Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Heating, Lead Paint, and General Silliness

So yesterday Ben rushed home from school so he could be there when the gas got turned on (MUCH more exciting than it would be normally since it's November and our hot water heater is gas-powered). To understand what happened next I will need to give some horribly boring and realistic background, so prepare to snore!
When we originally made an offer on the house, it was with the understanding that a) everything would be up to code and b) all the chipping lead paint would be painted over, since we have a government loan that doesn't want us to feel gradually worse and worse until we die of lead poisoning. Reasonable enough. The lead paint got taken care of after some fighting and shuffling between the realtor and then the seller hired a man to bring the heating up to code, which he claimed he did. An inspector came in and said he couldn't approve it but our realtor and the man who "fixed" the heater produced a signed document saying it was up to code and the inspector didn't know what he was talking about. Being young and naive, we accepted it.
So when the gas man said the heater wasn't up to code, Ben quietly became very angry. (He doesn't do anything loudly except teach, which he apparently does at full volume with great animation. I'd pay to see that.) Anyway, long story short, the seller will pay for our repairs to the heater. But it again will take 10 calls to our realtor to have her call the seller and have them call her back and forth and so on and so on.
Which brings me to the point of all this nonsense. Our sellers seemed like reasonable, calm people to me. It makes sense to have a realtor in place to broker a home selling (even though we made the mistake of not getting our own, but having the realtor play dual roles). But it seems a little ridiculous when both parties have agreed on what needs to be done to continue to have a go-between. Seems like it just creates more anger than just speaking with each other would at this point. And i'm not saying it's always like that - I can think of many personality types that need that buffer between tempers. Damn bureacracy.
In other news, today I get to go stand in line to vote! Yaay! Ben's been in line for about 15 minutes and says he'll be there for awhile.

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