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Email to our former HOA, in re a violation letter we just received via certified mail:
Hello,

We received the violation notice from your July 22, 2024 inspection.

We sold the house at [address] on July 15th, 2024, as you can see in the Closing Verification document I have attached.

As such we will not be correcting the violation, as it is the responsibility of the current owners, [Names].

Thank you

Yes, yes, I know plenty of you would never buy in an HOA. Let's not have that discussion here, and instead just enjoy the pleasant sensation of telling off the HOA for giving us a violation on a house we don't actually own. If for some reason they attempt to clap back, our next step is contacting our real estate agent and asking if we can hire her attorney to write a letter explaining why it's not our responsibility.*


* As the attorney advised her before when the issue was brought up pre-closing. I have no idea how it was brought up pre-closing and yet the letter we got ~certified mail~ clearly states the inspection date is July 22nd. Either way, not our problem.

Ew.

May. 17th, 2024 08:18 pm
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[personal profile] myrialux decided to change the A/C filter at the new house today.



What you are looking at is an A/C filter that (a) used to be white and (b) has two Yankee Candle air fresheners clipped to it.

Hopefully they were the cause of The House Smell. [personal profile] myrialux never could smell much other than knowing there was a faint unidentifiable smell. I could definitely smell…something. Due to my current smell/taste situation, when there are smells in the air they all smell the same, if I can detect them at all. If I put my nose right up in something I can often get an identifiable smell but not more than an inch or so away.

So I have been smelling something vaguely like latex paint when we come into the house, enough so that a couple of times I opened windows and turned the fans on, which cleared it out of the house for a few days. I assumed it was the new paint job on the walls plus whatever else residual smells had been wafting from various surfaces.

I did not smell it when we came back in from picking up groceries, so fingers crossed it was those air fresheners. I did not want to put my nose anywhere near that filter to check so I won’t be sure for a few days!
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Would anyone here be able to point me to curtains that have a pattern similar to this wallpaper, ideally with a dark green background?

https://paintedpaper.com/collections/black/products/tina-floral-wallpaper

I like the art style and spacing between the flowers and the general scale (so you don’t see a small repeating pattern when you step back) and the delicate tracery of the stems between the flowers and the dark background. This would be going into a moody, dark green office area and a light background wouldn’t work for me.

One request: if you’re going to suggest something general like “Have you tried Etsy/Amazon/Wayfair/Spoonflower?” then suggestions for the search terms would be more helpful since yes, I have indeed tried those sites and a number of others but haven’t been able to find anything that hits my buttons. (edit: also, Pinterest is overrun with AI-generated crap so difficult to search.)

In other news, we’re living in a sea of boxes at the new house and have one more trip back to our former city to pick up the last straggling items that didn’t make it onto the moving truck.
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In the throes of moving. The packers were here today and WOW OMG so worth every fricken penny.

The cats are confined to my (former) office, and spent the day mildly stoned on meds the vet gave us while also in what my former coworker calls cat condos (wire dog crates) to prevent them freaking out at each other or hurting themselves while the strangers were making noise in the rest of the house.

I went in after an hour to check on them and D.Va had pulled the towel off of Sora’s condo, dragged a corner of it into her condo and was sitting on it!

Unrepentant criminal:



I separated the crates a bit more and re-covered Sora. That's a Feliway dispenser plugged into the wall socket, and paper taped on the wall above because it does leave a faint oily residue over time.

I also packed a few more boxes before the packers finished enough other areas that I was just in their way, and this is one, which contains cat toys (the ones not in with the cats right now) and D.Va’s buttons, with a warning because there’s a flopping fish in there and thanks to stuff inside shifting, when you put the box down it asks for pets.



Tomorrow the movers show and load everything into the truck, and we drive down to the new house with the cats. Friday the cats get confined in their condos in the main closet (it’s very big) while the movers move all our stuff in, and we can then spend the next two years unpacking. We’ll have to come back to the old house to pull nails out of walls and get stuff we had to leave behind, and talk with whatever real estate agent we go with, but the big stuff will be DONE.

I also have an appointment tomorrow afternoon with an ENT physician’s assistant to check my nose and rule out the scary stuff, because why not add more things to my life right at this moment (I didn’t want to spend days and weeks finding someone in the new city so got my doc to refer me to someone here). But we’ll see.

