You’re the next contestant on the Erwin House Guess Our Massive August Electric Bill Contest Game Event!
Our first electric bill will be in the mail soon. How much will it be? Let’s see who can guess the highest without going over.
Here are a few hints.
1. August in Texas is hot. The average high has been 101 degrees this month.
2. We’ve had the doors open a lot. We moved, workers have been in and out, and the kids are still learning how to close the doors with these weird handles.
3. We’re still figuring out how to set the AC. We’ve had it set on 76 upstairs and down, 24 hours.
4. We’ve been running the bathroom vent fans for white noise and to get rid of the new house smell. Basically pumping cold air out of the house for hours on end.
5. We have 2200 sqft, two 14 SEER Lennox ACs, insulation, a bunch of low-E windows, and a thin layer of attic space.
6. Last year we had 830 sqft, 3 window unit ACs, no insulation, single pane windows, and a flat roof. The average temperature was 97 degrees. We used 1360 kilowatts. It cost $129.03.
Who’s going to make the first guess? Who’s going to guess one dollar over?
We’ll announce the winner when we get the bill.
[Christiane adds: Just to make it more interesting (and fair), I will bake a batch of brownies (in my convection oven, whoopee!) for the winner. Make sure to leave a valid email addy, k?]
[David adds: To be precise, this is just the electric part of the bill. Not including water and trash. And our meter is read around the 10th of the month. The City of Austin charges the first 500 KWH at one rate, and additional KWH at another rate. Maybe it would have been more fair to guess in kilowatt-hours, but that ship has sailed.]

There is something terribly gratifying about the sconce on the stone wall.

My mom and I lived for a year with my grandparents when I was 4. I remember my grandfather’s basement-turned-den: he had a fully-stocked bar with a collection of miniature liquor bottles, a number of model trucks from his days as a transportation manager for Altorfer Bros., and lots of chrome. The Rejuvenation Aloha on the stone wall is straight out of his basement, the light I later used to do homework by when I sat at the ladies’ desk where my grandmother paid bills.
Next on the list: one of those spiky 60’s wall clocks.
In the meantime, we’re shopping for shams for the master bedroom. Since we didn’t paint the game room in the classic aqua blue, I’ve been trying to use aqua in the bedroom. I’m not going for the West Elm tan and cornsilk that everyone loves, rather I’m looking for that crazy greenish blue of the space age.


I love this pattern from PillowsandThrows.com, but you can’t buy the shams separately. We also liked some patterns from West Elm and Pier One, but finding just shams is going to be difficult. Wouldn’t it be cool if there were a Formica-flavored boomerang fabric? A girl can dream.

The punch list grows smaller.
The big event of last week was the removal of the old driveway. I think it took longer than they had expected. The driveway was original to the house and was a solid 6 or so inches of concrete through and through. No rebar, no clay foundation. They had to score each section twice and remove it with a bulldozer (a real treat for the younger boy).

It dramatically improved the face of the house in my eyes. It shifted the focus of the automotive section of the home to the backyard and it left plenty of room for the crepe myrtles I plan to plant in front of each post (once they are painted white, ahem).

Ace’s guys also hung the shutters and awnings, so now all we need are the screens on the front of the house, and we’re going to be close to perfection.

There was much ado about storage this weekend. Financial considerations made us cut the driveway, carport, and outdoor storage/garage from the original plans. That meant that, for the past few weeks, our guest bedroom became the garage and was piled to the brim with boxes, tools, and whatnots.
Realizing that it might be a while before we get a garage built, and seeing as we have company coming for Labor Day weekend, David bought a little shed to put together.
Who knew it would be such a project! Luckily, he had helpers
In the meantime, I organized all the schtuff and tried to put it in piles that could be moved–to the storage shed, to the attic, to somebody else’s house. By sundown today, David had cleared out the guest bedroom of all the miscellany and set up the bed and shades. A few curtains, and The Official Justin and Edie Wolfe Suite will be complete.
This coming week we are hoping to get things squared away with our bank. We met with our loan officer on Friday and, well, let’s just say that he didn’t seem to have ever read through our loan paperwork. David is keeping a list of things they have royally screwed up, and I think that one meeting added three or four new items to the list. Can’t wait to see what they do next. In theory, they should have the construction loan ready to rollover to a mortgage within the next week or so. Then the ball is back in our court.

