Friday, March 10, 2006
Part 5 The Summer of Our Discontent
(And that is how we referred to it at the time too!)
With the move, our lives changed drastically. Our first thought was to find an apartment and move out of the place we had just moved in to. We could have rented a storage garage, and the horses could stay at the stable, even though we were over 100 miles away. The stable owner treated all the horses like they were her own and she would know right away if one of the horses needed care. But what do you do with 5 house cats? My husband was so angry, he suggested shooting them all. He did not want to be beholden to someone who had caused us to be in this predicament in the first place.
But good sense prevailed, and we decided it would be best to agree to rent, and keep looking for another place in the same general area. Our daughter started attending the local school, and our son commuted back and forth with us to finish his senior year.
Our day started out with the three of us heading out the door around 5:45 am. I got dropped off at work by 7, and hubby made it in to his job by 7:30. My son then took the car for another 30mn drive to his high school. Son put in half a day, then headed of to the tech school he was attending, which happened to be about 5 miles from where my hubby worked. Son got done around 3:30, and waited around for hubby to get off work at 4, and then they’d come and pick me up, and we’d get home around 6pm. If our Realtor had come across anything she thought we might be interested in, she called me, and if it was on our way home, we drove by, otherwise we would drop our son off at home, grab a bite to eat and head out to look at the property.
This became a routine for us. We looked at so many properties. One would think we’d find something that would suit our needs. We lowered our standards, but we were not going to budge on one important issue. We would not live under a power line or transmission tower. It got to be a joke with us, we’d be driving toward a property that looked good on paper, and scan the horizon for the high voltage power line. This area of Wisconsin seems to be crisscrossed with high power lines, and sure enough, we’d see the power line and end up looking at a home within 50 feet of it.
You might think I’m exaggerating, but we must have looked at 10 properties that were right next to a power line. By May, we were getting nervous. Everything we looked at had something major wrong with it. We starting looking at more expensive properties, and found a beautiful newer home on 25 acres. It was at the top of what we wanted to spend, and only had a small shop for an outbuilding. The house was gorgeous, and we decided to take another look. It was raining that day, and when we went down the basement, there was water pouring in from the top of the cement wall. And I do mean pouring in! We starting looking more closely, and there was a gap between the foundation and the bottom of the house, with the house sitting on shims spaced around the perimeter. Half the house was on a crawl space, but the other half over the basement was not actually attached to the basement wall. It was obvious with the second look that the basement had been added after the house was built. I don’t know why it was this way, sort of looked like someone had not finished the job. The problems with the foundation, along with needed a barn for our horses caused us to cross this one off the list.
We’d been looking for over two months, and the owner of the place we were renting starting asking how long we would need to keep renting, as he wanted to put the place back on the market. Not that we expected he would have an easy time selling it, as Kramer had started working on the pit. They stripped off the topsoil and built a berm on the south end between the pit and the house. During the week, we were not home during most of the time they were operating the machines, so it didn’t seem all that bad. They started blasting and working Saturdays later that summer, but that was just another part of the whole miserable mess.
We also cleaned up the pasture and moved our horses. The stable owner didn’t like having boarders who lived so far away, and we wanted to save as much money as we could during this time. I had hoped we’d find something early enough in the spring so that we could move in and be settled before my daughter would start school in the fall. We didn’t expect to find something in the same school district we had moved to, and I didn’t want to disrupt her school year any more than possible.
We had never considered building, but we started thinking of the idea. One Saturday, as we were coming back from looking at another power line property, we stopped at an Open House that a builder was having. They put up Modular homes. These are the ones that are built in sections in a factory, and trucked to the site. They use conventional building methods, so once put in place; it is very difficult to tell they weren’t site built.
We talked to the salesmen; he showed us some models and quoted us a price of $110,000 for the house with full basement and an attached garage. This was a lot less than what we’d seen for a site built house, so we starting thinking maybe building would not be out of our price range. We made the decision to start looking at land and existing homes.
