GAAAAAAAAAAHHH!! It’s time to panic because we really, really, really, really started this whack-a-doodle renovation thing today!

See that dark space between the garage on the left and the unattractive brick and clapboard structure on the right? That’s what we call our breezeway, and that’s what we’re filling with house (i.e., more unattractive structure).

Here’s a from-the-front-yard view of the breezeway:

A breezeway can be a nice thing, but you can see why we don’t care too much about losing this one. Somehow we just fill it with rubbish.

Here’s what it looks like cleared:

There was a steep flagstone stepway coming down the hill from the breezeway to the back yard. We knew the foundation and demolition crews would be a rough horde with much heavy work to do and powerful equipment, so we decided to pull those flagstones out ourselves in an unshattered form.

Here’s what they looked like before we pulled them up:

And what it looked like after two or three hours of labor:

A bunch of dirt waiting to erode.

By the way, when I say “we,” I actually mean “me.” For the past two weeks Anthony has been saying we should put this particular bit of manual labor off until the last day or two before the foundation guys come. Then two days before the foundation guys came, Anthony had a massive gout attack in a knee. It was so bad he couldn’t even drive himself to work. He’s walking like an injured zombie.

Nice timing, mate.

I had to move the flagstones by myself yesterday. The bigger ones weigh anywhere between 30 and 100 pounds. I could lift and carry them up to about 60 pounds, depending on their shape — down the hill to the edge of the woods, about 30 or 40 paces, where I pieced together a rough little edge wall along a bit of shade garden we maintain there. But there were about a dozen enormous pieces that I simply couldn’t lift without doing some damage to myself. I levered them up with a shovel, and then depending on their shape I would roll them on an edge, or plop them end over end, or duck walk them zig-zag style, pausing frequently to catch my breath from the enormous effort. Each of these huge pieces took about 5 minutes to move to their new homes.

Based on estimated average weights, I calculate (conservatively) that I moved about 1600 pounds of flagstones. It was a great work out. Sort of like a prison boot camp. Or maybe some paleo thing. A good reminder that I never, ever want to be a caveman again. Forward, humans! Embrace the evolutionary path forward.

Right. This morning, the foundation crew showed up. With equipment.

Power tools are the answer to paleo.

The guy in charge of the foundation crew is named John. I think. All these contractor guys have monosyllabic names that blend together in my mind. John is a gruff, friendly fellow with a lot of facial hair and a can-do attitude. Perfect.

His crew jackhammered the concrete that I had cleared of junk, and somebody with stronger muscles than me carried those chunks of concrete to the big truck.

I wanted to give some of this equipment a go soooo bad. But I only got to watch. Here are a couple quick snaps I took from my kitchen window, which abuts the breezeway:

I was just a few envious feet from that digger as it scooped inexorably at the dirt, wreaking a small and precise devastation.

These guys were meticulous, clean, and fast, plus they had the right equipment. In the time it took me to carry 1600 pounds of flagstones away, this crew jackhammered and removed the concrete slab, dug down for the new foundation, and leveled the crawl space floor:

The photo doesn’t convey it well — that’s a level dirt slab about 5 feet below the level of the concrete that used to be there. They didn’t do any damage to the existing structures. Very cool.

My kids were a bit freaked out by the show. They stayed on the other side of the house watching a SpongeBob movie in our haven bedroom (because I’m that sort of classy mom). We could still hear the men screaming at each other over the roar of the generator and tractors, but it didn’t sound like the house was breaking. Nick and Jesse crawled up onto the kitchen counters and stared out the windows for a bit. Nick banged on the windows trying to distract the guy with the jackhammer, and Jesse got an instant little-girl crush on one of the crew guys, a youngish fellow with Australian beach bum curls:

I don’t know what happens tomorrow, but I know that Jesse hopes blondie comes back.

If you’ve been following this sorry tale, you already know I hate my kitchen. In a beautiful home filled with quirky wood details and a lovely exterior, the kitchen is pure junk. Also the dishwasher has been broken for years now. In order to replace it, we would have had to pull up the renovation tile some bobo put in, trapping the existing dishwasher in place. Or we could have left the tile and ripped off the counter top. A Hobson’s choice to be sure, and expensive either way.

But I had a third option: refuse to do anything except renovate the whole fucking kitchen, and in the mean time make Anthony do as many dishes by hand as possible. Seen in that light, one could argue that this renovation and expansion is entirely about replacing the dishwasher.