Technically speaking, I am not against flipping.
David and I have posted about it before, about our neighborhood and the fact that the vultures are circling as Austin booms and the houses begin to crumble. We don’t live in an historic area, and there is little necessary to save of most of the homes here. Once farmland later turned into a suburb, we are now a gentrified inner-city neighborhood with some of the last semi-affordable homes.
The fact is that the houses around here need work, and in many cases, more than just new roofs or polished floors. Some of them need new plumbing to the curb and all new electrical wiring inside and out. Some of them are infested with mold from years of leaky roofs or windows, and none of the original homes have insulation or low-E window panes. The work needed is expensive, time-consuming, and possibly hazardous to those with allergies or asthma. Young couples or families may not want to spend the time or energy updating their homes when they could sell them for much more than they paid even as little as a year ago.
Flippers often take on risks that homeowners are either unwilling or unable to take. They assume financial responsibility for a home that might need more work than they even realize, and they spend a great deal of time and energy working in a trade notorious for unprofessionalism.
My personal beef is when a rehabber does a poor job renovating a home in the neighborhood and then jacks the price up beyond where it should be. This does not improve the neighborhood, it only sets up the new homeowner with a house that has a short shelf-life and it embarasses the whole neighborhood, not to mention inflating prices over the short term and setting up the neighborhood for a fall when the homes begin to fall apart.
But I think there is a time and place for flipping a home. A friend of mine in Virginia recently purchased a home that was mid-renovation from a pair of brothers who were flipping in her neighborhood. They turned a tiny cottage into a family home, big enough for her and her 5 kids. They sold the home below cost, so she had instant equity, and they were true to their one-year warranty so that she could request repairs after she had moved in and given it a test drive.
So, now I turn this over to you. This weighs on my mind because David and I, even with our occasional troubles, loved renovating this house. And, better yet, so far we love the results. And we enjoyed ourselves so much that we’ve thought about doing it again–picking a home and buying it and updating it both aesthetically but also functionally and then hopefully selling it to someone who can appreciate the details. But… that’s flipping, right?
Is there such a thing as ethically flipping a property? I’m especially curious what people from Austin think about this, given all the heat over the McMansion issue. We want to see our neighborhood get better and better. But will the neighbors flip out over another Erwin House in the ‘hood?

Tomorrow we make the final payment to our contractor. That means it’s time for a real mortgage.
Here’s a re-cap of our past experience with our bank (affectionately called “Hakuna Matata Federal Credit Union”).
From January 26

…our bank put the wrong amount on the loan. Lame. And too late to fix it today. Better luck tomorrow.
(2 points go to Ace telling us that we were about to give him too much money and -2 points from the bank for saying it didn’t matter.)

From March 29

On Thursday Ace told us he was requesting a draw. We had about a week of delays in the first draw, so we wanted to be on top of things this time. On Friday, he got the money.
Nice expediting, but wasn’t I supposed to sign something? Wasn’t I supposed to see something? Like, the amount? I called them today and low and behold, they did need my signature, and they didn’t have it. They faxed a request for like $XX,XXX.XX (insert a respectable year’s salary in there) for me to authorize.

From May 10

Speaking of rates and loans, Hakuna Matata Federal Credit Union, has continued to be the weak link in this project. They tried to send our bills to the construction site for months. Even if they had spelled the street name correctly, there was no mailbox there. Maybe they could have tried sending the bills to the same address they send our bank statement to instead of threatening to lower our credit rating for non-payment.
When our bill finally arrived, it was pathetically marked up in ballpoint pen. Final payment was authorized via second hand voicemail (long story). I really wonder if they have ever done one of these loans before.

On Monday the bank did the final inspection. The “Inspector” opened the front door without knocking, took two photos and asked Christiane where the freaking deck was. The guy didn’t even go upstairs.
So, how do you think it will go? Smooth sailing?
In fact the poo was launched this afternoon. It will hit the fan tomorrow. No one is safe. Run for your lives.

Last Wednesday, the mason finally showed up to install the stone wall. No joke, I hadn’t felt like blogging because the stone wall was unfinished. I know that sounds pretty lame, but it is true. There was something about that wall that felt monumental to me. It felt like the last thing, even though it wasn’t–isn’t.
Anyway, the guy showed up with two helpers and began prep work. Before laying the stone, he needed to nail chicken wire to the wall and coat it in a primary layer of concrete. It looked like mud.
Now, try keeping two young boys off of a tower of mud in the exact middle of the house. Yeah. Right.
It was a crumbly, dusty mess, but I wasn’t the least dismayed. The mason said it would take 24 hours to set, but he’d be back to lay the stone then. I thought, “Hey, we can handle this for 24 hours!”
Thursday passed. So did Friday. On Friday night, we called our contractor and asked what was up with the mason. He called us back. Saturday, he said. The guy would be there on Saturday.
So, while we went to Breakfastland, and made a trip to Target (the thirty-fourth trip that week), and while I napped with the younger set and David took our eldest to piano lessons… they layed the stone. All but the last eight bricks.

They ran out of corner pieces at the end, but returned yesterday evening to finish up. It looks incredible. I told David that the stone wall makes everything, every room, even the stairs, look better. I don’t know how or why, but it just gels the whole thing.

I only have one complaint: It may take years to get rid of the dust. As they lay the stone, one guy would spread the mortar, and the other guy would scrape off the bits of concrete and stone around it to make it fit properly. The result was a thin layer of dust over every surface in the entire house. David and I swept, mopped and dusted in a tizzy after they left, trying to clear the air. I am still removing the residue today; it seems to settle when the A/C clicks off.

I’ve been taking notes on my first impressions of the house over the first two weeks. Here they are.
Appliances: I have always had bottom-of-the-line appliances. I haven’t had a refrigerator with an ice machine since I was in high school (except for the rental we had while renovating). So having crushed ice in the door feels like living in the space age. Several times we’ve stood in awe of the fine door-swinging-action on the fridge. It opens quickly, not too far, then stops at the perfect angle. I’m used to the freezer door resting coldly on my shoulder blade as I fumble through a pile of empty ice trays.
Likewise the stove and microwave are blowing us away with modern convenience.

Front door area: The design of the stairs gave us a dilemma. It could be right upstairs or right downstairs, but not both. We chose upstairs. As a result the front door and stairs clash a little bit. I keep trying to solve this in my mind. It’s one of the spots I could see a future family tuning up in a light renovation decades from now.
Light: I was pretty nervous about doing the lighting design ourselves. Lighting is important to me, and I’ve never done this before. It turned out great. We have good variety, and the right kind of light in the right places. And the natural light rocks.


Master Bath. Mixed review. Light - perfect. Tub - awesome. Tub deck - sweet. Sink - off center by 6-8 inches. Toilet - designed for giants. Wall lights - off kilter. Walls - by M. C. Escher. Tile - train wreck.

Stairs: The stairs are kicking our butts. We’ll get in shape quickly, and I’m already changing my walking-around-the-house habits to avoid extra trips up and down.

Kids Closet Doors: Should have been pocket doors.
Acoustics: The house is both loud and quiet. It makes no noise and it absorbs no noise. The AC is totally silent, so is the fridge, and the new windows cut out sound from the road, wind, etc. But a crying baby in the dining room can be heard perfectly in an upstairs bedroom.
The ice dispenser sounds like a car crashing into the house. I’ve rushed downstairs several times expecting the boys to be standing in a pile of rubble only to see them getting a glass of water.
I had gotten used to the old hardwood-radar method of kid tracking. But this house is solid. The floors don’t creak or pop and we don’t hear footsteps through the second floor.
Kitchen Ergonomics. We knocked this one out of the park. The cooking area, the cleaning area, the food area - it all works perfectly. Christiane is a cooking bad-ass in this kitchen.

Clean Air. That big hepa-filter works. When the sun shines through the house in the morning, no dust sparkles in the beams.
Bugs. Literally - ants and roaches. We had to exterminate a swam of wood ants that filled an upstairs bedroom just 2 days before we moved in. Sugar ants devoured a pile of crumbs in the dining room (note to self - buy dust pan). And we have seen real roaches. Not those big Texas tree roaches, which are just adorable, but actual little dirty roaches. Maybe it’s all those fast food wrappers tossed and swept into the crawl space during construction.

Yesterday, our contractor said a cleaning crew would be by the house tomorrow and please, would we not go over there. Then Christiane got this in her fortune cookie.

We took it as a sign. We took the last day off. We did not go to the house. (Well, one drive by, but we didn’t stop.) We went to the park, we had coffee, the kids visited with grandmother. We napped. We went swimming. We did an art project (more on that later), and signed up for soccer. We had fried chicken and beer.
Tomorrow, we move back in.