For the month of May, we spent all our free time driving around looking at properties. We found some beautiful land, one was 55 acres, and could not be divided because the zoning requires 35 acres for a building site. Based on the estimate of the house, we calculated we could spend about $25,000 on the land. Land was going for $1,000 per acre, so we were looking for 25 acres or less. And during the time we were looking, prices continued to rise. Then one day at end of May, our realtor called us about some land that just came on the market. 20 acres for $20,000. We got excited and headed out to see the property. As we got closer, we didn’t see any power lines, and the land had gentle hills and trees, it seemed very nice. We rounded a corner, and there was the “for sale” sign – in the middle of a swamp!!!! We got out and walked around, but other than a small area up near the road, the whole 20 acres didn’t have a building site on it. And the rest of the land would not have been suitable for hay or pasture. It wasn’t the first time we’d looked at land that would have been difficult to build on. We were depressed, and headed on home. Not very far from there, as we were headed west on the highway, I caught the sight of a white board with “Land for Sale” written on it. Hubby did a U-turn on the highway, and we headed down a tar road that paralleled the highway for a mile, and then followed another sign north on a dirt road past a winding creek and found another sign hanging on the fence a mile up the road. The land was beautiful, we didn’t know how much was for sale, but even if it was just the field we could see, there was lots of potential places to put a house and barn. We copied down the phone number and headed home (we didn’t have a cell phone at this time).
Hubby called and talked to the young man who owned the property. He had 40 acres, and wanted $45,000 for it. We decided to go back out and meet with him so he could show us the property lines. It was only 15 minutes from where we were renting, so we hopped back in the car and met him at the property. He had us climb in his truck, and took us for a ride up the hills and around the trees. It seemed like the property went on for ever, it was so scenic, and there was so much potential for doing just about anything on that land.
We told him we’d think about it and let us know. He told us he had just put the signs up minutes before we drove by, and we were the first people to call. We talked about it on the way back home. It was more than we wanted to spend. It wasn’t more than we could afford to spend, but we were trying to keep our mortgage payments down so we could have more flexibility in changing our jobs. But the land was so nice, and we’d look at so much awful properties, and we just wanted to have a home again . . . My hubby called him and told him we’d take it. I offered to drive over and give him a check for earnest money, but he said that would not be necessarily, he trusted us not to back out. This was Friday afternoon, Memorial weekend, and he would not be able to talk to his lawyer until Tuesday to get the papers signed.
I wasn’t worried about us backing out; I was worried about someone else offering him more money and him changing his mind. Verbal contracts are not valid for real estate, and I had lost too much already not to be nervous. But the young man held to his given word and the next Tuesday we signed the purchase agreement, and in 30 days the land would be ours. We did find out later that the person who owned the adjacent land called the young man that weekend and offered him more than he was asking, but the young man didn’t especially like this neighbor, and felt he already owned enough land. After we lived there, we found out that the neighbors were in two “friendly factions”, for lack of a better description. These two were on opposite sides, which is why the neighbor didn’t even know the young man was considering selling the property until after we’d put in our offer. We felt very fortunate.
So, now that we had the land, we got serious about house plans. I think everyone had ideas of what their “dream house” would be like, even if they never intend to build, and I was not an exception. Once we had decided we might build, I’d been doing up floor plans of what we might want. My first submission to the builder came back way over what we expected. Mostly because it didn’t fit into the mold required because the house would built within a building, and could not be wider than 16’ per section to fit out the door. I met with the builder and we went over my plans, and I revised them to meet within the parameters. The builder told us he would submit the plans, and would get a response in a week, and we could expect to get things finalized in a month, the house would take about 45 days to complete, and then another 15 days of work on site, and we could be in by September 1st, just after the start of the school year. Things seemed to be coming together wonderfully. We talked to our banker, and got approved for $160,000. We could have been approved for more, but this allowed $130,000 for the house (the builder was still saying we should be around $110,000 with the changes in the plan) and $30,000 to pay off what we owned on the land. We closed on the land on July 1st, and we were still waiting to hear from our builder on the revised plans. We’d call, he’d say they were working on it, and we’d wait and then call again, and he’d say they had some questions, so we’d come in and go over the plans and wait some more. We had expected they would be breaking ground by August 1st, but that day came and went and we were still trying to get things finalized. Our builder was getting very upset with the sales rep he was working for, and then one day he called and found out the rep had been fired. Our builder found out our home had never even been put on the proposed schedule, and the manufacture told him if they put it on now, they would not even start on it until January. They had such a tremendous growth in business from the time we had started first talked to the builder that they now had a backlog of homes to build. Our builder went to bat for us, and got the manufacture to agree that if we signed the contract within the next week, they would move our house up so that we could be in by mid October.
We did have the plans pretty much finalized, but they came in over what we had expected. Our banker said that it would take him two weeks to get us approved for a larger amount, and we didn’t have time to do that. We talked to our landlord, and he agreed to let us stay there through the end of October, but he was anxious to have us out. Our options were to go ahead with what we had and skip the garage to keep the price within what we had qualified for, or put off building. We actually did go out that week and look at a few more properties, thinking maybe we could buy something and then build on our land a few years down the road, but I didn’t want to do that, I just wanted this whole ordeal over with as soon as possible. My husband finally agreed, and we signed the papers to have the house built.
