Starry Wisdom

I’m a bit slacky in my once a week posting, I swear I’ll try to get better, but stuff has been busy lately. One of the things which has been keeping me busy the past month (or really since the end of August) was the condo conversion refinance, which would complete the process of turning from TIC to Condo – something I’ve posted about before, and I swear I will make a definitive post on in 2013 (please, my meagre readership, hold me to this!).

Anyway, I ">posted back in September that my condo conversion was done with the city, but that there was still the refinance bit to go. Well it took until the week before last for that to finally finish. We closed the refi on 1/15/2013, and that puts an end to the TIC and brings into full on Condominium territory. Hurray!

Months ago I posted some about my condo conversions, and the inspections. Well, suffice it to say that after that last post the final but of the inspections went through without a hitch. After that we had to wait for the city to approve our application, which went fairly smoothly (there was some confusion over the title report, but that got cleared up pretty quickly.

At this point there are only a few tasks left to do:

1. Pay all of this year’s property taxes – there can’t be any liens on the property when the seperation into two seperate deeds take place. Since the tax lien is from January 1, even though we don’t get bills until September, we need to pay this before we can proceed. I recently contacted the tax assessor and got our estimated property taxes for this year – up somewhat more than I expected from last year, but still not too bad. We plan to pay this off in the next couple of weeks.
2. Record the condo map – this is actually expensive, but already paid for when we sent in our application. The surveyor will send in a mylar copy of our condo map to the city, and when it is recorded we are officially two separate properties, at least as far as the city is concerned.
3. And then, the final step to true separation is to refinance into two seperate loans and record the CC&Rs. Hopefully this won’t be too bad to do – property values look like they are still pretty good around here, so I doubt the house has devalued, which would be the biggest snag to a refi. But we’ll have to see – at least we have pretty much forever to do this step (although rates are sure good now).

In other news, we bought a grill for our shared back area, so BBQ season can commence!

I should post a real post about this sometime, with some specific information, since there isn’t a lot of information about this stuff around, but I’m currently in the midst of converting my place to condominium. I purchased the top floor of an Edwardian two-story in 2010, along with another person. We are currently co-owners (Tenants in Common – TIC) of the house with “exclusive” use of various parts of the property. San Francisco has some peculiar laws around converting this shared-deed property to a multiple-deed condominium – basically there is a lottery in which TICs of up to 6 units can enter when they meet certain owner-occupancy thresholds, and a small number of units win every year. There are two other ways to convert to condo. The first is so big companies can do it whenever they want, which is 50% or more improvement (which includes, of course, new construction). The second is a, lucky for me, exception for two unit TICs with a clean (eviction-free) rental history. After one year of both units being owner occupied, the TIC is eligible to begin the condo-conversion process.

Anyway, that’s the background, and like I said, sometime in the next couple of months I will write more about this and my particular experience, but one of the big steps towards conversion is to get a ‘code and safety’ inspection by the City. This inspection costs something like $2500 for a two unit building (it scales up, but the biggest per-owner burden is at two units). Building, electrical and plumbing inspectors come out and point out all the violations which then must be corrected within the next six months, whether or not the condo-conversion goes forward. A signed job-card verifying the completion of this work is needed to continue on with the process. We had our inspection November, and we got our report back at the end of 2011, and it really didn’t seem too bad. Only one ‘building’ issue was called out, a fairly minor issue with one of the back patio stairs, and there were a few small electrical issues, and a few more plumbing and mechanical issues. I don’t have the final bill for the contractor work on this, but it’s going to be around $5000 of work, shared between the two of us. Actually when I went in to the Department of Building Inspection to get the permit for the work, the inspector who looked over my report and my permit application said “wow, this really is not very much work, usually it’s a lot more”. Well, thats a lucky break for us – it’s probably a good thing that the former owners of this place replaced most of the electrical and redid the bathrooms and the downstairs kitchen, ALL WITH PERMIT in the past five years.

Ok, now to get to the point of this. We aren’t done with inspections yet, the building inspector has to come out Friday and look at the stairs and close the job cards, but the electrical and plumbing inspectors came out yesterday and both passed us. So hopefully when the building inspector comes out Tuesday he’ll just sign off on the small back staircase, and we will be free to proceed to the next steps.

