AstroNerdBoy: Home Owner 02

It has been another busy week for me. Monday, I went to Lowes and picked up a new Schlage door knob/deadbolt set for installation. Mr. Disney met me at the condo and he brought his mother along to check out the washer/dryer set I’m selling. She approved, so he’ll be getting it next Monday.

Anyway, after they left, it was time to do my first house project. After I removed the old deadbolt, I discovered that the fixtures had rounded corners and my new deadbolt has square corners on the fixture. That meant that my new deadbolt and door knob wouldn’t fit.

Nice.

So, the old deadbolt was put back in place and I went back to Lowes to find rounded-cornered fixtures. Unfortunately, Lowes no longer sold those for Schlage so that left me with one other choice — buy a chisel. I returned home and chiseled out some wood to make everything work for the new door knob and deadbolt. It wasn’t difficult but it did make the project more interesting and in the end, a sweeter feeling for me upon completion of the project.

I returned to my apartment and called the HOA about getting my satellite dish installed, only to run into a bring wall. My unit faces north and the dish needs a clear view south. That means that the only place to install the dish is on the roof. The manager of my complex HOA, “Mr. Helpful,” immediately rejected the notion of installing a dish on the roof.

“Why?” I asked.

“It’ll put holes in the roof,” was the answer.

“What about the other dishes installed on the roofs of other buildings?” I countered.

“Oh,” he replied. “I guess we need to drive through the complex and have everyone with a dish on the roof to remove them.”

The “it put hole in roof” argument was a non-goer with me. After all, I got into DirecTV because an apartment complex I lived in had dishes installed on the roof of every building because there was no cable service to this new complex. There were no roofing problems because of it. Further, I’ve seen many homes with dishes on the roof and no problems there either. I mentioned this all to Mr. Helpful.

“Well, it would be troublesome to have them on the roof if we wanted to put new shingles up,” he stated. What a complete crock.

Mr. Helpful helpfully suggested I go to the HOA’s website and put in a request for having dishes on the roofs of the buildings. So I went, but the website denied my registration because the HOA has not received official notification from the title company about the sale. The HOA’s webmaster who informed me of this via e-mail, suggested that I call my HOA manager to get something done. I wrote back to explain that I’d already done this and he sent me to the website, thus my attempts to get a dish installed had run aground.

Mr. Helpful then responded, telling me to send them a diagram of the installation and telling me that the wires for the dish should be hidden. So I called DirecTV and they were gracious enough to schedule a visit to my condo to show me how they’d do things so I could get it to the HOA.

That out of the way, I stopped by Best Buy to purchase the new fridge for a Monday delivery. Then it was a call to the former ZeroRez outlet to have an estimate on what it will cost to get my air ducts cleaned and a call to a cleaning company to get a move-in clean done, to include the windows.

Whew!

This upcoming Monday is going to be a busy one, but my new home is slowly becoming “mine” as it were so that by the time I move in, the transformation will be complete. ^_^

Reader Comments

  1. The HOA does have control over the exterior of the building. They also provide the hazard insurance as well (to include interior walls) though I don’t have to ask their permission to paint my inside walls or replace appliances. ^_^

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