The building when relatively uneventful, but had the normal setbacks that seem to come with any building project. It was soon evident that we would not be in by the end of October, and our landlord gave us until November 10th to be out of there. Things still dragged on, and during that time we put up a lean to shelter for the horses, and hauled in hay for the winter. We put up a fence, and moved the horses onto our property before we were living there. Our plans had been to finish the basement, and then move into the house, but now it was evident we would be moving in before a lot of the work was completed. We needed a place to store our belongings, so as soon as the horses were taken care of, we started building the shop. My husband took two weeks off work, and we managed to get the building up in that time. It was another pole shed, with a regular 16’ garage door. We put rock down on the floor, and started moving our stuff over. I cleared an area and moved the plants I’d brought with me from our first house, and moved my pond fish too. Those poor fish, they had spent the entire summer in a stock tank, but they were still doing ok.
We had as much moved over to the shop as we could. The day they brought the house was exciting, and it was such a thrill to be able to walk in side and see what had only been plans on paper before. The house wasn’t ready for us by the 10th, so our builder put us up in a hotel for 10 days. We went to check on the place, and they still had not put down the carpet, so I called the builder and asked why. And then we find out they never ordered the carpet. We had picked it out so many months ago; we had not even considered this would be a problem. The builder said he could not get a crew in to lay the carpet, so we agreed we’d take care of it. At this point, we would have agreed to just about anything to get moved in.
They got the well hooked up the day before we moved in. But the electrician didn’t have time to come back out, so my hubby wired in the well himself. He also had to hook up the water heater. We planned on tiling the master bath, so that wasn’t hooked up yet either. We had a full walkout basement, and the kids would have rooms in the basement, which was unfinished. All our furniture was stored in the shop, and we slept on the floor for a week until we could get the carpet purchased and installed. Our first experience laying carpet was something else. Berber with a one way pattern, that went from the living room, across a walkway into the dining area, and down the stairs, landing and down the second flight to the basement. Berber is bad enough to work with even without all the extra complications. But it did turn out quite nicely. The carpet in our bedroom was easy compared to that stuff. We also had to finish laying the laminate floor in the kitchen. The builder had run out, and told us it would be two weeks before they got more shipped in. Stupid ))#$&_*%(*& Wisconsin back woods @)&%$*.
I got on the phone, drove into the Twin Cities and picked up what we needed and we put it down ourselves. We purchased, hauled and installed all the appliances ourselves. Our son got his “bedroom” set up in the dining room, and our daughter got the living room, while we spent the next 60 days frantically working to get the downstairs rooms finished so they could move in.
There were other assorted problems, one of the cabinet doors in the second bathroom didn’t match the others, and there were cracks above the doorways because they had a slight problem during transportation. One half of our house showed up without a roof. They told us it happened at the factory during the high wind a few days before they hauled it out. They set it and put the roof up right away, and it didn’t seem that big of a deal. Then a few weeks later, my husband had called and talked to the receptionist, and in passing she said “can you imagine what the people driving behind thought when the roof came off?” Hmm, now we knew the REAL reason why it sat in the rest stop for two days. They told us they had problems with the road permits, those )*%#$(*Y^$)(.
Oh yea, they also didn’t hook up the main vent. We lived there a few weeks, and my hubby looked up into the attic and realized they had never hooked up the vent. It went up into the attic, and there was a pipe through the roof, but they weren’t hooked together. Very dangerous situation, if you know about sewer gasses. And then there was the one we didn’t even know about for three years. WI requires you have your septic pumped every three years, and when the pumper opened up our tank, it was filled right to the top. It took him two loads to get it empty, and then he saw the problem. The (& %(#*&$#(* plumbers forget to install the pump! We have a mound system, and because we were on a slope, the tank had been siphoning into the drain field naturally. If it weren’t for the slope, we would have had sewage backing up into our basement in a very short time. The plumbing company did come out and install the pump at no charge. The tanks had been locked by the plumbing company, and we never thought to cut them and look inside. The inside alarm was hooked up, but we didn’t have any way of knowing nothing was hooked up on the other end. They messed up other things, so all in all, we felt very dissatisfied with the whole process. But by the time March rolled around, we had the kids moved downstairs, and our furniture moved in from the shop. Things were starting to settle down, after a year of madness.
