This is the current view from the top of the front stairs into the back of the house – through what will be the landing, kitchen, pantry, and bathroom. You can see the old bathroom location in the back because the toilet’s just right in the middle of the room there, in what will eventually be a hallway.
After a few mix-ups about which part of which document had to be stamped with which seal, we have been approved for a building permit.
Next step: EVERYTHING.
The other day I saw a question on a student aid messageboard from someone who had a loan in default and wanted to go to nursing school. They were a couple months away from completing a loan rehabilitation program, but until they got at least 2/3 of the way through it they weren’t eligible for additional federal student loans. How, they wanted to know, could they get aid for a program starting before then?
They mentioned that their parents were willing to help, so I said they should probably take out Parent PLUS loans. This was, it turns out, incorrect: You can’t borrow a Parent PLUS loan for your child if that child is in default on a federal student loan. The poster will have to wait a couple of months to regain their own eligibility for student aid, at which point they and their parents could both borrow to pay tuition. They’ll probably be able to get the school to allow them to use a payment plan for the first part of tuition, enroll, then get the rest of the tuition in loans later on in the semester.
Spurred by that embarrassing public error, I decided to read as much as I could of the entire 2016 Federal Student Aid Handbook, which is… not generally a page-turner.
But there are some amazing little details in there that are really cool:
As a result of the Jay treaty of 1794, native Canadians (that is, First Nations tribe members) qualify for student aid. However, as non-citizens they don’t have Social Security numbers, and as non-resident-aliens they don’t have alien registration numbers either. So, what ID number do they use when applying? Apparently all of them just put A9999999999 in that field, and then the financial aid administrator is prompted to check their tribal membership bona fides.
Children under 13 can go to college and get financial aid if they have finished high school or equivalent credentials. But the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) prohibits governments and businesses from gathering personal information about these children online, so they must apply on paper. (If you’re still in high school and just taking college classes, you don’t count as a college student and can’t get aid).
Men must register with the Selective Service between the ages of 18 and 26, or they can’t get financial aid. The exceptions are students who became citizens after the age of 26, and students who served in the military, more or less proving that their non-registration was accidental. If they simply forgot, no dice. Trans men often have obstacles registering for the selective service, since their gender isn’t necessarily what was on their paperwork between the ages of 18-26, so they also are exempt from the requirement. (I did not see an equivalent footnote about trans women, but my expectation would be that they are women and therefore not required to have signed up, even if they were legally male in the past – nobody’s going to ask Caitlyn Jenner if she signed up for the selective service back in the day).
The definition of “parent” for student aid is very complicated. If you have foster parents, for example, their income isn’t included when calculating your family contribution. But they do count as parents for other aspects of college and financial aid.
Homeless students get special consideration. If they live on campus, does that count as a home and therefore mean they won’t get the exceptions anymore? Nope, “would be homeless if not for dorm” still qualifies for special processing.
Residents of US territories qualify for US student aid… if they were born recently enough. If you’re from the US Virgin Islands and born before 1917, you may have trouble getting college aid. I don’t know how many 99-year-olds from St. Thomas are applying to college right now, but there’s a rule about it. In the case of Puerto Rico, for some reason you have to have been born after January 13, 1941, even though Puerto Ricans were granted US citizenship under the Jones act of 1917. I don’t quite understand that one.
There’s a set of shelves built into a sort of alcove in our basement. For some reason they’re made of old doors. Before being made into shelving they were pretty nice solid wood doors. But they’ve been shelves for a long time and they’re absolutely filthy, with just years of dirt and dust and cobwebs.
After about half a bottle of Simple Green a several absolutely blackened rags this afternoon, they’re… not exactly clean, but less filthy. It’s progress.
The permitting process is still ongoing, so actual construction can’t begin yet, but we’re hoping it’ll start next week.
Most of the roof now looks like this, with double-layer asphalt shingles:
The gutters aren’t back up yet and there are various bits of fascia and trim and woodwork that need to be replaced, but it’s come a long way.
Meanwhile, this week we decided we really ought to get a new front door lock and doorknob. At some point before we got the house, Banco Santander or their agents deliberately broke the lock so you can only enter the house from the back door. This isn’t malice on their part, of course, just standard procedure with foreclosed properties with lockboxes- they just pick one door for entry and make the other exit-only. But it does mean we need a new lock. So, off to Lowe’s, which is slightly further away from our house but carries prettier doorknobs, which should go nicely with the huge old solid-wood front door.