This is a much more expensive option than the first two.

Anthony and I have owned four homes, and all of them have had shitty kitchens. Why is it so hard to design a good kitchen for a person who cooks a lot? Even big sunny kitchens can suck for a cook. A huge space just means more floor to clean, and more feet to traverse while carrying stuff from here to there, and more room for kids and dog to get underfoot.

I love a good galley kitchen. It’s what I’ve always wanted. A galley kitchen, with plenty of counters tight on both sides and very little floor to mop, where Anthony and I can cook and clean side-by-side, bumping into each other affectionately and sneaking in a few kisses —–

Sorry. This is probably not ideation I need to share with you here, in this special place where I explore my grumpy. But the fact is, I haven’t had a kitchen like that. For the past nine years, Anthony and I have grumbled incessantly about how much we miss cooking together, because our kitchen sucks so bad there’s only room for one cook in there. One person can’t even wash dishes while another cooks.

When I first called the designer we ended up hiring, I had drawn a picture of our kitchen. It looked something like this:

My existing kitchen has about 2 linear feet of usable counter, once you plop down the necessary toaster, microwave, electric kettle (I’m married to an Englishman), and Cuisinart (I cook).  We wedge ourselves into our seats at the kitchen table for meals. (That’s the thing at the top of the picture. Those aren’t dancing D’s. They’re chairs.)

You can see from my drawing that there’s a breezeway between our house proper and the garage. Anthony had this brilliant idea to just fill the breezeway with house. It’s 7 or 8 feet wide, perfect for a small addition that makes room for a better kitchen. I did some drawings of how a kitchen might fit in that space. It seemed PERFECT for a galley kitchen — just throw it right in the breezeway, and then the existing kitchen area could become some sort of eating/living space.

Notwithstanding my steady hand and excellent drawings, we quickly realized we needed a professional. We ended up hiring AMETHYST DESIGN, run by a delightful woman named Kristi Minser, who is not only a project manager but also an architect. Yes, I’m shamelessly plugging her here without her knowledge or permission, because she is awesomeness. She doesn’t make me grumpy at all, which is a rare treat indeed because you know how irritable people make me. Kristi took our ideas and came up with some floor plans, and we had a very open back-and-forth with about eight iterations. In the end she came up with a plan that had very little to do with anything Anthony or I had ever envisioned, and it included stuff we never wanted, and it was perfect.

There is nothing better than paying a professional to do something way, way better than you can do it yourself. It amazes me how rare an experience that is.

Here’s Kristi’s professional drawing of our existing kitchen, in context with the whole house. That’s the garage out to the right.

Here’s what it’s going to look in four months, if all goes well:

There’s my tidy galley, tucked in the back corner of the house. I’ll even have a door directly into the back yard, finally. And Kristi added an unexpected mudroom, which we can definitely use to keep our outdoor gear in check.

The squiggly counter is going to be a dropped bar alongside the cabinetry, at a regular-chair level. Because Princess Anthony doesn’t like sitting at counter-height stools.

But I’ll say no more of that because now I’m being rude, and anyway even the dropped bar is going to be pretty cool.

I thought we’d close Friday on our renovation loan and then we’d spend the weekend panicking about all the preparations we have to make in anticipation of breaking ground. Instead, as my dear readers know, the mortgage-issuing bank screwed the pooch. We’re spending the weekend making preparations anyway, on the loosely optimistic assumption that everyone involved actually wants this thing to happen and will flex out as much as necessary Monday to make it so.

Remember that the delays have nothing to do with us or our contractors: our money is ready; the workers are ready; we are approved as borrowers; our contractors are approved as well. This is only about giving the underwriter documents that satisfy his anal retentive need to track how and when our money moved from our mutual funds and savings accounts to our checking account. I’ve collected all available records from the financial institutions involved and there’s nothing more that I can do. Hosebags all, these financial institutions — as difficult, rigid and challenging as a child with OCD. This is not a comparison I make lightly. I speak from maternal experience. (Except I don’t call Jesse a hosebag, not even behind her back. Most of the time, anyway.) Now it’s just up to the bank underwriter to get a grip. I hope he’s been to behavior modification therapy lately to help with that.

