10th street Reno
January 1, 2008
Asbestos removal
During the inspection pre-purchase the engineer noted we had a lot of asbestos on the piping in the basement. Not being up to speed on these things we did think about just leaving it there but some friends noted that we could easily get taken to the cleaners if a pipe burst with the asbestos on it. We also found out that it may be a problem on the ground floor renovation with the dob aproval if it was still there. So much like all the other items that have come up we called round a few folks and here's the results... Liam and co from Leinster contracting did a great job.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22366270@N04/2154687382/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22366270@N04/2153894381/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22366270@N04/2153894629/
As you see from the above photos the asbestos had cracked in quite a few places and we didn't realise but this was all over the floor. The guys spray washed the entire basement and now we have the official document noting the full asbestos abatement. Just in case someone else is thinking of doing this you need a licensed pro which you can check on the NOV.gov web site.
Cost was $2400 and we had aprox 125 feet of piping to take care of. It took one day and i'd definitely reccomend Liam and the guys at Leinster contracting. Good guys.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22366270@N04/2153895071/?rotated=1&cb=1199199657161
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22366270@N04/2154689070/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22366270@N04/2153895305/
Happy new year all.
December 11, 2007
Bit of background....
Seems like forever since we bought the place back in August and naturally as soon as I get set up to post on the site work has had me here at all hours !
So just a bit of back ground......after several months of looking, losing out on other places, we eventually closed in August. Fortunately the seller moved the closing forward just in time to miss the major hike in jumbo loan moves over the summer. We used a combination of brokers and websites to play lenders off against each other to drive the fees and rates down. Next big challenge was to sell our condo. That was also in park slope in a relatively well established block so we sold it ourselves based on closing prices from a month earlier. It all went pretty well, which was great news as that saved us 4% commision which was the lowest a broker offered. Couple of open houses based on posts on NYTimes.com did the trick.
We had an engineers report done and to be honest I didn't think it was that great. Still - the engineer did point out a few things which we used to lower the price. Admittedly only 30 cents on the dollar but better money in our pocket than the seller and this did give us some peace of mind that the place wasn't going to fall apart the day we moved in.
Closing costs ! We had calculated these previously but it didn't make me feel any better when we had to pay them. We sold our apartment for @700k and bought the new house for @1.4m and the fees were approx 60k. Just the price of doing this type of business I guess.
I dont know how we didn't notice it at the walk through but the house was filthy when we moved in. The contract calls from broom clean but in no way was it. We also found out that we had no end of little house guests in the form of a mouse infestation and water bugs. Terminx guy came round and within a couple of weeks we had killed over 30 of the damn things. No sightings recently and the moniker of "mouse mansion" seems to be a thing of the past.