So we had the electrical inspection… and failed miserably

It was bad, really bad.

I mean, I don’t think we will be getting electrocuted any time soon (knock on wood), but in terms of passing an inspection, no matter how many times the inspector could have turned the other way on small stuff (which he wouldn’t have, he sounded like a hard ass), there were too many big things that could just not go ignored.

Things like, did you know you are required to have an outlet every 12 feet around the walls of the house? We didn’t and for some reason, the licensed electrician seemed surprised about it too.

Adventures in Refinancing

So now that its been over a year since we closed on the house (so crazy!), we can finally refinance our mortgage (the reason we were told we should wait a year is so we could get the house reappraised as the original appraisal is in effect for a year).

Even with interest rates shooting up, it made sense for us to look into it because we could get rid of that pesky mortgage insurance and move into a regular old conforming loan. Our house has well over 20% equity in it.

Exactly two days before the one year anniversary of our closing date, I email my current lender and ask to start the refinance process. I also tell him we want to possibly take some cash out, confident that the appraisal is going to be higher than it was originally. The real estate landscape this last year in Bushwick had been on fire.

After taking updated documents from me (bank statements, w2’s, etc), he comes back with a rate of 4.75%, which, even after taking out the mortgage insurance, puts us almost back where we started. He says the rate is high because we want to take cash out and we have a 2-family. Now we would just be paying more interest to the bank instead of mortgage insurance. It’s amazing what half of percent can do when hundreds of thousands of dollars are involved.

And then there was hot water. Every time we flushed.

Probably the most, um, unexpected mistakes among all the things that went wrong once we got the gas turned on was that our toilet was running hot water every time we flushed.

But let me start at the beginning. We totally got gas meters last week! The gas authorization came through at the end of the last full week of July and as soon as we got the okay, I called National Grid. They set us up with an appointment for the following Tuesday.

We tell our contractor to make sure everything is ready for the meters to get put in and he assured me that would be the case.

National Grid rolls in on Tuesday morning (after a series of phone reminders that we need to be at the house or they will charge us for an uncompleted visit) and wouldn’t you know it – nothing is hooked up. Not the stove, or the washer dryer, or even the boiler or hot water heater. He also didn’t mark which meter was for which floor so the national grid lady couldn’t even hook up the meters.