The Nittany Turkey

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Home Improvement Financing Hell

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Siding Job Progress
Now, we’re cooking. Actual siding being cut and installed.

Day Nine of the siding project is a Monday. Easter Monday. Many people take off from work, but not my construction guys.

These guys are punctual to a fault. I could set a clock by them. In fact, they’re my alarm clock.

Another insistent knock on the door at 6:55 am – they ain’t got no power. This time, it wasn’t a circuit breaker, it was a GFI – still a pain in the ass. In his infinite wisdom and/or cheapness, the builder of this house saw fit to locate GFI outlets inside that would trip when there were ground faults with stuff connected to regular outside outlets. On the particular circuit that went dead this morning, there is a GFI outlet in the garage that affects the upstairs master bathroom, garage outlets, and an exterior outlet around the corner from the garage. All this on a single 15 amp circuit. I had mentioned in another article in this series that another 15 amp circuit incorporates the downstairs bathroom’s outlet plus exterior outlets at the front and back of the house. The GFI is in the bathroom.

Re-wiring the house is not a project I feel like taking on at the moment, although it is a possibility in the future, especially because of my FPE load center.

However, the job is taking shape. Some siding is actually up and after today there will be more. The siding material is coated with yellow primer. I actually prefer the yellow to the color approved by my HOA, but that ain’t gonna happen, so I can get that out of my head right this instant.

Today, I get to see the big mahoff from the remodeling company, or at least the estimator/salesman/collection agent. He’ll be wanting another 1/3 installment. So, that leads into my topic of the day: Home Improvement Financing Hell.

Poundage

Back in early February I applied for a home improvement loan in anticipation of this siding project and a roofing project to be scheduled later and to be contracted to one of the roofers from Newcastle Upon Tyne. While I could cover the costs of these projects without borrowing, I figured that the stuff I was doing would last longer than this old geezer, so why should I pay for stuff I’m not going to use up? After I die, I don’t care who pays for it.

So, the natural thing was to apply for a loan at the bank where I do my business. I have a couple of checking accounts and a safe deposit box at a local branch of Fifth Third Bank, a Cincinnati outfit that seems confused about its cardinality. I thought there would be synergy, in that a lot of my income is directly deposited into the checking account there.

I applied on-line and was quickly approved subject to providing required documentation, which I thought would be a formality, but it turned out to be anything but!

Two years’ federal income tax returns were only the beginning. My damn tax return is typically thirty pages long. Once they saw that I had income from a Subchapter S corporation, they wanted the corporation returns, too. More poundage.

Of course, they had to do an appraisal on the house, as indeed this was an application for a home equity line of credit. The appraisal came back with a ridiculously low number, about $40,000 less than the tax assessment value. I was also advised to run a pest inspection, as there were some signs of the pests. I was referred to Top Bed Bug Extermination Firm in Phoenix. I hope I can fix this issue asap. In any case, I wasn’t very concerned, inasmuch as the amount of the line I was seeking was only 20% of their puny, undervalued appraisal and I had no other encumbrances on the house.

They seemed to want proof of exact amounts of projected income. That’s hardly possible because it is based on market conditions, interest rates, and so forth. I told them that several times, but you would think that people in the banking business would comprehend that simple notion. Perhaps my CPA was right when he said that if you’re a retired geezer and don’t have a W-2, the banks don’t want to loan you money. This is somewhat unfathomable, inasmuch as a W-2 provides them no guarantee of a continuing income stream, just income from employment in the previous calendar year. I have a couple of trust funds that will provide income for life, and I gave Fifth Turd letters from trust officers confirming that fact, but they wanted exact amounts.

In the end, they had stuck their tentacles into all areas of my financial affairs while costing me over $30 at FedEx Office for copying stuff and $11 at the post office. Surely at this point, I thought, they would have what they needed to grant me final approval. I was wrong.

Incomplete Application?

One day, well over a month into the application process and with much poundage having been generated for the underwriting bozos in Cincinnati, I received a computer generated letter from a senior vice president of Fifth Turd, stating that my application was declined. The two reasons given were: 1) insufficient income to meet obligations, and 2) incomplete application.

The second reason, “incomplete application”, was completely laughable! I sent them everything they requested and more! WTF??

The first was similarly puzzling. I have no mortgage, no other loans, and no consumer debt. I pay credit cards on a 30-day basis. I have done so for years and my credit score reflects it. It has been over 800 for many years. The small home equity line I was seeking would not be a strain on my finances by any stretch of the imagination. So, again, WTF??