I’ve been considering offering the underwriter some additional data points to assist him in reaching a sound conclusion. He already has 400 years of our financials. He has our renovation contract bid and the bid reviewer’s assessment of it. He has the appraisal of our home and a bunch of photos that accompanied it. He has a variety of special-issue letters and special-issue statements from various financial establishments. As far as I know, he has a bug in my house and is in constant communication with the CIA about it all. But really, what does he know about me?

I think if things don’t work out Monday, I may offer to fly out to New York, where the underwriter works, and give him stool and urine samples. I can do it right in his office. I may also invite him to perform a proctology exam. Then maybe he’ll have all the information he needs to finally authorize us to close already on this fucking loan.

We were scheduled to go to closing today at 3:00 pm. It didn’t happen. Maybe we’ll close on Monday. Maybe global warming isn’t real. Maybe dinosaurs are a hoax.

What went wrong is this: the broker set up the loan for the wrong amount, and that’s what went through underwriting. We’re actually going to finance much less and bring more money to closing. So now it aaaalll has to go through underwriting again to establish that we have as much money as they already know we have, and to establish that we transferred funds from our own savings and mutual funds accounts to our own checking account. This is entirely, and only, about the paper trail.

It turns out that paper trails are extremely hard to establish with financial institutions, if you’re asking them to provide information outside their regular statement cycles. Right now I’ve been on the phone for 29 minutes with my own bank (most of it on hold), as they figure out how (or perhaps how not) to issue an interim statement for my savings account, from which funds were transferred into my checking account. Had the correct loan amount been put through underwriting, I would have known of these issues days ago and been able (perhaps) to resolve them. But now? Who knows if I’ll be able to get what I need out of these institutions STAT.

I’m so angry about the situation that I’ve lost all sense of humor about it.

We got the draft settlement papers two hours before closing was scheduled, which is in itself a significant issue. I’m not even sure that’s legal. I spotted the problem with the loan amount immediately. But it was too late to do anything about it. Maybe they thought we’d just go for it and finance a bunch more than we intended to?? But Anthony and I are onto the mortgage business. These guys always screw something up.

The first house we bought, the mortgage company sent construction loan closing documents to the title company. Fail.

Once when we refinanced our mortgage on a home, the closing agent showed up with papers that contained the wrong terms on a loan — 15 years instead of 10, which would of course generate more income for the investors on the lending end. We were planning to curtail this particular loan (pay it off early) anyway, so we said screw it and went ahead and signed.

Once when we refinanced our mortgage on a different home, the bank screwed up with the loan amount. We found out at closing. It would have taken so long to fix the mistake that we would have lost our interest rate lock. So we shook our heads, plugged our noses, and signed for the loan. The loan amount was too much, of course (because when does a mortgage broker ever make a mistake that’s to the borrower’s benefit??), so we had to take cash home with us. I know, I know, it’s a crazy problem to have. But seriously, I didn’t want to take cash home and then pay interest on it for 30 years! Even if it was “only” a few thousand dollars…

And here we go again. Only this time we’re on a clock, because we have contractors lined up and we’re packing shit up in our house and setting up an alternative kitchen because ours is supposed to be ripped out and so on and so on.

Carla is way, way, way past grumpy. I have moved on to just plain grim. I hate the mortgage business.

Still on hold with my bank, by the way. The call has lasted 44 minutes so far. Still waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel.

Like a zombie slowly and hypnotically gamboling in my direction, the closing on our renovation loan is approaching. It’s scheduled for Friday afternoon (aka tomorrow), though hypothetically something catastrophic could still happen Friday morning if the underwriter decides something catastrophic should happen.

To be honest, part of me is looking for the catastrophe, because the months it’s taken to plan the renovation and get to this point have given my anxiety time to blossom into full-on panic. I am truly frightened by the scope of this renovation. Plus today was the last day of school for the kids, so now they’re full time with me, unless I want to pay someone. After I stop choking on the size of the wire transfer we’ll make to the bank as part of this loan transaction, I’ll check my balances to see if I have enough money left for a babysitter.

I am overwhelmed by my first world problems.

I really was a lawyer once. A litigator. But I never, ever dealt with liens, except to the extent I must have studied them to take the Virginia bar exam, and I don’t remember anything about it, and anyway I never executed a judgment on anyone. 

Here’s what I do remember about taking the bar exam. Back then, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,  Virginia still had a dress code for the exam. Especially for women. Had I sat for the bar exam in the dark ages before the Big Bang, I would have been required to wear pantyhose. I would have been hosed. By the time I came along, I was merely warned to wear a dress. Some examiners might kick a girl out if she was wearing pants, no matter how professional those slacks might be. 

