I seem to be murdering my plants...

In order to move I have to sell my condo. In order to sell my condo I have to get rid of the massive wall of ivy that I have had growing since I moved into the place. It's not always been the easiest to maintain but for the most part it's been a glorious wall of green that I have been very proud of. And then, about 12 months ago, the center part got sick. The leaves started to turn yellow and spotty and die. And then a different thing happened. Suddenly one leaf in the middle of a vine would just wilt, turn gray and die. And the in a different spot on the same vine it would happen again. There were 2 forces at work that I could see. And the whole wall started to die from the middle out. 

I went to my go-to plant guy...no help. I took pictures (not the actual leaves since I didn't want to infect any other plants) to plants stores here and in Madison. No one knew. I did a search online and came up with zip. Nothing like it. So the only solution seemed to be to cut them down. And by this point, what had been a glorious wall of lush green was beginning to look like it had been sprayed with Agent Orange. So I cut it all down. Not only was this emotionally disturbing for me, the ivy has fine hairs on it that get everywhere and make me sneeze and itch. At least the mess of cutting it down was not as bad as it might have been since I put down plastic paint cover sheets and then just folded it all up and dumped it. Not into the garbage but off the back of the terrace onto the ground in the back of the condo building (all real ecological-like). 

So now I have 18 pots with infected dirt in them (one of the pots is out of the picture and I am sure my go-to plant guy will want to point out that there are only 17 of them). The empty vines will leaf out. But they will all die much to my chagrin : (

 

The patio is poured

The doors are in and the concrete patio has been poured. The architect hates it, the poured concrete. Tough shit. It's my house. Wait till he sees the travesty I'm going to inflict on the front of the house.

Stairs-ish are in

These cannot possibly make sense to a casual viewer. It doesn't even make sense when I am standing in it. It's very messy. 

Floor's in

After a month or two of twisting in the wind the contractor seems to have remembered he had a job somewhere in RiverWest. In just 2 or 3 days the insulation for the floor, the heating tubes and the concrete went down. He, the contractor seems now to have gone to wherever it was that he went to before this happened. The electrician was supposed to come on Tuesday...it's Thursday.

The thing is that every time I actually talk to him, the contractor, he makes it seem like I will be moving in by the end of the week. Nice talk but ultimately a fail.

Stuff has happened, but not much

I don't know what to think. They put down gravel and some tubing shit. Doesn't seem very tidy to me.

Almost floor

They put the insulation on the floor in preparation for the radiant heating tubes over which they pour the concrete that makes the floor. The house looks very small to me. That may be because there are no windows. Yet.

Junk in the trunk, well, garage

They put garage doors on the garage so I could receive my appliances which were ordered in February. I told the builder in February I was going to do this and that they'd deliver in May and he said oh, you'll probably be moved in my then. In May when they called to deliver I had to push it out a month. But no more than that.

Nothing had happened between then and May. So I told the builder...uh, June 17th, gotta be ready to put them somewhere.

June 14th he put doors on. I got the stuff on the 17th.

#6 Nobody knows the houses I've seen

Eventually I became less and less eager to look at, or for that matter even consider looking at the emails the MLS sent me. I'd go a month without looking at the email listings and when I did, it was always the same damn thing. The same properties listed as new although I'd seen them before. Or reduced in price. Not that money was so much the problem. It was almost always that the place wasn't right. I stopped taking pictures after a while. It was just a chronicle of misery but you can get what I'm saying.

Whitefish Bay: Theoretically this was very much what I wanted. I loved the style but the master bedroom window looked right out onto the neighbor's driveway. I mean the neighbor's driveway was paved right up to and against the back of this house. To make matters worse there was a basket ball hoop on their garage. The neighbor's garbage was against the back of the the house just outside the master bedroom window. This had been the home of an elderly couple who had both died. Another neighbor bought it (overpaid for it), thinking they were getting a deal and that they were going to turn it quickly and make a profit. That didn't work out so well for them.

Bayview: So many issues, the front door opened directly into the stairs to the second floor. 

Like the door touched the first stair. The place was too small anyway.

Shorewood: The garage was separating from the house. 

I didn't like the house anyway, maybe the garage didn't like the house either.

RiverWest: Yeah, no on this one. 

And the owner, who happened to be outside was a complete asshole.

Electric's in

Glamorous views from the second floor

This will be the view from my bedroom window. The city was pretty insistent that my house fit in with the neighborhood. So I am getting plywood windows.