With the move, our lives changed drastically. Our first thought was to find an apartment and move out of the place we had just moved in to. We could have rented a storage garage, and the horses could stay at the stable, even though we were over 100 miles away. The stable owner treated all the horses like they were her own and she would know right away if one of the horses needed care. But what do you do with 5 house cats? My husband was so angry, he suggested shooting them all. He did not want to be beholden to someone who had caused us to be in this predicament in the first place.
But good sense prevailed, and we decided it would be best to agree to rent, and keep looking for another place in the same general area. Our daughter started attending the local school, and our son commuted back and forth with us to finish his senior year.
Our day started out with the three of us heading out the door around 5:45 am. I got dropped off at work by 7, and hubby made it in to his job by 7:30. My son then took the car for another 30mn drive to his high school. Son put in half a day, then headed of to the tech school he was attending, which happened to be about 5 miles from where my hubby worked. Son got done around 3:30, and waited around for hubby to get off work at 4, and then they’d come and pick me up, and we’d get home around 6pm. If our Realtor had come across anything she thought we might be interested in, she called me, and if it was on our way home, we drove by, otherwise we would drop our son off at home, grab a bite to eat and head out to look at the property.
This became a routine for us. We looked at so many properties. One would think we’d find something that would suit our needs. We lowered our standards, but we were not going to budge on one important issue. We would not live under a power line or transmission tower. It got to be a joke with us, we’d be driving toward a property that looked good on paper, and scan the horizon for the high voltage power line. This area of Wisconsin seems to be crisscrossed with high power lines, and sure enough, we’d see the power line and end up looking at a home within 50 feet of it.
You might think I’m exaggerating, but we must have looked at 10 properties that were right next to a power line. By May, we were getting nervous. Everything we looked at had something major wrong with it. We starting looking at more expensive properties, and found a beautiful newer home on 25 acres. It was at the top of what we wanted to spend, and only had a small shop for an outbuilding. The house was gorgeous, and we decided to take another look. It was raining that day, and when we went down the basement, there was water pouring in from the top of the cement wall. And I do mean pouring in! We starting looking more closely, and there was a gap between the foundation and the bottom of the house, with the house sitting on shims spaced around the perimeter. Half the house was on a crawl space, but the other half over the basement was not actually attached to the basement wall. It was obvious with the second look that the basement had been added after the house was built. I don’t know why it was this way, sort of looked like someone had not finished the job. The problems with the foundation, along with needed a barn for our horses caused us to cross this one off the list.
We’d been looking for over two months, and the owner of the place we were renting starting asking how long we would need to keep renting, as he wanted to put the place back on the market. Not that we expected he would have an easy time selling it, as Kramer had started working on the pit. They stripped off the topsoil and built a berm on the south end between the pit and the house. During the week, we were not home during most of the time they were operating the machines, so it didn’t seem all that bad. They started blasting and working Saturdays later that summer, but that was just another part of the whole miserable mess.
We also cleaned up the pasture and moved our horses. The stable owner didn’t like having boarders who lived so far away, and we wanted to save as much money as we could during this time. I had hoped we’d find something early enough in the spring so that we could move in and be settled before my daughter would start school in the fall. We didn’t expect to find something in the same school district we had moved to, and I didn’t want to disrupt her school year any more than possible.
We had never considered building, but we started thinking of the idea. One Saturday, as we were coming back from looking at another power line property, we stopped at an Open House that a builder was having. They put up Modular homes. These are the ones that are built in sections in a factory, and trucked to the site. They use conventional building methods, so once put in place; it is very difficult to tell they weren’t site built.
We talked to the salesmen; he showed us some models and quoted us a price of $110,000 for the house with full basement and an attached garage. This was a lot less than what we’d seen for a site built house, so we starting thinking maybe building would not be out of our price range. We made the decision to start looking at land and existing homes.