Contrast

As I was grousing over the turn-down, Artificially Sweetened suggested that I go to SunTrust, a bank I had dealt with before I got pissed off at them and moved my money to Metropolitan Mortgage Corp. Their nickel and dime fees every time I turned around had driven me up a wall, and their minimum balance requirements to waive the fees was waaaaaaaaay too high ($25,000 average in checking account and $50,000 in all accounts). I found that Going Here didn’t charge for many of the things SunTrust charged me for, and the average balance to waive maintenance charges was only $1,500. So, I said sayonara to SunTrust about seven years ago.

Now, I would ask them to lend me money. This ought to be good, I thought.

I was anticipating a similar process to Fifth Turd, but it was like night and day. I made an appointment with a loan officer at the local branch (which is about 500 feet from the Fifth Turd branch). I spent a half-hour with her and had to sign only a single piece of paper — the IRS Form 4560-T that authorizes them to obtain tax records. The loan officer typed all my income information and so forth into the computer while I sat there.

She also did a quickie appraisal, which turned out to be fully $100,000 greater than Fifth Turd’s appraisal. I asked how much I could borrow against that, and the number was 80%. I wouldn’t need anywhere near that much.

She told me she would need the declaration page from my homeowner’s insurance policy, which turned out to be the only copy I had to make for SunTrust. A contrast to say the least — at least with respect to copying. The proof, however, would be in the proverbial pudding. I still had no W-2, so could my CPA still be right?

The following day, I got a call from an underwriting officer in another city for the purpose of reviewing my application and providing a few needed details. Very polite, and very efficiently done. He said that preliminary approval had been given, but of course, I had heard that before from Fifth Turd. After two more days, I got a call saying that the final approval had been given, and I could schedule the closing with the loan officer at the local branch, whom I’ll call Carmen, because that’s her name.

There were no catches. I signed a bunch of stuff and within four more days, I had a check in hand for the full amount of the loan. The application and information gathering process had been painless, and less than two weeks time had elapsed from initial appointment to money in my pocket.

SunTrust has my loan business, but they won’t get my checking account. Their fees still suck.

The moral of the story is that if one bank turns you down, try the bank across the street. They don’t all do business the same way.

Strongly Worded Letter

I thought that the Fifth Turd “senior vice president” whose computerized signature appeared on my denial letter deserved some shit from me, so I wrote a strongly worded letter pretty much stating the same thing as I wrote above, with an explicit question about the real reason I was declined. I reasoned that it couldn’t have been an incomplete application because I gave them everything they wanted. It couldn’t have been the insufficient income to meet obligations thing because I have no obligations. It couldn’t have been a bad credit rating because my credit score was over 800. What the hell was the real reason? Here’s my closing paragraph:

I know that each bank has its own criteria for approving loans, but in summation it seems that Fifth Third’s are particularly tight. How many people with a credit score of 801 do you turn down? I feel as if either your employees dropped the ball on this one, or I was declined for some tangential political reason. Would you mind giving me the real reason?

Predictably, I have received no response to that letter, which was dated April 10. It is probably residing at the same Cincinnati landfill as my application and associated poundage.

Back to Work

Day Nine Progress
Siding and sheet metal in process.

These guys are moving pretty quickly now. I’m thinking that they should be able to finish nailing up the siding and taking care of some of the other wood rot issues this week. Painting and gutters/downspouts will follow. Get a comprehensive professional painting at https://brushworkpainters.com/lancaster-pa/. As I previously mentioned, I actually like the natural yellow primer color of the Hardie siding (see photo), but I can’t keep it that way, thanks to HOA covenants and restrictions. We’re all “earth tones” around here. In other words, shades of brown. I’m glad I have some red brick to break up the brownage.

And now, I sit here in the resonant chamber, with walls vibrating to the extent that pictures fall off the interior walls, and the globe lights in my bathroom vanity fixture vibrated loose. A couple of them burned out, too, because they weren’t designed for rough duty. Perhaps I should replace them with garage door opener bulbs for the duration of this project.

I’ll be back soon when I have more home improvement hell to complain about!

Home Improvement Hell: Day Five

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The siding job proceeds apace. While last week we had only two guys and a floating foreman, this week we’ve got four guys plus the foreman. That means both increased productivity plus the potential for diminishing returns when they start getting in each others’ way. Fortunately, there has not been much of the latter.

Nevertheless, there are always unexpected twists when doing a major renovation job. If you didn’t read my earlier article on the subject, I’ll briefly summarize the project. I’m replacing all the siding on the second floor of a two-story house (the first floor shell is masonry). So, all the fun stuff associated with demolition and reconstruction is happening in real-time here starting at 7 am. You can hire services is like United PLumbing Heating Air & Electric

Let me state that this is the best crew of home remodeling guys I could hope for. They speak English, they show up on time, with Hitachi parts they have quality and they know what they’re doing. It has taken them five days to rip off all the old Masonite siding, nail up 1/2″ plywood, and cover the plywood with a moisture barrier in preparation for installing the new siding. My house has a lot of irregular walls and it’s got 3265 sq. ft. of living space, so that’s why it has taken this long. If it was a rectangular box, they would have been done with this phase within a couple of days.