#5 Shopping on line

My sister is my real estate agent. She is very helpful and has never complained about having to show property to me even when she knew there was little chance I'd be buying. This process, though, became a lot easier for her once I was subscribed to the MLS email notification service. While helpful, it is less than efficient. I was sent the same properties over and over, often as a new listing that I'd already seen 50 times. But rather than sending an image of the property, you were sent a link to the property. So if the email contains 5 properties, which was not unusual, you were sent 5 links which requires you to click 5 separate times to link to 5 different property websites just to determine if you have seen them before. Usually I had.

I am sent various shopping emails 10 times a day from all sorts of places that contain images for 5 to 10 different items for purchase. You can click on, for instance, a bottle of ketchup, if you're interested in it. I don't know how much a bottle of ketchup costs exactly but let's say $5. So these shopping sites can make the email contain a clickable image of a $5 bottle of ketchup, but the MLS cannot manage to put an image of a $350,000 condo into an email. Sloppy, lazy, inefficient and seriously annoying. Still, clicking on 5 different URLs in the privacy of my office is easier than asking my sister to come into Milwaukee, and then going and looking at some crap hole she knew perfectly well I was not going to buy. 

Why I do not do this for a living

Little by little

More of the floor

I am heartened by the progress even if it still looks like less than nothing.

Second floor arrives

There is no way to put a stairway in until the floor is poured. The floor cannot be poured until there's a roof. It's like a catch-22. Fortunately I don't have to worry about it. Except that I do anyway.

The garage is huge

I'm not sure that I need a 3 car garage. But since I don't have a basement I imagine this is where all the shit I accumulate that will be thrown away when I die will end up here. The good thing is that they can put the dumpster right there in the alley next to the garage door.

#4 Milwaukee Historic Preservation

The very first house I looked at in the beginning of my search, back when I wasn't really sure this is what I wanted to be doing, was on Brewer's Hill. The house was way too small for my needs, my living room furniture would never have fit into it. And my living room furniture isn't all that much, it fits nicely into 15 x 8 feet. And then there was the dining room issue, there was none. But I was new to the idea of remodeling. I thought I'd just throw on a couple, 3, 4 thousand square feet and call it a day. It had a great back yard and the neighborhood was nice. It was a half block from a spectacular view of the downtown. The lot, a double, could have accommodated an additional structure.

In fact, there had most likely been another house exactly like it right there. The houses lining the street are perfect Monopoly-house-shaped. They mostly lack garages and my thought was to build a garage that looked like the house itself (and all the other houses) with a custom made door that hid the fact that it was actually a garage, even putting a fake front door if that's what it needed. I can be sensitive to the needs of history, or people who care to inflict their idea of it on the world. As luck would have it the Milwaukee Historic Preservation Stick-Up-Their-Asses Club wasn't having any of it. Instead, to preserve the historic nature of Brewer's Hill, where a good deal of the homes are boarded up ramshackle old wooden frame houses they wanted me to put the garage in the back of the house where no one could be offended by having to see it. Never mind that it would take up most of the back yard and pave whatever was left of the yard for a driveway.

In my second viewing, with the seller's real estate agent present, I suggested I would be offering less than her asking price. The agent snapped, "she's already losing money as it is." Welcome to the club honey. I was/am going to be taking a 100K loss, myself. I wasn't sympathetic. I didn't make an offer.

The house sold but I noticed that the side yard is still a paved parking spot. So at least it still conforms to historical standards. Looks just like it did back in the day, I guess.

Currently

From across the street in the park.

#3 Casting my net

I had the idea that I would buy something in or near my neighborhood, the neighborhood in which I'd spent most of my adult life (aside from 8 years in the suburbs). I thought I'd buy something cruddy I could gut and remodel. I had big plans. Like many things, the plans didn't exactly pan out as I'd imagined. Surprise. The first house I looked at I loved. It was small but I could add on, I thought. Unfortunately the city historical society had other ideas. Then began a series of disappointing viewings of houses of a variety of sizes, in various neighborhoods, in an assortment of states of decay, unworkable for manifold reasons. Over the past 6 or so years I've looked at hundreds of properties online, and physically looked at scores of them. I only really ever considered 2 or 3 properties enough to even look at them again. I hate to bother the real estate agent to go see something a second time when I'm pretty sure I'm never gonna buy the damn thing. Even when the real estate agent is my sister, or perhaps because.

I looked twice at a spectacular condo across from Juneau Park that was stunning and perfect in many respects. It even had a temperature-controlled wine storage facility and the private humidor room. Which is great if you go in for that sort of thing but the condo fee alone was $1,200 a month. I'd have been impoverished.

Another needed easily $100,000 worth of structural work. And I had it professionally appraised, this was not just my opinion. It needed new plumbing, electricity, all new windows and some sort of landscaping work so that the basement didn't flood through the windows every time there was a hint of rain. Eventually it was bought by the lawyer for the Bucks, or Brewers or some damn sports team.