For the month of May, we spent all our free time driving around looking at properties. We found some beautiful land, one was 55 acres, and could not be divided because the zoning requires 35 acres for a building site. Based on the estimate of the house, we calculated we could spend about $25,000 on the land. Land was going for $1,000 per acre, so we were looking for 25 acres or less. And during the time we were looking, prices continued to rise. Then one day at end of May, our realtor called us about some land that just came on the market. 20 acres for $20,000. We got excited and headed out to see the property. As we got closer, we didn’t see any power lines, and the land had gentle hills and trees, it seemed very nice. We rounded a corner, and there was the “for sale” sign – in the middle of a swamp!!!! We got out and walked around, but other than a small area up near the road, the whole 20 acres didn’t have a building site on it. And the rest of the land would not have been suitable for hay or pasture. It wasn’t the first time we’d looked at land that would have been difficult to build on. We were depressed, and headed on home. Not very far from there, as we were headed west on the highway, I caught the sight of a white board with “Land for Sale” written on it. Hubby did a U-turn on the highway, and we headed down a tar road that paralleled the highway for a mile, and then followed another sign north on a dirt road past a winding creek and found another sign hanging on the fence a mile up the road. The land was beautiful, we didn’t know how much was for sale, but even if it was just the field we could see, there was lots of potential places to put a house and barn. We copied down the phone number and headed home (we didn’t have a cell phone at this time).
Hubby called and talked to the young man who owned the property. He had 40 acres, and wanted $45,000 for it. We decided to go back out and meet with him so he could show us the property lines. It was only 15 minutes from where we were renting, so we hopped back in the car and met him at the property. He had us climb in his truck, and took us for a ride up the hills and around the trees. It seemed like the property went on for ever, it was so scenic, and there was so much potential for doing just about anything on that land.
We told him we’d think about it and let us know. He told us he had just put the signs up minutes before we drove by, and we were the first people to call. We talked about it on the way back home. It was more than we wanted to spend. It wasn’t more than we could afford to spend, but we were trying to keep our mortgage payments down so we could have more flexibility in changing our jobs. But the land was so nice, and we’d look at so much awful properties, and we just wanted to have a home again . . . My hubby called him and told him we’d take it. I offered to drive over and give him a check for earnest money, but he said that would not be necessarily, he trusted us not to back out. This was Friday afternoon, Memorial weekend, and he would not be able to talk to his lawyer until Tuesday to get the papers signed.
I wasn’t worried about us backing out; I was worried about someone else offering him more money and him changing his mind. Verbal contracts are not valid for real estate, and I had lost too much already not to be nervous. But the young man held to his given word and the next Tuesday we signed the purchase agreement, and in 30 days the land would be ours. We did find out later that the person who owned the adjacent land called the young man that weekend and offered him more than he was asking, but the young man didn’t especially like this neighbor, and felt he already owned enough land. After we lived there, we found out that the neighbors were in two “friendly factions”, for lack of a better description. These two were on opposite sides, which is why the neighbor didn’t even know the young man was considering selling the property until after we’d put in our offer. We felt very fortunate.
So, now that we had the land, we got serious about house plans. I think everyone had ideas of what their “dream house” would be like, even if they never intend to build, and I was not an exception. Once we had decided we might build, I’d been doing up floor plans of what we might want. My first submission to the builder came back way over what we expected. Mostly because it didn’t fit into the mold required because the house would built within a building, and could not be wider than 16’ per section to fit out the door. I met with the builder and we went over my plans, and I revised them to meet within the parameters. The builder told us he would submit the plans, and would get a response in a week, and we could expect to get things finalized in a month, the house would take about 45 days to complete, and then another 15 days of work on site, and we could be in by September 1st, just after the start of the school year. Things seemed to be coming together wonderfully. We talked to our banker, and got approved for $160,000. We could have been approved for more, but this allowed $130,000 for the house (the builder was still saying we should be around $110,000 with the changes in the plan) and $30,000 to pay off what we owned on the land. We closed on the land on July 1st, and we were still waiting to hear from our builder on the revised plans. We’d call, he’d say they were working on it, and we’d wait and then call again, and he’d say they had some questions, so we’d come in and go over the plans and wait some more. We had expected they would be breaking ground by August 1st, but that day came and went and we were still trying to get things finalized. Our builder was getting very upset with the sales rep he was working for, and then one day he called and found out the rep had been fired. Our builder found out our home had never even been put on the proposed schedule, and the manufacture told him if they put it on now, they would not even start on it until January. They had such a tremendous growth in business from the time we had started first talked to the builder that they now had a backlog of homes to build. Our builder went to bat for us, and got the manufacture to agree that if we signed the contract within the next week, they would move our house up so that we could be in by mid October.
We did have the plans pretty much finalized, but they came in over what we had expected. Our banker said that it would take him two weeks to get us approved for a larger amount, and we didn’t have time to do that. We talked to our landlord, and he agreed to let us stay there through the end of October, but he was anxious to have us out. Our options were to go ahead with what we had and skip the garage to keep the price within what we had qualified for, or put off building. We actually did go out that week and look at a few more properties, thinking maybe we could buy something and then build on our land a few years down the road, but I didn’t want to do that, I just wanted this whole ordeal over with as soon as possible. My husband finally agreed, and we signed the papers to have the house built.