Of course, this turns out to be less than simple. This old door has a mortise-lock doorknob, not the cylinder type that’s used in most doors nowadays. Those are kind of a specialty item, and they’re a little tricky to size because you need to know the exact width of the slot they’re inserted into as well as the usual things like the backset (distance from the door edge to the key slot).
So, I called the local specialty key and lock place, Commonwealth Lock. These guys are good, and very well reviewed. Sure, it’ll cost a little extra to buy hardware there, but it’ll help us preserve this awesome old slab of door, and it’s a local business which I do like to support.
When I spoke with them they confirmed that they do carry a line of mortise locks, although we’ll probably have to special-order one to fit exactly. Their advice is to take the lock off the door and bring it in so they can figure out exactly what should replace it… and also they’re only open on weekdays. Apparently if you shop there you either have the sort of job where you can take time off to shop for doorknobs, or have the kind of money that lets you send your architect over to select doorknobs for you. Maybe this is going to cost more than a little extra.
Anyway, the procedure to replace our doorknob and front door lock is now turning out to be:
And there you have it: Replacing a doorknob in 8 simple steps.
Well, we just found out how much it costs to heat a house with broken windows using only two space heaters. Even keeping the temp at around 40 degrees, that was a surprise kick in the wallet.
We found some exciting new leaks in the last rain storm, but the crew has fixed them very promptly. A guy came by in the rain on Sunday to put extra tarps down and stop the leaking, and they patched them more permanently once the weather cleared. We’ll have to replace that section of roof later anyway, but the patches should hold for now.
Shingles are starting to go in on the roof, and the two missing windows in the basement have been replaced with actual windows.
Today when I came by the house to meet with our plumber/HVAC guy, a neighbor out walking her dog stopped us to say they were very impressed with the work the crew had done so far, and also with how they’d been careful not to get construction debris on anyone else’s driveway/yard/street/etc. Tibet Construction: Your Neighbors Won’t Hate You.
Etymology fascinates me sometimes. I’ve been mulling over a poem, for example, about dead metaphors that are actually pretty creepy if you think about them hard. If you’ve ever trained a dog on a short leash, you’ll know what level of control it means to say a person is kept on one.
But the political season also gives us etymologies that are also revealing. Like Lee Atwater’s explanation of the origins of keywords like state’s rights, small government, and so on:
The entire social and political platform of the right in America today is basically a re-branding of overtly racist policies. It’s got a different label, but the contents are still the same.
Don’t forget where your words come from.
Yesterday I may well have made a very serious error in my renovation project. I let the city inside my house to see it.
If I had lied to the city about where I was living on January 1, 2016 I could have gotten a tax abatement. But I didn’t feel comfortable lying. So I let them look inside to do a proper assessment of the quality and size of the building. Which means I’m going to pay more in taxes until 2018.
When Megan was in culinary school I thought a lot about the difference between ambitious home cooking and restaurant cooking, and now that we’re trying to design a kitchen together I have to think a lot about the difference between trendy “pro-style” home kitchen equipment and actual commercial kitchen equipment. And of course the entire design goal of a pro kitchen is different. A home kitchen is the heart of a home, where you hang out with your friends. A pro kitchen is a workplace designed to the needs of the budget and the health inspector. The style and comfort of the actual cook barely figure into the process at all.
People will say “I want a professional kitchen,” but they don’t mean a twelve-and-a-half-foot-long three-basin sink. In a restaurant kitchen, you need three basins to meet code: wash, rinse, sanitize. In my kitchen, I’m going with one basin. And I will wash both my hands and my dishes in that sink instead of having a separate handwash station.
In a restaurant kitchen, you give the cooks as little space as you possibly can, so that you can have a larger dining room. You don’t care if it’s cramped and hot and noisy, as long as the line cooks don’t get heat stroke too often.
And trust me, Sub-Zero almost certainly doesn’t make the stove in your favorite restaurant. If they’re not using hot-plate-style one-pot induction burners they’re using an old beast with pilot lights and dangerously sharp corners that doesn’t fit anywhere near a standard countertop.
Secretly Ironic 