I thought I was going to have to take a cold shower today, because the water was ice cold even after running for a minute or two. Contractors were over yesterday to do the minor code work that needs to be done for the condo conversion – more about this in a later post, I think – and one of the things they did is replace the first bit of pipe coming off my gas meter, before it splits out to upstairs and the basement (water heater and furnace). Well, I was worried they busted something for a moment, then I decided to see if they had just turned the water heater off. And they had. Thankfully it’s a tankless heater, so a very short time later I was able to take a shower.

We all know what happened ten years ago today. For me it started with waking up to NPR, as normal, and hearing that the *second* World Trade Center tower had just crashed down. I felt like I was dreaming at first, but then I got out of bed and turned on the TV. And of course, yes, it was real. And that’s about all I am going to say on that subject.

Now, for today:

A little over a year ago I purchased the top flat in a approximately 100 year old two-storey Edwardian in San Francisco. One of the things you’re likely to get in a home that old is some old, painted-shut, double-hung windows. My flat as full of them, but over the past year I managed to get all but one of them open by cutting the paint on the inside of the sash. But one window in my living room would not relent to my assault, so I knew it was going to be the first window in my window repair plan – besides windows that were/are painted shut, there are some windows with cut sash cords, and other assorted problems. But the one in the living room was both painted shut and it was missing a sash cord, so it seemed to be a good place to start.

I actually began the project yesterday afternoon by removing the stops (the vertical pieces of molding the hold the bottom sash into the frame). Actually, the project began a few months ago when I bought some books on the subject, and started to assemble a series of tools and supplies for the job, such as: sash cord, finishing nails, a respirator, and a small pry bar. Anyway, removing the stop involves cutting the paint between the molding and the frame, then prying it out with a combination of a hammer, a pry bar, and a stiff-blated putty knife. Once the stops are off, it’s fairly simple to wiggle the sash to free it from the dried paint, and then it can be removed. I ran out of time yesterday, so I replaced the stops (they are held in place by a combination of tension and nails – I just pressed them in place).

This morning I took the stops back off, and then sanded off the excess paint on the edges, primed, and painted them. While waiting for the paint to dry, I replaced both sash cords on the window – even though one of them was already functional, the rope was in a sad state, so it was actually easier for me to remove and replace it. Here is a picture of the sash out of the window and one of the weights:

Also, this is what it looks like in between the windows, where the weights normally are:

Then it was a relatively process of replacing the stops, and repainting the trim – and that left me with a finished, operable window (sorry for how dark it is, but you probably get the idea):

All said and done, it probably took about five hours to get the window fixed, which included a couple of hours of waiting for paint to dry. I could probably do more than one in that time, and three in an hour or two more. I’ll probably fix the next two at the end of the month!

Well, I guess I owe the completion of the furnace story. They furnace company called me last night and said “we have your parts, can we come put them in tomorrow morning?” And of course I said yes. So they came this morning, put the new parts in, and now my furnace works again. Of course it was in the 60s outside today, so the heat wasn’t really necessary. But hey, at least it works again.

So yeah, that home warranty thing? Not bad at all – I am sure I saved a few hundred dollars because of it!

Still out of operation. Furnace people coming monday. Until then, space heaters. Also, we did a lot of cooking today (made cookies, and chicken stock). At least that room was warm!

Remember my post yesterday about cold weather? Well, after some rain in the morning, it turned into a sunny, albeit a bit chilly day. However, my furnace isn’t working!

The fan works (in fact it doesn’t want to stop running) but the furnace won’t ignite. It’s electronic ignition, so there was nothing I could really do save call someone. But then I remembered that the realtor gave me a 1 year home warranty when I bought the place.

When I got home, I found the paperwork and called the warranty place. They said they’ll make it a rush job, but we’ll see if they can get someone to come out on a Saturday. I have a fixed $55 charge for the service call, and hopefully it will be something fixable within the day. But we’ll see, and we’ll see how well the warranty service works. At least we have a space heater for the bedroom.

The contractor wasn’t able to make it. He won’t be able to make it until next saturday. I’m going to call a leak specialist tomorrow, in the meantime.