On Saturday, the HVAC guy was scheduled to show up between 2 and 4. At about 3:55, he finally came. We were scared of this visit, knowing that our system is old and that the sellers were lousy at maintaining a house. As the service guy cleaned our system, there were lots of "Oh my God"s. . . which I would have chalked up to drama on his part except I know how many times we have said that about other things we've found. It appears that our system has not been serviced in many years, which is not too surprising (we were anticipating this, which is one of the reasons we had someone come out only a couple of weeks after we bought the house). We got a couple minor repairs and a cleaning done (that poor guy had quite a job to do), and there don't appear to any major issues, but as he reminded us, the system is 17 years old and is likely to be on its last leg. Of course, we already knew this, but we are tired and at this point would prefer to just stick our heads in the sand about it. The good news is that it works for now, so we'll just keep our fingers crossed that it stays that way!
On Saturday, we were also scheduled to have our dishwasher delivered between 4 and 8. At 7:45, we started to worry that it wasn't coming, and at 8:00, I made some calls. The dishwasher (and its deliverymen) finally showed up around 8:45, at which time I was already showered, in pajamas, and very much ready for bed after an exhausting day. There was a moment where we thought the dishwasher might not fit, which was scary, and then once they got it in, they ran into a couple issues. Apparently our countertop is sagging--not enough that it's putting weight on the dishwasher, but enough that they noticed it while putting in the dishwasher. In addition to that, they were only able to mount the dishwaser on one side because they kept hitting tile on the other, so they couldn't screw it in. Yet again, we were reminded of the fact that much of our kitchen is old and crappy. Nonetheless, we are very excited to have a beautiful new dishwasher--yay!
On Saturday, we were supposed to have someone come to give us a quote for refinishing the floors, but somehow there was some miscommunication and he rescheduled for Sunday. Another person who was supposed to come Sunday called us to cancel after looking more carefully at the e-mail we sent him and realizing that we have lead paint, which he is not equipped to handle. So we made zero progress on the floor refinishing on Saturday, though we did get two quotes yesterday. On the upside, they both gave us quotes to refinish the whole house (both upstairs and down) in a price range that we can handle. On the downside, they seemed to have no awareness of how to properly handle lead paint despite the fact that we made it very clear from the beginning that we have lead painted floors. And so, we are back to the drawing board.
The floor situation is extra frustrating because we feel as though the entire house is being held hostage until we get that sorted out. We don't want to move anything upstairs, so we're stuck sleeping in the dining room, and we don't want to unpack much because it will all have to be moved once the floors get done. The quotes we got this weekend made us think that we might be able to afford to get both the upstairs and the downstairs done, but we're not sure since clearly the whole lead situation was not factored into the price, even though it just means an extra piece of equipment (a HEPA vacuum attached to the sander). Until we know what the price might be, we don't really want to unpack much downstairs, either, because we might go ahead and get that done, too. So we are just stuck waiting. And searching for someone who knows what the heck they're doing with an old painted floor.
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