We find that having people come over to the house really motivates us to finish painting and to clean the house. For Halloween, we had just completed painting the living room and entryway. For the entry, we chose a High Society reddish-orange color and for the living room, we chose a tan color called Spanish Sand. You can use this link to search for those colors on the Kelly-Moore website. This past Friday, we painted our bathroom a sky blue (the top half.) We didn't get that one from Kelly-Moore, so you won't be able to look that one up.
This past weekend, we had friends over for an early Thanksgiving. Matilde and Greg came up with the idea to deep fry a turkey and we volunteered to host. People brought over side dishes and desserts, so we had salad, stuffing, corn relish, mac 'n cheese, scalloped potatoes, homemade apple pie, panne cotta, and fruit tart. It was a good time and good food and good friends. We used our new table for the first time and we were able to fit 14 people around it without the leaf! It was a good thing we just got some new chairs. Though we weren't able to deep fry the turkey because it was raining outside, it still tasted really good because Matilde and Janet rubbed it with salt & pepper and marinated it the night before. Since baking a turkey would have taken hours, Greg had the great idea to cut up the 12 lb turkey and bake it for an hour. Everything turned out great. We'll have to do this again.
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