Anyway. What? Oh. Remember the liens I was talking about yesterday? I got to talk with the lawyer at WE energies this morning. He called at 7:00 am. Who does that?? Peeps in Wisconsin do that. Early risers here. 

The WE lawyer explained how this works. Judgments against people are recorded in court records. Title companies do searches in those court records when they’re making sure a homeowner’s title is clear. If they see judgments with our names (or similar names), they pick them up. But the plaintiffs who got the judgments haven’t gone out and found properties whose owners have those names and done something extra to “attach” the lien to their property. It’s just up to the title company to figure out what’s relevant. 

Ooooh… Imagine if your name is John Smith or Mary Jones. 

It turns out all you need to do when this happens is give the title company an affidavit that says, in various legalese, “that’s not me.” Done. No big deal. 

I had a massive anxiety attack about these liens yesterday and fretted and fretted. Total waste of time and emotional energy, caused entirely by my own stupidity. If only I had been trained as a lawyer. 

Oh. I was. God, I’m stupid and ignorant. I really do deserve to live with myself. At least I didn’t yell at anyone, so I guess it could have been worse. 

As we come limping into the closing gates on our renovation loan, we have had what I hope is our last surprise. The lady I’ve been working with at the lender bank called me today. “There are three liens on your property. Do you know about them?”

This came as a surprise. A really big surprise. No no. A REALLY BIG-ASS SURPRISE. The only debt Anthony and I have is our mortgage. We pay our bills. We check our mail. We answer our phones. We even check our credit reports sometimes. In fact, we’re going through a mortgage loan process, so our credit reports have been picked clean by underwriters. There should be no surprises.

Yet there they were, three clouds on clear title to our home. So let me tell you a tale of three liens.

1.  Child Support.

In February 2013, Milwaukee County child support filed a lien on our house. Totally makes sense. Because Anthony and I have children we don’t know about! Maybe it happened during the missing years in our 20’s. The title company provided us with a docket number, and It was remarkably easy to find Wisconsin’s child support “lien docket” on line. The website makes it really easy to search for a docket number, so I did that and I learned something. Some guy named Anthony Cross owes $24,861 in child support, at least as of two years ago. He was born on January 4, 1974. If I had a photo of him, I would post it here for you and the world to see. Different name and different birthday from my Anthony. This didn’t stop child support services from filing the lien against our home.

I called child support services and explained the problem. The nice lady who answered the phone told me I had to give her my social security number. Why? I replied. “Because that’s the only way we can find you in our system.”

“But I’m not in your system. That’s the whole point.”

“I cannot help you, ma’am, unless you give me your social security number.”

So I did. Because what else could I do?

“Oh. You’re right, ma’am, you’re not in my system.”

“Thank you for that excellent news. Who do I need to talk with about having the lien removed from my property?”

“You need to go down to the courthouse to room 101–”

Whoa whoa whoa whoa. I interrupted. “I don’t need to do anything. You guys need to remove the lien from my property, because it is wrong and a bad mistake.”

“I can’t do that, ma’am.”

“I KNOW. So who do I need to talk with??”

“The lawyer, who is in room 101.”

“Can I have a name and number?”

“No.”

??????

I’m at an impasse with myself, because I don’t feel like going down to the courthouse and I’m not sure what to do next.

2.  Power Company.

WE Energies, our local gas and electric monopoly, filed a judgment lien on our property in March 2011 for $1,700 and some change. The judgment is against — wait for it — Anthony Cross. I’m guessing this deadbeat was probably born some time in, say… January 1974.

I called WE Energies. I was transferred to some legal-ish department, where a nice lady named Ann took my call. I explained the situation and ended with, “What do I need to do, to make sure WE removes the lien from my property?”

“Ma’am, you can fix this problem yourself easily, by contacting your credit bureaus and informing them of the error.”

My jaw went slack as I took deep breaths and tried not to scream. “This isn’t ON our credit reports. Otherwise we would have known about it before. The judgment isn’t against us, we don’t owe you any money, so you haven’t reported us to any credit bureau.”

“Ooh. I’m not sure how to handle this.”

I got huffy. “It’s easy. WE Energies corrects its mistake and removes the lien from my property!”