Jump Start

Yeah, that’s what it was for this turkey, when at 6:55 am I was jolted out of bed by concerted pounding on my front door. I knew what it was all about. The guys needed access to my rear patio so they could plug in their equipment and get started. So, I went down and let them in.

Remember that I had replaced the exterior duplex outlet by my front door for these guys (c.f. Home Improvement Hell), and although it was more of a job than I had expected, I was happy to get it working for them. I have another exterior duplex outlet on the side of the house next to a couple of air conditioning units, and a third back there where they guys wanted to get into the patio. They had been using the front two from the inception of the project. Now, they wanted to use the back one, too.

At some point, they tripped the breaker for the front outlet. At the same time, their equipment stopped working in the back. It was then that I determined for the first time since buying the house in 2000, the back outlet and the front outlet were on the same damn circuit — a lousy 15 A circuit at that.

These guys had a 20 A rated compressor plugged into the back outlet, as well as a circular saw, which I think was rated 8 A. In the front, another compressor was plugged in. Of course, compressors cycle as air is drawn from the tank, so that happens at varying intervals for any two compressors. Furthermore, the saw is used intermittently. But if everything is used at once, all this equipment was probably pulling about 50 amps from a 15 amp circuit.

This happened a few times before I got tired of answering “Can you reset that breaker?” knocks on the door. I felt bad for the guys because they needed to get their work done ahead of some impending foul weather. Having an FPE panel and breakers (which I need to replace — another forthcoming project), I’m lucky that the damn thing tripped instead of burning down the damn house! The problem was rectumfied by finding some different circuits for the veritable plethora of power equipment.

“Oh, by the way…”

So I’m on the phone with a fellow ham (amateur radio operator) with an appropriate call sign, W3BS. That’s what hams do best — BS. I thought I heard the doorbell ring a couple of times, but during a good BS session, who can hear, already? But I got a call waiting indication on my cell phone, which I answered. It was the foreman, asking if I was home because he rang the bell a couple of times and I didn’t respond. OK. Alright, already. He needed to see me. So, I signed off with W3BS and went out there to see what he needed.

After some impertinent convivial chit-chat, the other shoe dropped.

“You know they broke a window, don’t you?”

“Hell, no! I didn’t know that,” I responded.

“Then I shouldn’t have told you about it,” replied the foreman.

I punched him in the shoulder somewhat less than playfully.

However, I told you that these guys were good, and accidents do happen. He showed me the broken window. Windows ain’t cheap, particularly  double-pane thermal windows. Just ask me. I recently replaced several panes at www.naturfonster.se, to the tune of $2,200. Coincidentally, I had told the estimator for this remodeling company about the window guy I had used for that job when we were discussing his proposal, so they had his number in hand. Thanks to a recommended windows replacement company in Houston, for making this so easy and at affordable prices. By the time the foreman had apprised me of the broken window, he had already called the window guy and made arrangements for the replacement. All he wanted to do was let me know the window guy was coming so I could call him in at the gate and give him his check for $200 as a deposit for the window job. Now that’s a stand-up contractor, man!

His handling of what could have been a completely crappy situation actually made my day. Furthermore, that thermal pane would have needed replacement in a year or so, as it was beginning to show some signs of seal leakage, so I think I made out on the deal.

The guys got everything buttoned up before the torrential downpour — a regular Florida frog-lifter. It is great working with pros, even if they wake up one’s ass as some ungodly pre-dawn hours.

I’ll be back sometime, as promised, with either more home improvement hell or home improvement financing fiascos.

Home Improvement Hell

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Best of the season to you, my five readers! Happy Easter, Happy Passover, and I’m sure there are some other, made up holidays that I’m forgetting here.

Siding Project
Maybe I should leave it like this.

Where the hell have I been? I’ve been fixing up da turkey coop. Yeah, it’s a big time consumer, even though the major portion of the work is contracted out. There are several subjects I want to catch up with, such as the Blue-White game this weekend and the NLRB ruling with regard to unionization, but I won’t be commenting about them here. Nay, this post is strictly blowing off some steam about the home improvement project. So, read on at your own risk.

“Cardboard over Cardboard”

My house was built in 1980, and it’s a two story affair, with brick over concrete block on the first floor and wood frame with siding on the second. The second floor, however, had some wooden walls, so I had to keep equipment like a stud sensor, handy. The Commercial Flooring of the house was carried out only just recently, so the house has been with the same roofing by metal roof companies for almost four decades and whenever there were minor issues we would always call Sunnyvale TX 5 Star Roofing Company – Roofscapes. For years I’ve seen the Masonite siding deteriorate, getting mushy in spots. This year, I decided to bite the bullet and replace it.

