Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

The Daughter Unit and I spend the weekend accumulating ‘ow’s, and the painful evidence that we are both somewhat out of shape. The Daughter Unit went off to a lake park near Austin to a class in paddle-boarding all day Saturday, a recreation which she has been interested in for some time, especially after seeing another paddle-boarder with an inflatable board having fun at Canyon Lake, where we went to spend the occasion of Wee Jamie’s first birthday.

Me, I spent the day alternately minding Wee Jamie (who most considerately went down for a long afternoon nap after about 12:30) and installing vinyl flooring in the den. Yes, I could finally finish out the last element of renovating the den, after the cave-in of the ceiling last year when the drip pan under the HVAC unit in the attic overflowed. The ceiling was repaired late last year, beadboard and cornice installed, the whole room repainted and the closet doors replaced – but the flooring had to wait until I finished paying for repair of my car after the little accident with the hood coming open while on the highway. The particular brand vinyl flooring product that I had to use – mostly because I had half a box left over from doing the front bedroom/nursery last year is not the ultimate expensive one, but I wanted to make use of those bits as it was the brand recommended by NHG in the first place because it has all kinds of good qualities including not needing an underlayment before being installed over concrete. That brand and style has gone up in price, alas, from barely under $3.00 a square foot to 3.80. We had to go back for another box of it today, as there wasn’t quite as much in the leftover box as I thought there was. But I took it in my head to do the install myself, saving a good bit of a bill from Neighborhood Handy Guy (who now has a raft-load of bigger and better-paying projects) plus the weeks and weeks and weeks that NHG would need to fit it into his increasingly busy schedule. I had the tools – a nice little 4-in saw which cuts a fine line and isn’t nearly as heavy and dangerous to manage at the big circular saw – a tapping block, a right angle and a soft-headed mallet … and having watched NHG and his #1 Minion install the first floor, and watching another series of videos on Tube of Ewe – well, why not?

It was mostly like a life-sized jig-saw puzzle, sorting out what would fit, and what I would simply have to cut, whanging it repeatedly with the mallet, and wanging again and again and again until all the joints locked into place. This project also involved moving all of the existing furniture and fittings out of the way, and taking out the closet sliding doors and the doors into the den itself and then reinstalling them once the flooring around the doorways was in place. But as noted – I have all the tools. Circular saw, square, a set of screwdrivers, a hammer, mallet, tapping block … but oh, the labor of shifting all the stuff in the den! Taking down the doors, stacking it all … I was so exhausted by late afternoon, with about 2/3ds of the floor done that I messaged Daughter Unit (on her way home from her paddle-boarding get-together) that she had better hurry up so she could give Wee Jamie his bath, as I was so exhausted, I was afraid that I would drop him.

Well, as of Monday afternoon, the last bits of flooring are in place – and yay! All that is left over is a small pile of vinyl scraps, thanks to careful fitting and utilization of all usable scrap pieces. But I still must cut all the baseboard pieces to fit, and nail them into place. Fortunately, I had bought all the necessary lengths and painted them last year, so I am not out any more money.

I am just not at all certain I am up to doing another floor install, satisfactory as this project has been. (Pictures to follow as soon as the baseboards are installed)

This must be my month for noticing cozy and modest little homes appearing in media – last week it was a quaint little cabin in the mountains redone by Melissa Gilbert and her husband as their personal refuge. This week it is a shed on a small ranch property near Fayetteville. The owners inherited the property from grandparents. While sensibly saving up what they need to reno the main house, they spend a year and a mere $16,000 on fitting out a shed as a tiny temporary home for themselves and two young daughters. The shed itself dated from the 1980s and appeared structurally sound – it had even been insulated, but lacked plumbing and electricity, and was just a single room inside, approximately 280 square feet. So they set to work, doing the labor themselves; partitioning off the space inside to one living room and kitchen, with a bathroom and bedroom at the back. They built on a generous porch which added about a third more living space, replaced the windows, put in an air conditioning system – and have been living in it happily for more than a year.

