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8:55 a.m. - 2005-09-17 That Cash Register is Ka-Chinging for me right nowSince I posted last, we have had various estimates on work needed at the house, one of which was a guy who was going to tell me if my addition was merely settling or sinking hopelessly into the Earth. The bad news is....It's sinking in the the Earth. The good news is...you can't really tell right now and it may not sink any further and if it does it may take years before it sinks bad enough to need the $13,000.00 plus fix the guy quoted me, which is sinking 6 steel rods down to bedrock and jacking it back up. This company did this to Chicago's Buckingham Fountain and several Frank Lloyd Wright homes including his studio in Oak Park, Illinois. We waved good bye to this fellow thinking "What an honest man he is" and "If this does need jacking in the future, we will surely hire him." The second guy came to look at our basement cracks for epoxy injection and repair of a menacing looking pie shaped wedge that looks as if you could just pull it right out leaving a tremendous pie shaped hole. He was a wealth of information on everything about house construction and a freindly sort, so we picked his brain for over an hour. He quoted us 1000.00 to fix all our basement woes and explained his procedure and put our fears at ease. A price that was much lower than I expected. When we told him of the sinking addition and the $13,000.00 fix he started chuckling. The chuckle grew to a full blown belly laugh. "Dis addition here?" he pointed in his extremely thick Chicago, Back of the Yards accent. We nodded. "I could fix dis here for under a $1000.00 with a couple of house jacks from Menards." he continued to laugh. We told him all about the 6 steel rods going down to bedrock and he stopped us and said. "Dat might be fine for Buckingham Fountain, but dis here is just an addition....none of any of these houses in Elgin is built on bedrock...and dat's the whole house." He told us that when and if we decided to have it done, to call him because he'd "Done plenty of dese". We also found out that this guy had a solution to fix the drainage problem that caused the sinking addition and for another 1000.00 he will reconfigure our downspouts and run an underground pipe along the side of our house which will dump the water on the other side of the house toward the street all underground and we will never see the pipe....the water will just disperse into the front yard and continue down hill. So, I woke up Thurday morning expecting to sign a $10,000.00 plus contract and went to bed with all of our heavy work costing us around $2000.00. All that's left after that is a plumber to reinstall a new shut off valve in the basement, a chimeny sweep, and the guy to come and give our furnace a cleaning and annual blessing. The total bill for all work needed will likely come to under 3000.00, leaving me about 8000.00 to continue my landscaping plans and THE ROOFTOP DECK!!!!! Now...on another note...warning about 1-800-FLOWERS.COM. I had a birthday last week and was surprised by a birthday cake made out of flowers from an internet buddy (who does not read this blog). I told her they were lovely and thanked her and would never spoil her pleasure at having surprised me by telling her the flowers were not what they should have been. This is what 1-800-FLOWERS.COM said the cake would look like.
The actual cake looked more like a round lump of dying flowers with ribbons half pinned on and one dead rose in the center. There was no border of pink carnations going around the edge of the cake and no candles in it as the advertisment suggested. The dead rose in the center was also half the size of the one in the picture. It was not cake shaped but more "helmet" shaped and didn't look at all like a cake. Now, maybe some people would think I should warn my friend and I thought about this, but I also thought about how if I had sent it, part of the pleasure of sending a gift is knowing the pleasure of the person on the receiving end. I didn't want her to think I wasn't blown away....and I was blown away by the her thougtfulness and of the delight of receiving mystery flowers on my birthday, (which had my husband as anxious as I to open them and see who they were from). I didn't want to sound like I was complaining, so I just thanked her for them and gushed over how surprised and pleased I was...which was the truth. I am warning any readers of this blog though that 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, may not be the best way to spend your flower giving money. Well, have a wonderful day....I'm going to go work out in my yard, because I now have the money to buy the things I want to put in it. P. I. Yarnsmith
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