The gas

Apr. 3rd, 2024 10:06 am
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I said in my previous post that we had no gas because of forgetting to change the end—of-service date. Turns out that:

(A) we still had it because they hadn’t flipped the switch yet

(B) the phone call to straighten it out took all of 10 minutes and there was no creating of new accounts or anything like that

(C) the rep even waived the $19 setup fee.

In conclusion: gas company 1, ISP minus several million. We’d use them for the new house but alas they don’t service it, instead it’s a propane area (cue Hank Hill jokes) and the company seems to be run by one guy who’s laidback and ok with texting so there’s that.
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It only took two more phone calls to the ISP but internet was restored last night! Yay!

Of course now we have no heat or hot water because with all the internet mess going on [personal profile] myrialux forgot to call the gas company and update our move-out date, but that’s understandable and MUCH LESS IMPORTANT than the sweet, sweet internet. :)
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OK. So we have bought a house in a city closer to friends and family and rather than try to do All The Things At Once with moving as regards fixing up the new house and fixing up the old while at the same time trying to pack and move, we chose to do it in stages. We got internet set up at the new house so we can go down there and work while meeting with tradespeople and such, and have gotten most of that done. There's painting happening there right now and we've got a few photos sent by the painter so it's looking good.

Anyway. As part of that whole setting-up-internet thing, [personal profile] myrialux called our ISP and discovered that for whatever reason we can't have two overlapping houses on the same account. This seems odd, because there's got to be plenty of people paying for internet at their house in the country, or their college kid's service, or Nana's service. But, whatever. The ISP rep who started setting up the service to transfer canceled out of that and we got a new account set up for the new place. We can't get into the new house account online, although autopay works just fine, we get bills just fine, and the people at the storefront can get into it and tell us it's fine.

Fast-forward to Easter Sunday when we wake up at the old house with no internet. A few power cycles of the modem later we assume it's a more general outage in the area. However there's none reported that we can see on the ISP's website. Note that our house's radiant barrier is VERY GOOD at blocking all sorts of things including cell signal, and the waves of cell signal ebb and flow in our area according to some mysterious criteria of their own, so trying to do anything online using hotspots is futile unless we want to sit outside on the patio furniture that has been marked by feral cats.

It then occurs to me that it's the end of the month, and that might speak to the problem, if for some reason the account was set to turn off at the end of the month, even though we did not specifically request it. [personal profile] myrialux calls in and lo and behold, that's the problem: the original rep actively set our account to close at the end of March, even though we did not yet have a moving date set. The solution should be easy enough, right?

Wrong! There is no way a rep can turn the account back on when it's been cancelled! (Note that [personal profile] myrialux is being bounced back and forth between reps and Sales for all of this.) We have to create a NEW ACCOUNT!

It's now Monday or so. Fine. We have a new account created. Great! Does the internet work? NO! Because we have (a) an outstanding bill and (b) the old equipment! More calls ensue. The outstanding bill is just the normal bill from our account due in early April, it's that the account closing terminated auto-pay so we need to pay it manually. OK, no prob. Paid. Why we can't just use the old equipment I will never know, but [personal profile] myrialux wraps it up and takes it off to the storefront. Awesome.

However, the reps at the store can't release the NEW equipment to use until a flag in the account is switched that, presumably, gets flipped sometime after the old equipment's return wends its way through the system. Back home, to MORE phone calls and explaining the whole sordid affair AGAIN to a new rep. By this point, [personal profile] myrialux has actually created a document detailing what's happened and the order it's happened in for both our reference and for showing the storefront reps.

Calls duly made, the switch is flipped and [personal profile] myrialux goes to the storefront AGAIN to pick up the new equipment. Home again, install the stuff and activate.....oh no that would be too easy. The online activation is not working.

And that's where things stand, because [personal profile] myrialux had no spell slots left and missed most of a day of work--he managed to hotspot a while during the afternoon by propping his phone on the living room windowsill and sitting in a chair next to it, but it wasn't ideal. I investigated coworking spaces in our city that would let us book a private office (because of [personal profile] myrialux's many meetings) for 2 (so I could get internet time for various projects) for one day and we've ended up at WeWork, not my first choice, but the one that sat in the middle of the Venn diagram intersection of expense, location and convenience.