I looked at a 700 square foot houses with vinyl interior walls where the owner emphatically told me she would not sell it if I wanted to tear it down. The inside was filled with picture of Pope John Paul II. I figured that I'd tear it down anyway and had an architect draw up some plans for me. If you like flying buttresses this was the house for you. It seems that instead of listening to me when I talked about what I wanted, he was high on crack. I abandoned the idea and the house remains unsold.

Structure

So there's something on the vacant lot now. Which is good since I got a revised assessment for tax purposes from the city. They're right straight on top of that shit of course.

Wood

They delivered wood last Friday. Monday night someone took 10 sheets of plywood. $30 a sheet. Cops didn't care.

#2 A decision made years ago

I've made plenty of bad decisions, many of them reckless. At least as reckless as a good, rule-observing Catholic boy gets, well, perhaps not that rule-observing. For instance, in my freshman year of college, on the weekend before Thanksgiving, my friends and I dropped acid and hitchhiked from Madison to Milwaukee at dusk. What can I say? I was less than a year out of a solid 12 years of Catholic school including a stint in the seminary, I was free to do stupid things. On another occasion I opened a restaurant. The ride to Milwaukee in the very old, unheated car of a morphine-addicted World War II veteran with lights, patterns and sounds sizzling around my head was a trip to the park compared to the restaurant. It's one thing to make unwise decisions when you're 20, another at 55.

When  it was clear I'd be living alone in a big house in the suburbs I decided almost immediately to move to a condo, people came out of the woodwork to tell me not to do it. "Wait a year," was on the minds and lips of nearly everyone with whom I was even remotely acquainted. "Don't be reckless," someone who barely knew me emphatically told me. But it wasn't reckless. I was never going to spend a year alone in a house that would only remind me of misery with the added kick of a 20 minute commute at the beginning and ending of each day, alone in a car, to reflect on it. So I bought the place. The only place, as I've said, that I could reasonably buy. Somehow though, even then, I knew it would be only a parking spot until I figured out what I was going to do or where I was going to be. The crystal clarity of the exact problems with the place did not immediately present themselves and even when it was clear I chose to ignore it for years. In the meantime I planned to move to another city and went as far as updating my resume, registering with creative employment agencies, and researched best places to live in Atlanta, for instance. I went on and off anti-depressants, bought an apartment in France, speaking of reckless, and remodeled, tiled and repainted it. Yeah, there was the restaurant in there. And then I bought a cottage and remodeled that.

Maybe 6 years ago, right after I closed the restaurant, I decided it was time to move.

#1 The house began in 2002

When life as I knew it ended for me in 2002, I moved into a condominium. At the time it was, I believe, the only condominium available in Milwaukee and I bought it. A year later hundreds of different and lovelier condominiums came on the market but by then I was living here and more upheaval really wasn't what I had in mind for myself and my mental health. I was crushed enough without another half year of life lived out of boxes, furniture placement decisions, and the re-hanging pictures.

I really had little choice in buying the condo, I felt, and I determined not to regret it. And mostly I didn't. I regretted the ending of my relationship, and the loss of the house I loved, and the garden I adored but no regrets about the move to a condo in the city from a house in the suburbs. No regrets a year later when the the value of my condo fell because a ga-billion others were available. No regrets when one of my fellow condo owners sold his for $100,000 less than he'd paid for it and the value of the condos fell even further. No regrets when there turned out to be foundation problems and we had an $8,000 assessment.

I have a great view. It's close to work and there's plenty of room despite it being a fraction of the size of the house I lived in. Theres no shoveling, no grass mowing. I have a balcony that works pretty well for growing stuff, herbs and flowers, if not tomatoes. It's really not enough room to actually garden or, say, lounge around drinking cocktails. But it's great for grilling and for standing in my bare feet in the winter when it's cold and my feet are flaming hot as they generally are.

I deal with the tiny kitchen pretty well and I put up with the sometimes thoughtless fellow condominium owners (although not Rebecca Bradley, the newly elected supreme court judge who lives in my building and is a complete witch so much). What I cannot deal with is the dining "room." Even when I looked at it the first time I thought it was small but I presumed I would deal with it. I'd dealt with worse.

But it turns out I can't. Four people can eat at my table, if not exactly comfortably and for that reason, I decided to move.

Best laid plans

The foundation is poured and the garage slab is under straw. The reason for this remains unknown to me. Too bad I don't have a pet goat. Yet.

Slab's in

So the slab got poured. I went over and scratched my initials in the concrete. The garage is HUGE.

Next comes the garage slab

I don't know how this gets done in the winter. I imagine it is slower than it might be in nicer weather but it is happening pretty fast as far as I can tell.