This past Thursday we closed on our flat, apartment, condo, what-have-you, in Providence, RI. We are now officially Rhode Islanders, and in typical American fashion, back in debt. The carefree world of the vagabond traveler is now behind us -- the future beckoned and we heeded its call at last.
The closing went off without a hitch; Susie brought a few sweets to pass around the table, and after an hour of nonestop paper signing, we had ourselves a home.
By now most of you know that our new condo is in an old funeral home in west Providence. The builder, who, it turns out is also a licensed funeral director no less, completely gutted the main structure and rebuilt everything inside, but keeping the original wooden floors and wooden arches in our unit. He then added several brand new townhome units at the rear of the "home," in what was at one time an eight-bay garage. Our unit is on the top, or third floor (second for you Europeans), and was originally the living quarters for the family that once operated the funeral home. (The morgue I'm told was in not in the basement as you might think, but in fact in what is now unit 4.)
We borrowed one of Dick and Dorothy's cars, loaded it and the Mini with some of our stuff in their basement and drov ein the spitting rain to the condo, where we left the cars while we went to closing with Seth, our realtor. Seth brought us back to the condo, we thanked him for all his great work and said good-bye. I'm sure we'll be seeing him again; Providence is a small city and he's actively involved in the local arts community as well as plugged into the food scene. He and a friend work to promote the city through their iloveprovidence.org website.
Thursday was rainy for much, if not most of the day, but after Seth left us at the condo we turned to unloading the cars. Using the portico on the side of the condo building (the "hearse door" I call it although I'm informed that was not in fact the door where the hearse loaded the remains) we backed each car up and unloaded, an in relays schlepping everything upstairs; the wine we carried down to our storage room in the basement. We then drove back to D & D's house, cleaned the last of our Paris stuff out their basement, and drove back to Providence. By the time we finished our second trip it was dark and getting late. So back to Massachusetts for the night.
On Friday we returned to the condo clean the condo, getting the space ready for the movers on Monday afternoon. Along the way we discovered a few problems in the flat.
One problem concerned the front door entry system. The (brand-new) "Talk-Listen-Door" box in our flat didn't seem to work at all; moreover, we had no idea which buzzer on the box at the outside entrance was ours (only Unit 2 was labeled), even after testing every button.
Second, the phones don't work -- and this after the Verizon guy came out to get us online. After hooking us up in the basement, he checke dvery phone jack in the flat and exclaimed that the electrician had apparently not spliced the jacks together. As we understood it, although the service was on at the main junction box in the basement, there was no communication among the jacks in the flat. Another electrician issue.
Third, we discovered by accident that the garbage disposal does not work -- and the electrician who came out to check out our problems informed us that the disposal had never been connected to the circuit breaker box!
Lastly, for the moment at any rate, our hot water is, well, not so hot. The thermostat on the brand-new hot water heating system reads 120 degrees (F) but that produced very weak heat at the faucet.
But the builder responded promptly and the electrician who came out to try and fix our problems spent three hours working out the various solutions -- all to no avail sad to say. But he persevered nonetheless and we certainly appreciated that. He said someone would come out on Monday -- although it seemed odd to us that it wouldn't be him. Sounds like it was just that sort of lack of continuity that problem produced the problems int he first place.
So, today, Saturday, we pick up some new blinds that we ordered the other day, and finish getting the flat ready to move into on Monday. Sunday we'll probably just hang out in Massachusetts.
Wish you were here (maybe you'd know how to fix our problems)
Steve
No comments:
Post a Comment