(And of course our office has a giant glass wall facing the entrance into the workspaces and I forgot the Seekrit Art Thing I need to work on is using nude figure study reference so this afternoon is probably going to be spent with the computer and me awkwardly rotated to block the screen while I scribble black bikinis over the figures I want to use but that's a thing that can be done.)

Tonight will probably involve more phone calls and possible visits to the ISP storefront, but hopefully things will work out. Blah.
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It occurred to me, while I was in the throes of a major hunger-induced ADHD Moment at 10:45 wherein I was trying to, at the same time, (a) figure out what to eat, (b) buy curtains for the bedroom, (c) figure out where to get a paint chip of the wall color for the bedroom, and (d) decide if it was worth waiting 15 minutes to just eat lunch instead, that I now work from home and if I was done with the immediate workload, I could just...take the afternoon off and go buy curtains. MIND. BLOWN.

So things got sorted out. [personal profile] myrialux pulled the paint can in question out of the garage and dipped a popsicle stick in it to make a paint chip for me (it's 10 years old; I'd be surprised if Home Despot had that particular color of chip), then after I offered to go pick up lunch looked at me and decided I shouldn't be driving in that state so we went out to Raising Cane's and ate an early lunch in the car while listening to the current audiobook (Garth Nix's Sabriel, read by Tim Curry), and reassured me that yes, I could just go out and buy curtains. So once a few more tweaks on this cover are approved by the author.. it's curtains for me!

Re: the curtains--I have hated the way our main bedroom is set up ever since we moved into this house, and never managed to figure out how to arrange it, so I ended up finding an interior designer on Fiverr, sent them the measurements, some photos, and the constraints* I had, and she sent me back a set of 4 renders that make the room look CALM and RELAXING and NOT LIKE A COLLEGE DORM so I am over the moon with it and now have something to more-or-less aim for in arrangement, decor, etc.

*The biggest constraint was our sound-dampening curtains, which need to stay because of the very busy road behind our house that occasionally hosts illegal drag racing at night, but I said I was fine with covering them up with other curtains. Second biggest constraint was the couch, which is mostly being stored in this bedroom until we move on the off chance that we have a place for it in whatever new house we move into. Yes, I know, not really the best thing but I don't want to sell it or toss it, and it will provide a nice place to sit and read, provided we stop piling random stuff on top of it (hah).

edit: Also, rhythmic gymnastics with your dog is a thing, and you should watch this YouTube video of a woman and her border collie (I think?) competing. Energetic part starts about 2 minutes in.
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Cat story and photo of new library/dining room arrangement.

cut for temporary cat illness--she's fine now--and cat photos )

And that last pic leads us into the new library/dining room/gaming room! We were both too keyed up to work yesterday, so took the day off and kept our hands busy finishing it off. Only one photo, because I didn't think to take more, but you get the effect.

cut for pic and talk about interior design )

tired...

Sep. 6th, 2022 10:56 am
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We got a massive urge to rearrange the house and spent the better part of all 3 days of the holiday weekend doing so. Far from done, mostly because a lot of it involves culling books and other shelved possessions, then unloading books and possessions, then unscrewing bookcase braces from the walls, then doing the 3D equivalent of those sliding puzzles to get the pathway and destination cleared enough to slide heavy furniture there, then measure out the placement and screw the braces back onto the walls--the cats probably can't tip stuff over but we have a small active nephew--then load them back up.

Why measuring placement? I used Photoshop to make scaled floorplans and arrange scaled furniture virtually. Quicker overall than putting all the cases in and manually arranging them to fit, and it means we don't have to unload all the cases at once--we can unload the one going in the middle, place and secure and reload it, then just put the others next to it.

The advantage of having done strength training for a year was clear: stacks of books that I'd normally have found too heavy were much less heavy. I was limited in the amount I could carry by how many I could hold at one time, not by how heavy they were. That was during the culling-and-moving-out-of-the-way phase. We did eventually get down empty boxes and fill them for the move-to-the-destination-room phase, and the filled boxes were still too heavy for me to carry very far, but we also own a small hand truck. (Which did start showing signs of age, so when we did a hardware store run for flat-plug extension cords to go behind the bookcases, we also picked up a newer, sturdier hand truck.)

I'll post more when we've got the whole process completed. It'll be a bit. :D

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