Kitchen

The kitchen on our floor didn’t look good at all when we bought the house. The colors were bad, the floor was bad and (what you fortunately can’t tell from the pictures) it smelled bad.It was something like this:

Since the kitchen is now close to being finished, I recently I got some sort of approval from the powers-that-be to make pictures. I personally thing it’s a huge improvement :-)Part of the kitchen:

Back in the fray

Unfortunately my vacation days are over and I am back at work. After 4 weeks at home (the longest vacation/time off I ever had) it takes a while to get used to being at the office again, but I am getting there.

In the meantime in The Cave, the kitchen renovation is almost done and it looks MUCH better now. Still, my wish to make pictures and post them has been denied because it does not look “perfect”, there are some thing left to be painted. So maybe this coming weekend.

The bathroom upstairs is almost ready too and in the last weekend we cleaned and renovated the small room downstairs where we have the washer and the dryer. Before it was yucky and ugly, now it’s clean and with gypsum on the walls instead of wallpaper. It also has a new floor and the room is properly sealed. The previous owners were pigs, no other way to say it.

I started doing more stuff with my new Canon. First of all I was a bit surprised to find out it does not come with any kind of memory card so I got a 16GB SD Card from Amazon and now everything is fine. Most of the time I shoot in RAW format and I do the post-processing in Lightroom or RawTherapee if I am in Linux, so the extra space on the SD card is welcomed because one RAW file can take up to 20MB.

I still have a lot to learn but I have reactivated my Flickr and Deviantart accounts and I started posting there my first attempts. I have also updated the blog with a small widget which displays the latest flickr Deviantart uploads (the flickr widget looked crappy).

• Me @ Flickr (RSS feed for updates)
• Me @ Deviantart (RSS feed for updates)

I wish I would have some faster lenses, even something cheap like the Canon EF 50mm/ 1,8/ Objektiv II for a start, but that’s really not a priority right now so it’ll have to wait I guess. 

“Vacation”

Typical day of our “vacation”, today for example:

• alarm clock goes off at 7:30 am after coming home late the previous day and sleeping only 4 hours.
• get ready, put clothes on and leave. We had to be at the house early because the carpet we ordered for our apartment is supposed to be delivered  in the morning.
• work, work, work (clean kitchen, remove old and yucky things from all over the house).
• actually start to wake up couple of hours later.
• more work, remove old carpet from our bedroom and the living room.
• yet more work, take piles of trash downstairs.
• guy from VW dealership calls, my car is ready (yay!). I go there, drop the replacement car, get my own.
• more work, clean the garage, rearrange the insane amount of trash bags so I can actually move in that room in the basement.
• walk to the VW dealership, pick up my private car which I had left there, drive it back home, get back to the house with bus and train, fall asleep in the train coming really close to missing my stop, waste 2 hours in the process.
• the carpet is finally delivered. Of course, not in the morning as expected. If we had known, we would’ve slept a bit longer. Great.
• more work, help paint the yucky red tiles we had in the kitchen.
• go quick and get some small pizzas at the nearby Hoagies.
• yep, more work. Paint the ceiling in the kitchen.
• drive back home, stop the the Kaufland to get a few things to eat.
• write post, take shower.
• drop dead.

So much for the bathrooms …

Well, so much for the two bathrooms, I don’t think it’s gonna happen, not with the company we talk to so far. We had an interesting meeting with them last friday.

As I was mentioning before, we had a very unpleasant experience with a guy from that company. As a result we sent them an official complaint letter, relatively tough but polite, in which we were expressing our total disapproval about the way their employee handled the whole stuff. So, the guy comes back from vacation on the 7th of january and tries to contact us. I was in a meeting but he manages to talk to Freya. He just wanted some information, didn’t say anything about our letter. I just assumed he didn’t get it yet. I just sent him the information he needed via email then we exchanged couple more emails, things he needed for our quote. I still didn’t understand how he could send us a quote when he didn’t actually see how the pipes in the store looked like, as it was planned.

Anyway, we get the quote (quite a lot of money) and we set up an appointment at their office to discuss it. We didn’t really know what to believe, we just thought we’d give them another chance after their previous failure. We get there and we talk about the quote for a while. We realize that there are things he does not know (particulary how the piping for the toilet from the 1st floor gets there), things he would know if he would’ve came when he promised. Finally, the guy pulls out of his folder our complaint letter and also a german translation of the my blog post that I mentioned above!

