Lorraine a' Malena
WOW! What wonderful pictures! WHo knew we cleaned up so good? Tho I do not recall owning a pair of spider gloves, I sure as heck am a big fan of them.
I have been having great fun with House. We have been deciding on what is going to get re-modeled ( the tiny bathroom, the master bedroom closets and the entire porch, some of the kitchen, the ceiling of the back bedroom ) and what colors it will all be painted ( anything except what is currently there, I do shudder ) I will take some more pictures for you soon.
I have not been having fun trying to get gas and electricity, two things no home should be without. Who knew it would be difficult. I am a ( somewhat ) sane adult women with a perfect credit rating, but it seems the previous were not so careful with their bills and there was a shut off notice there today.
Silly me, I thought that simply saying I had purchased the house and was the new owner and desired to be signed up would be sufficient. I sat on the phone for an hour talking to an increasingly dour set of folks , tho in fairness they started out nicely. By the time I reached the STATE CREDIT INVESTAGOR , as dour a chap as one will ever talk to, the questions had become ludicrous. Background check? Next of kin? Faxes of the closing papers on the house????
Hello?
Candles people, I will need candles. And wood. For I do not believe the Great and All powerful Gas/Eletric company is going to deem me worthy of anything else.
More on House as the situations develop, as they no doubt will, such an adventure.
As Malena says, we are leaving for Boston on Saturday to record with Chris Ewan, which will be nothing but wonderful, then back here for a couple of concerts at Convergence, which will also be wonderful, then she is off to travel.
I'll just come home and sit in the dark.
Love and light,
Lorraine
posted by Anonymous @ 4:43 PM
16 Comments
16 Comments:
You're trying to connect gas and electric to Hugh Laurie??
;)
The remodeling plans sound like a blast. I can't wait to see more pictures!
Bureaucracy is a pain.
Hmmm...
Nora created some fingerless spiderweb gloves. I don't remember if she gave you a pair or not.
I'm sure you know how to deal with beauracracy, so I don't want to insult you with advice. (Working for an attorney office I have lots of it :-)) That is one of the fun parts of my job, actually. I call places and get what I want when others cannot. It is a wonderful skill that I can use in my own life.
Local guvmint, the attack of the puny-brained!
heh, that's future tense, vanda. i am going to give the gloves the spiderweb treatment to see how they look :-) .
But i may not airbrush the gloves, i may use the silver ink and a regular brush......
My other half would sympathise with your utilities frustration - he's spent quite a long time trying to get us set up with a phoneline this week (and incidentally broadband and cable). Not that this is as important as gas and electricity. Well, except for the broadband... I need to talk to you lot!
I think the spidergloves are rockin'. I need to find an occasion to wear my black lace ones...
I have no patience with bureaucracy, which means I'd be looking at wind and solar options. If you can get one of those to work for you, then you can thumb your nose at the cheerless and complicated gas & electric twits, and be environmentally-friendly and independent of The Grid.
what a horrible pain - and hopefully you will be able to get it resolved soon. We had to get electric run down our road and it took over a year when we built. I remember throwing the phone in frustration. BUT remodeling will be such fun. Hey Vanda - congrats on painting again, must see must see!!! very stormy here in the outer banks, lots of flooding too, its been an interesting vaction thus far.
::SIGH:: For most people it's not a problem getting gas and/or electric turned on in their new home; however, some former tenants don't like to pay their bills, so much so that they'll change their name and claim to be a new owner just so they keep their gas/electric, etc. It really sucks for the rest of us. :/
Being too far in, or out, of town shouldn't matter for solar. What would matter is the amount of remodelling for installing the solar panels, and the possible rewiring of the house. Way back in the mid-1970s my parents thought about converting the house we were living in to solar. We would have been in a model house for solar energy, even though our house was built in 1923 (IIRC). Ultimately, we turned it down due to lack of privacy; people could have come through our house pretty much any day of the week to see how a solar house functioned. The house was very much in the middle of town.
I can't believe NO ONE in the city knows who you should call for water. I suppose you could have your own well, but you would also have some type of well house for the pump (even electric pumps need housing). Assuming you're on city sewer, sewer and water are usually in the same department, and both are often billed together with garbage pickup.
sheesh.
Ummmm....just to be on the safe side, you might want to make sure your house isn't in some kind of historic preservation district. If it is, you might want to make sure there aren't any restrictions on paint colors and what you can/can't use as materials for remodelling. You don't like yellow, but it is a typical color for Victorian houses, at least in the U.S.A. I really wouldn't want to see you have to go through that twice.
I've always wondered - why do they call them Victorian houses in America, given that she wasn't queen there? No reason why they shouldn't, it just always seems odd. (I've never heard anyone in America talking about Edwardian style...)
Nobody in Edinburgh, including the council, seemed to know who you should call about council tax for quite a long time. We did eventually get there... Ah bureaucracy. Such fun.
Usually utility contacts are listed in the beginning of the phone book.
K: We have Edwardian and Georgian styles as well. We even have Queen Anne furniture. ;-)
K, we have Tudor style houses, too.
Granted, I live in a Texas ranch house, but there are lots of styles even out in the county where I live. I suppose we could call them Gingerbread houses for all the ornate trim, but they aren't. ::shrug::
SF is full of Victorians. Just the style of house structure. Typically they feature a lot of rooms of small-moderate size, with far too many small walls on which to hang knick-knacks galour. Not sure if the bay-window thing is a product of the Victorian style or just a popular thing here.
-MM, whose victorian home is currently being invaded by the neighbor cat.
Don't a LOT of normal people buy houses every day and need to get service?
There you have it.... they've figured out already that you're not *normal* enough, and therefore don't qualify for utilities. Simple!
Can your real estate person help?
Best of luck with the horror of bureaucracy... (bureaucra-ticks... blood-sucking desk mongers?) ... personally I have a special and extreme dislike for corporate phone info-message systems... they always seem like a special bureaucracy of the telephone system to me.
Really looking forward to the pics when you find the time...
safe travels to everyone!!
(hope you are having fun Ivenotime and best wishes for the art Vanda... looking forward to it)
Rubius: Ah, the plague of art...
My mentors would always tell me when I was half way through a piece that it was done. Okay, I can dismiss that because they just didn't know.
So now my daughter tells me that my pieces are done and I shouldn't do more. SHEESH!! I'm plagued.
I will have pics of the first piece soon. It is getting close. It is experimental just to see how things mesh.
Bye everyone! I'm off to the airport. We'll talk to you when we return. And hopefully sneek a few words in on the laptop if we have it with us.
Hugs to you all!
Malena
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