The building when relatively uneventful, but had the normal setbacks that seem to come with any building project. It was soon evident that we would not be in by the end of October, and our landlord gave us until November 10th to be out of there. Things still dragged on, and during that time we put up a lean to shelter for the horses, and hauled in hay for the winter. We put up a fence, and moved the horses onto our property before we were living there. Our plans had been to finish the basement, and then move into the house, but now it was evident we would be moving in before a lot of the work was completed. We needed a place to store our belongings, so as soon as the horses were taken care of, we started building the shop. My husband took two weeks off work, and we managed to get the building up in that time. It was another pole shed, with a regular 16’ garage door. We put rock down on the floor, and started moving our stuff over. I cleared an area and moved the plants I’d brought with me from our first house, and moved my pond fish too. Those poor fish, they had spent the entire summer in a stock tank, but they were still doing ok.
We had as much moved over to the shop as we could. The day they brought the house was exciting, and it was such a thrill to be able to walk in side and see what had only been plans on paper before. The house wasn’t ready for us by the 10th, so our builder put us up in a hotel for 10 days. We went to check on the place, and they still had not put down the carpet, so I called the builder and asked why. And then we find out they never ordered the carpet. We had picked it out so many months ago; we had not even considered this would be a problem. The builder said he could not get a crew in to lay the carpet, so we agreed we’d take care of it. At this point, we would have agreed to just about anything to get moved in.
They got the well hooked up the day before we moved in. But the electrician didn’t have time to come back out, so my hubby wired in the well himself. He also had to hook up the water heater. We planned on tiling the master bath, so that wasn’t hooked up yet either. We had a full walkout basement, and the kids would have rooms in the basement, which was unfinished. All our furniture was stored in the shop, and we slept on the floor for a week until we could get the carpet purchased and installed. Our first experience laying carpet was something else. Berber with a one way pattern, that went from the living room, across a walkway into the dining area, and down the stairs, landing and down the second flight to the basement. Berber is bad enough to work with even without all the extra complications. But it did turn out quite nicely. The carpet in our bedroom was easy compared to that stuff. We also had to finish laying the laminate floor in the kitchen. The builder had run out, and told us it would be two weeks before they got more shipped in. Stupid ))#$&_*%(*& Wisconsin back woods @)&%$*.
I got on the phone, drove into the Twin Cities and picked up what we needed and we put it down ourselves. We purchased, hauled and installed all the appliances ourselves. Our son got his “bedroom” set up in the dining room, and our daughter got the living room, while we spent the next 60 days frantically working to get the downstairs rooms finished so they could move in.
There were other assorted problems, one of the cabinet doors in the second bathroom didn’t match the others, and there were cracks above the doorways because they had a slight problem during transportation. One half of our house showed up without a roof. They told us it happened at the factory during the high wind a few days before they hauled it out. They set it and put the roof up right away, and it didn’t seem that big of a deal. Then a few weeks later, my husband had called and talked to the receptionist, and in passing she said “can you imagine what the people driving behind thought when the roof came off?” Hmm, now we knew the REAL reason why it sat in the rest stop for two days. They told us they had problems with the road permits, those )*%#$(*Y^$)(.
Oh yea, they also didn’t hook up the main vent. We lived there a few weeks, and my hubby looked up into the attic and realized they had never hooked up the vent. It went up into the attic, and there was a pipe through the roof, but they weren’t hooked together. Very dangerous situation, if you know about sewer gasses. And then there was the one we didn’t even know about for three years. WI requires you have your septic pumped every three years, and when the pumper opened up our tank, it was filled right to the top. It took him two loads to get it empty, and then he saw the problem. The (& %(#*&$#(* plumbers forget to install the pump! We have a mound system, and because we were on a slope, the tank had been siphoning into the drain field naturally. If it weren’t for the slope, we would have had sewage backing up into our basement in a very short time. The plumbing company did come out and install the pump at no charge. The tanks had been locked by the plumbing company, and we never thought to cut them and look inside. The inside alarm was hooked up, but we didn’t have any way of knowing nothing was hooked up on the other end. They messed up other things, so all in all, we felt very dissatisfied with the whole process. But by the time March rolled around, we had the kids moved downstairs, and our furniture moved in from the shop. Things were starting to settle down, after a year of madness.
// posted by Cathy @ 7:05 PM 