I’d guess that most of that $16,000 went for the plumbing, electric and HVAC, the new vinyl windows, and the kitchen cabinets. Most of the other construction materials were sourced from the ranch itself, gained from tearing down an even more decrepit old barn and reusing the wood beams, planks, and the front door, which hardly needed any more work than replacing the glass panel in it. It was a lovely demonstration of what one can do on a small project, with the help of friends, and making use of what materials come to hand. I do hope that they will also document progress on renovating the main house; at any rate, when that second and larger reno job is done, the family will have a lovely little guest house.

I honestly wish that more builders were interested in building developments of small – say 800 square foot or less houses, of the two bedrooms, one bath sort. Those small starter houses might sell for a much more reasonable, affordable price. But there are all sorts of economic and political pressures not to do so, mostly associated with economic costs and civic authorities not wanting to allow any development which might soon descend to slumhood, never mind that home owners tend to be rather more careful of their property than renters.

So, my daughter was roped into representing the brokerage she is with, for a day-long outdoor market event earlier this month. I will not say anything more specific about the event, the location of it, or the purpose of the event itself, save that it was absolutely the most horrifically mismanaged and disastrous event which she has ever been a part of, and oh, gosh, have we done a lot of them. Not as many as professional vendors following the weekend markets will attest, but yes, we’ve participated in enough of them to be able to distinguish a well-organized and well-run event from a dumpster-fire, floating down a flooded riverbed.

Yes, efficiently well-run community or event market has certain commonalties, upon which vendors and exhibitors have come to depend. Like, the event organizer will let us know exactly what we need to bring, or if such items will be supplied (usually as part of the required table fee.) The organizer will also let us know through providing a map, exactly where to set up our pitch, what time to set up and break down, where we can park, and are available by phone call, email or just by simple physical presence, when it comes to dealing with problems which naturally arise. Trash cans, portapotties/bathrooms also abound, in readily locatable areas. The very best markets which we have participated in also featured representatives from the managing organization or committee who also took a tender care of the vendors – circulating among the vender booths, ensuring that we had water, lunch, someone to spell us if we were alone and needed a bathroom break. Oh, and … sufficient publicity for the event itself which drew enough participants and generated enough in sales to be totally worth participating? Oh, yeah. All this, and some of the very best even included a free lunch for vendors, and raffle tickets … but never mind.

The event earlier this month incorporated practically nothing of the above. The organizer was not much in evidence for much of the day and couldn’t be raised by cellphone or message to deal with those problems which arose. This persistent unavailability gave rise to much annoyance. The place, so says my daughter, looked half-derelict and deserted, the landscaping neglected, and mildly litter strewn. Not an inviting prospect on the whole, although if kept maintained, the grounds and building could have been amazing.

A food truck depending upon electricity from the venue had no luck at all, and had to send at the last minute for a gas generator, as the feeble trickle of electric power proved insufficient for their needs in providing for customers … customers who didn’t show up anyway. My daughter did report that she and the other vendors could make use of the bathrooms within the permanent venue building, but that the plumbing of the place didn’t allow for TP to be flushed down the toilets. An archaic thing that I haven’t seen since we were living in rental property in Spain, where the plumbing system proved to be unable to digest toilet paper. We got used to this, of course – but it seems a strange quirk of a system in an American venue in this present day, no matter how old the house. Finally, by late afternoon, my poor daughter and her co-agent were basically sitting in a place without shade – which would have been endurable if there had been any kind of crowd at all for the venue event.

Which there wasn’t. And that was the final insult – hardly any crowd at all, as publicity for the event seemed to have been minimal.

Finally late in the afternoon, after suffering from a mild case of sunburn, my daughter and her co-worker decided to pack up and leave an hour before closing time. One of the other vendors had also left before that time. They brought around their cars from where the vendors had been told to park, rolled carefully across the venue grounds, packed up and were about to leave when the venue organizer finally showed up, and cussed them out a blue streak for carelessly driving through the grounds, and leaving early. (Copious amounts of alcohol may have been involved on the organizer’s part, as this person seemed to be oblivious to the lack of crowd, or coherent and completely sober.)