As a small sidenote, when I got home and checked the logs I saw that he googled my email domain, found my blog and then he read every single post, tag, category, etc from my blog. Everything through Google Translate because he most likely didn’t understand english or romanian. I wish I had more such thorough readers, I would have some cool statistics. I even felt flattered for a nanosecond or two but then I quickly got over it because I got some Gestapo-like flashbacks with people in a badly-lit room, looking at screens and analyzing each post, phrase, sentence, word and pixel from my blog, trying to find Achile’s heel.

Coming back to our discussion, the guy actually googled me. Most likely Freya too but she’s like 10.000 times less present than me on the net. He expressed his disapproval about my obvious lack of glory in describing his performance. On my personal blog … I tried to explain that he actually made us lose a lot of time and that now it’s unlikely we’ll ever finish the bathrooms before we have to move. I also tried to find out why he didn’t keep his promise with the visit and why he didn’t at least contact us to let us know, but in vain. He said that he was extremely busy (don’t see how that is my problem), that he had to cover for another colleague who was in vacation (again, I don’t think that is my problem) and in the end he said something like: “Why didn’t you contact me?”. WTF ?! If he made a promise he should keep it. And if he can’t then he should just pick up the phone and call, it takes what, 2 minutes ? But no, he preferred to leave his customer in the dark and leave in vacation. There were some other things too, like he actually came on friday but the lady in the store was not there. Even though he should’ve come when he promised, tuesday that is, during the day he spoke with Freya on the phone. And so on.

Anyway, seeing that we were not getting anywhere, we asked him to give us two minutes to decide how we should proceed. That was no problem, he got up and went to another office where he kept talking with someone else. The guy has a very strong schwäbisch accent so I didn’t really get all of it but Freya did. They were talking about us or about our bathrooms. Before we finished talking, another guy comes to us and starts explaining (speaking very very fast) how they are extremely busy, how they have a lot of orders which came in november (!!) and that there is no way they could start working before march. We were just looking at him unbelieving. We didn’t even bother to tell him that the guy we initially talked to said that we would get the quote before Christmas and that if all was well, they could start working in early January. If they had orders from the previous month that guy would’ve known. Obviously something stinks here.

Then, when he heard we still need to speak with the bank about financing, he looked at the final price and started to talk with what appeared to be great enthusiasm about us having to add quite a lot to that amount because the house is of old construction and things can “come up”. Right. It was kinda clear to us that they don’t really want to do this job and that they just want to get rid of us. We had explained to them from the very beginning that we are tight with the time and there is no way we can wait until march. Good riddance, we just said our goodbyes and we left.

See, it does not really matter how big the company is or how good your shop looks like; in the end the way the customer is treated matters. Pitty, the guy we talked to initially (the boss, we assumed) seemed like a really nice guy, sincere and wanting to help. But otherwise … let’s just say we were less than impressed.

The bad thing is, now we have to do something with the existent bathrooms before we move. After we make them usable, we’ll have a bit of breathing space and we can start looking for someone more serious. What a mess.

Next steps

Now that we are on the last mile,  there are some things that we need to take care of:

• all old carpets need to be taken off and thrown away. Then the wooden floor need to be cleaned and new linoleum/carpets/alternatives put in.
• old wallpapers need to be replaced
• most of the wood surfaces in the house need to be repainted in lighter colors (white)
• two rooms (one of each floor) need to be converted into bathrooms
• get a quote for the infrared heaters from another company, the current one is too expensive
• get a quote for an Airmax24 Wind Turbine because we want to make our own electricity (or at least enough for the heating, it complements perfectly the infrared heaters)

We investigated all kind of possibilities to make our own energy, considering that we currently pay 20,25 cents/kWh and I don’t think it’s gonna go down anytime soon. Solar panels are not a good solution for us, the roof has the wrong orientation. Not to mention they are expensive and need a lot of maintenance. The wind turbine I was mentioning is roof-mountable and can start generating electricity with a wind speed of only 2m/s. It has its own price too but it has a lot more advantages compared to the solar panels. It looks something like this:

Other alternatives would be household Fusion Reactors, anti-matter generators, Zero Point Module, etc but it seems we are born in the wrong reality or way too early for something like this. And finally a picture I took while I was going to lunch, cold but beautiful weather, I love that blue sky: