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what's wrong with an uninhabited house
Tuesday, January 24 2017
This morning, we had an appointment at the Brewster Street house with our realtor and the Kingston building safety guy to discuss its habitability. We thought we'd swing by Lowes on the way to get lightbulbs for a pair of whimsical chandeliers I'd installed in Gretchen's basement library. Lowes is the best place to get lightbulbs in the greater Kingston area; the stock is good enough that I stopped buying conventional bulbs online back before LEDs became the dominant lighting technology. While at Lowes, we learned the building safety guy was running late, so we went over to Home Depot to check out the lightbulbs there. I'd told Gretchen that Lowes has much better bulbs than Home Depot, but she didn't believe me until she saw for herself. We walked out of there with nothing but a styrofoam cup of coffee (provided free at the "contractor" checkout).
Then we picked up five boxes of faux-wood flooring tiles ($500) at Carpet One, the balance needed to finish the floor in Gretchen's library.
The building safety guy was running later than he'd said, so Gretchen and I had an opportunity to walk around the house with Karen (our realtor) taking measurements and wondering about things like insulation and illegal bathroom possibilities. On that latter issue, Karen spooked us by telling her own personal horror story about installing a bathroom without using a properly-licensed Kingston plumber. It was good to know, and dampened our enthusiasm about the many possible bathroomportunities in the house. This was particularly crushing with regard to the finished attic, where it seemed a master bedroom suite could be built. "Not without installing sprinklers," Karen said, throwing a wet blanket over the whole idea. Then when I reached into a hole some rebellious teen (or abusive manchild husband) had punched through the attic ceiling, I found no insulation. That didn't bode well, but then I reached somehow over to a neighboring bay and felt a bat of insulation, giving me some hope.
The building safety guy showed up at noon, just as my workday began (no problem; I had my smartphone). His name was Joe, and he was a real piece of work. He was skinny, in his late 20s or 30s and spoke with rapid-fire delivery. He'd only been in the house a few seconds before mocking Donald Trump with a "make America great again" joke. It turned out that the only reason for the "uninhabitability" of the house was that it had been winterized and the state of its utilities was unknown. The electrical system all looked good from what we could see (at least as far as Joe could tell), though there was no meter and the wiring was an unknown. So if there was a problem, it seemed like the kind of thing I could fix unbeknownst to the powers that be (thus evading the Kingston-approved electrician requirement). As for the plumbing, it was possible water had frozen in the pipes before the house had been winterized. A failed solder joint suggested this, but, again, it looked like the thing that could prove to be "in working order" by the time I'd secretly run around and fixed things, thereby evading the Kingston-approved plumber requirement. Joe was the first person I'd ever met who didn't like copper as a plumbing material, claiming it eroded from the inside (which it probably does, though at an extremely low rate). He was such a PEX partisan that he suggested ripping out all the copper and replacing it with that wonder material. Yeah, no. Still, he gave the impression that the Kingston Building Safety Department wouldn't be the hardasses that, say, the Hurley one had been regarding our solar deck (which hasn't even been legal for six months yet, though it's over 11 years old).
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