My daughter looked at the all-but-deserted venue, shook her head and left, while the event organizer fulminated. Perhaps as was fortunate, the organizer didn’t know their names, and may indeed have forgotten the name of the brokerage itself. Participation in that goat-rope was on the part of someone else at the brokerage who wanted to get more exposure. We’ve passed on the contact details of organizers of regular markets who are more on the ball, organization-wise.

It has been almost a year since the day after Wee Jamie was born, a day that I spent at home because the AC ceiling unit had overflowed the drip pan, saturating and collapsing part of the den ceiling. The trusty local company which installed the whole HVAC system in the first place almost ten years ago had to reinstall a new evaporator coil as the existing one was ruined, a new line connecting the outside condenser, compressor and fan, the coolant line had been dinged somehow during the siding install, and a drain to the nearest outside flower bed. At that time, a year ago, they suggested making a full sweep and replacing everything, including the outside condenser, etc., but I winced at the cost and opted for the minimal fix. And the darned outside condenser/compressor/fan gave out entirely over the Mother’s Day weekend, in the face of an expected heat wave. Sigh. You’d think that something like an HVAC system maintained by the installing company could have lasted longer than a decade, but this is Texas; great for men and dogs but hell on women, horses and, apparently, HVAC systems. We had no HVAC drama for the whole year until last weekend. (The condensation drain used to get plugged pretty regularly, until it was re-routed – to our exasperation, and that of the techs, who used to have to show up every couple of months.)

The good thing is that my credit rating is recovered to the point where I can get favorable terms for a better-quality system – quieter, smaller, and more efficient … plus they promised to fix an ongoing problem with the front bedroom, which has always been either hotter or cooler than the rest of the house. The other good thing is that I had finally paid off two loans for previous work, which gave my budget some (fleeting) elasticity. The third good thing is that we got several hefty discounts – one for having been loyal customers for a decade, another for referring a good friend who bought a system from the company based on our good word, still another for senior citizen (hah!) and veteran, and a fourth hefty rebate from the energy company. It is my profound hope that with the new system – and taking into consideration the new siding and the windows – that I really will see a substantially lower energy bill this summer. The bill for April was the pits; we only ran the air conditioning for half the time, or two days out of three, but the kilowatt hours consumed were nearly as much as the hottest month around here, which is August. Possibly the condenser/compressor/fan failing had a lot to do with this. I hope so. They topped up the blown-in insulation, which ought to help with the bills.

Another very promising thing is that the outside unit is about a third the size of the previous one. It mounts to the side of the house, rather than on the ground on a small pad, which keeps it above the dirt and all, and allows a bit more of my yard to be used, without that big hulking square thing taking up precious garden real estate.

And the final bit of good fortune? About a year ago, I scored a deLonghi portable AC unit for the price of a customer review, knowing that we might have a need of it someday. It didn’t have enough oomph to keep the house cool, but it did chill one 15 x 11-foot room quite nicely, It turned out well that we had that portable, for there was a problem with the new smart system, in that it didn’t actually work, at first. As my daughter remarked, ‘never mind about a smart system that doesn’t work, what about a moron system that does?!’ We’ve been miserable all week, waiting first for the installation, and then for the last in a series of expert techs on Friday to sort out why the brand new out-of-the-box modules – apparently some connection came unconnected in transit from the factory, such a rare occurrence that the regular install technicians didn’t expect to see, and the factory support functions are in another time zone entirely, so someone working on our unit in the late afternoon or early evening was SOL when it came to expert human tech support. Praise be, the installation supervisor arrived first thing this morning, and went over the inside and outside units, reprogrammed the whole system, and for the first time in a week, it’s comfortably cool in the house.

And the contractor who promised to do the back fence actually arrived first thing this morning – so although my bank account will be cleaned out for the next week to pay for work done – the back fence and gate is under construction even as I write. At long last; we’ve been waiting on that since early in March!