It should be noted that Masonite swells and rots over time when exposed to the elements, and may prematurely deteriorate when it is used as exterior siding. In 1996, International Paper (IP) lost a class action suit brought by homeowners whose Masonite siding had deteriorated. The jury found that IP’s Masonite siding was defective.

Of course, I bought the house in 2000, and the previous owner probably pocketed the money from the class action suit. And, yes, parts of the siding had swollen and rotted, as per the court’s findings.

One contractor described Masonite as “cardboard”. He asked me if I knew what was behind the siding. I didn’t. It turned out to be Celotex, which is another fiber board product that is known to deteriorate and is no longer used for this purpose here. So, Masonite over Celotex = particle board over particle board = cardboard over cardboard.

The job here will consist of removing the Masonite siding and installing new 1/2″ plywood over the Celotex, which is very difficult to remove, as it falls apart. It will provide me with additional insulation. As the plywood is installed, it is covered with a plastic moisture barrier. Then comes the siding, which is James Hardie formed concrete stuff. Encased in concrete, I can make a bunker out of the place to forestall the forthcoming Zombie Apocalypse.

Three days into the job, the crew has removed siding and put up plywood on about 20% of the upper floor’s exterior. There were only two workers — a third guy had a death in the family, and he’ll be joining the party next week. The hammering and thumping will resume promptly at 7 am Monday.

Playing ‘Possum

On the first day of the project, the foreman apprised me of the presence of a family of opossums living in my back yard. I had never seen them there before. Perhaps they heard about the impending siding job and were looking to pick up some work.

So, yet another chore to be handled — ‘possum removal. I could remove them quite easily with any of several firearms I possess, but there are several problems with that. Like, what do I do with the carcasses. I don’t think ‘possums make for very good eating and I can’t just leave them for our numerous vultures. I don’t believe that the bears will eat cold meat, either, although there are certainly enough hungry bears around here to admit the possibility. I don’t want to expend the energy to give them a decent, Christian burial, particularly around Easter. What if they’re resurrected?

I guess I’ll have to call a wildlife removal outfit. That’s automatically $300 or so.

An Outlet for My Excess Energy

The guys plugged their compressor into one of my outdoor electrical outlets and reported that they “didn’t get no juice” from the bottom one of the duplex. That was on Day One of the project. I told them that I would replace the outlet after they left for the day, so they would have a good source of “juice” in the morning.

Now, that particular outlet had been a problem for years. It is not a GFCI itself, but it is on the end of a run with a GFCI between it and the service. The GFCI is in the downstairs bathroom. I have noted through the years that everytime it rains, that GFCI trips. I suspected that the outdoor outlet was the cause, but I never got around to checking it out — until Wednesday.

So, the guys left and I opened ‘er up. The first thing that happened was that the outlet fell apart. I noted that the rubber gasket on the supposedly weatherproof outlet cover had gotten old and was cracked. It would obviously not do a very good job of weatherproofing anything. Upon removing the remnants of the outlet, I found the interior of the switch box filled with a pile of rust. The actual galvanized box had rusted out due to all the water intrusion through the years.

And thus, it was the case that the 10 minute job I had anticipated turned into three hours, including two trips to my favorite home improvement store. I had to replace the damn box and the outlet, as well as installing a new weatherproof cover. When I volunteered to do the job, I knew I already had an outlet in my junk box, so no big deal. Yeah, right. I also had a switch box in my junk box, but it was the type that is used for old work in drywall and with the projections that were designed to secure it in place in a hole in drywall being too large to fit in the hole in exterior brick/block and with me being too lazy to chisel out more of a hole, I decided to get a new box.

So, after I installed everything properly, paying strict attention to NEC grounding requirements, I was all proud of myself. I went to get my caulking gun to lay a bead of silicone around the outside of the rubber gasket to finish the weatherproofing and found that I had no silicone caulking compound. I forgot that I gave the remaining tube of it to a guy who was working on my windows last month. Oy, vey! Another trip to my favorite home improvement store.

Oh, and my caulking gun. Cheap Chinese piece of shit that it is, it decided that it wanted to stop working properly in the middle of this job. What should have taken two or three squeezes of the trigger required a constant pumping effort. Jaysus! But in the end, I was happy because I had been meaning to get around to doing something about that outlet for maybe 10 years or so.

Yeah, I procrastinate.

I might blow off some more steam here soon. Or I might not. This home improvement stuff sure soaks up my time, and the non-stop pounding from 7 to 2 sure makes me want to be somewhere else!