After some aimless back and forth about the title company, there was a long pause, into which silence my imagination inserted a vivid image of a young woman staring blankly into space making a silent “duuuuh?” shape with her mouth. “I will need to look into this and determine who you should be talking to. Can you hold for a moment?”

Five minutes later, she took my name and number and promised to call back.

Two hours later, I got a voicemail from a gravelly-voiced man.

“Yes this is attorney Terry S—, from WE Energies, Wisconsin Electric, [telephone number], I’m calling for Carla Pennington-Cross, the call is regarding a judgment that was taken against a Anthony Cross, and I know there was some questions that was posed to one of WE Energies employees, and I think I can explain the situation better than she, and that’s why I’m calling. So if you want to get better clarification, give me a call at [telephone number]. Thanks, bye.” [sic, minus the “uh”s.]

I called him back and was rolled over to his voicemail. The message was recorded by a woman, suggesting Terry is a lawyer who’s too uppity to record his own message. Lame. I left him a message.

“This is Carla P—-, returning a call from someone named Terry regarding a lien that WE Energies filed against my home for a judgment against someone else. Please call me back as soon as possible. I look forward to receiving “clarification on the situation.” In particular I look forward to hearing how and when WE Energies will remove the lien from my home, since it was filed in error.”

No telling how this one is going down.

3.  The Bank

Associated Bank filed a lien against our house in August 2013, for a judgment in the amount of $18,151.73 against someone named Carla Cross. This one should be easy, because I’ve never been named Carla Cross and I’ve never had an account with Associated Bank. But I know it won’t be. After I spent a good hour trying to find phone numbers and information about the first two liens, I was used up. I guess I’ll call Associated tomorrow and see what the fuck they’ll actually do for me. Nothing, probably.

How could someone file a lien against my home without even sending notice of some kind to the address? Why are there deadbeats running around town bearing half my name and Anthony’s name? Am I really going to have to go down to the courthouse and file motions and do shit to get these liens, which are essentially false strangleholds on my title to my house, removed? Why? Why? I don’t want to be a lawyer anymore. This is the world I left behind me.

Our legal system may be amazing, but it also sucks.

Nothing happened today on our construction project. I sent a missive to The Bank last night basically saying this: come on, you fools, you ought to be able to tell me how long it’s gonna take to reach closing!! Seriously! Also I liquidated some assets so we have enough cash to take to closing. Unless The Bank has not accurately estimated the amount of money we need to bring to closing, in which case I guess I’ll liquidate some more. And each time that changes it has to all go through underwriting again, because I have to produce an assload of documentation confirming that the money in my bank account (for which they have 90 years of records) came from my investment accounts (for which they also already have 90 years of records). I don’t actually know what “go through underwriting” means, but there’s some guy somewhere called an underwriter who has an incredible amount of control over this part of my life right now.

I don’t think I’d want to be called an underwriter. It sounds too much like undertaker. Which by the way I think is one of those crazy words that quite poetically describes what the person does, i.e., take the dead body under ground. Kind of creepy really. The underwriter, by contrast, is perfectly capable of killing well-designed loan opportunities, so he’s less of a care-providing person and more of an assassin.

Anyway, I sent a somewhat obnoxious, needy, whiny, and loosely demanding email to The Bank People last night. I complained and snarked. I wagged my figurative finger. I typed the whole thing on my iPhone, so I was especially grumpy by the end of it. I said I wanted some transparency. I want to know exactly what additional hoops we need to jump through before we get to closing, so we can decide whether we’re even going to be able to do this project this year.

Today, The Bank did not respond. Nothing. Wall of Silence. Apparently, someone did call our design/built person, Kristi, to iron out some meaningless language details in our bid proposal. But that is all. No one called me, e-mailed me, texted me, or sent me flowers.

Bad form, Bank. And so much for transparency. I’m giving serious thought to walking away from the deal and wiping my hands of it. We’d lose a couple thousand dollars in various fees that we’ve already incurred in this excruciating process, but I would be free of noxious banker oversight. I hate being beholden to anyone, and I hate the thought of some inspector — not from our city, mind you, but some guy acting on behalf of the bank — wandering around my home eyeing all the work and making completely random decisions on whether my contractors get paid.

Anthony’s been out of town. He gets back tomorrow night. Let’s hope I don’t do anything foolish before my rational and practical man gets back, like calling The Bank and telling them to go suck it because nothing happened today.