Day 94, packing, real estate, FOPAL

I omitted to mention yesterday that when I was at the gym, I was accosted by a man about my own age who I kind of recognized. He identified himself as Mike F., an old IBM colleague who worked with Marian for many years. He very kindly expressed condolences and commented on how everyone knew Marian as “really, really smart” and “a programmer’s programmer”. That was nice.

Wednesday 3/6/2019

Since Chuck and his contractor will be here at 10, there isn’t time for a run — I tell myself. That isn’t strictly true; if I got off my butt and out the door at 8 there’d be time. Or I can take a run after they leave; how’s that for a concept? I’ll consider it. Right now it’s 8:20, and I’m dressed and finished with one of the two “things” on my schedule for today,

packing,

which brought up a couple of emotional reactions. Tomorrow morning I will leave for a long weekend in Vegas (baby), to watch the PAC-12 WBB tournament. Eleven games in four days, whee! Probably won’t watch all, or at least will probably walk out early from ones that turn into a runaway. But today I wanted to make sure I had everything ready.

Packing for one is stupidly easy. Everything fits in a nice little carry-on bag that fits under the seat, so I don’t even have to worry about space in the overhead. Which is a good thing, because I’m flying SouthWest, and I didn’t check in until half an hour after the 24-hour check-in window opened, so I’m number A46, the 50th or 60th person (allowing for gold members, servicemen, women with babies, etc) to board the plane. Don’t care, it’s a 90-minute flight and my bag fits under the seat hahaha.

Inevitably I contrast this to prior trips, where the two of us used at least a roller bag, two for a longer trip, plus a computer bag for our two laptops. We’d check the bag, especially in recent years where we had to go to the desk to check in in order to get the wheelchair Marian needed to travel to the gate. Now, in a moment of release (similar to what I felt back in the first week when I realized I could again walk to Sunday coffee), I realized that I can just print my boarding pass at home, pick up my bag, and bop on over to the security line without a pause. That’s nice.

Prior to that realization I had another moment, not exactly of grief but of combined relief and pity. I went to the “travel drawer” (oh jeez, yet another drawer I need to clean out) to get one of the small mesh bags we used to pack toiletries. The one I picked up had something in it: oh, Marian’s first-aid supplies.

For most of this millennium, she suffered from fragile skin: her skin would split or tear seemingly under a hard look, or at least any small collision with a corner of anything. So she always had to be ready with bandaids, tape, gauze, to patch a split. She handled this as she did all her other maladies, with intelligence and calm practicality. Your skin breaks; you swear quietly, patch it, and carry on. So one of the toiletry bags had this double-handful of assorted patching materials. I was so pleased to be able to throw all that out on her behalf. At least that isn’t an issue any more. As I finished writing that I saw Chuck pulling up so time for

Real estate talk.

Chuck brought his favorite contractor, Vassily, and we looked long at the kitchen and talked about how one could — or mostly how one could not — upgrade it. It bugs Chuck and his designer Amy that there is a door between the kitchen and the refrigerator:

It hasn’t been a functional problem for 45 years. The annoyance of having to open that door to reach the fridge, and close it to reach the pantry that’s behind it, was so slight it never occurred to us to do anything about it. Turns out that was smart, because in Vassily’s opinion, it can’t be done. One, the wall in which that door sits is a bearing wall for the sloping roof above and it would be hard to remove it. Two, if you keep the wall but do other work, because there is a furnace beyond it, the city will make you upgrade that door to a “20-minute fire door” which would mean replacing the frame and the door. If you keep the wall and try to put the fridge in the kitchen it replaces some of the counter, and anyway the counters are 24″ or less deep, so the refrigerator sticks out and you have a problem opening it. You could maybe put the fridge next to the stove where the pantry is, but then you lose all the shelf space in the pantry, plus, having a fridge abutting a stove is kind of weird.

I really don’t care; as I said several times (as much to myself as to them) “I won’t be living here, so I don’t care what you do.” But the decision to do such work does impact me, as I went over with Chuck after Vassily left. If they do remodeling, it can’t start until I move out, and then it will take at least a month (probably more, because that’s how this shit always goes) to finish. And that delays the selling of the house by that much.

We talked about the implications of that. If I move into C.H. they will charge 10% on the unpaid balance of the entry fee, which would come to circa $4000/month until the house closes escrow and I can pay the balance off. But Chuck says, if the upgrade work adds $100K to your sale price, you come out ahead.

Another option that we talked about is that I could go ahead and move out and take a temporary spot in another ILF (one with a month-to-month contract and no entry fee). Again that would cost circa $4000/month until such time as C.H. has an opening, but the work on the house and its sale could proceed.

Against that idea is my reluctance to change my address twice. But then I had the thought that perhaps I could change my postal address to C.H. right now. I need to ask Kim Krebs about that. She said that as soon as I paid my application fee (last Monday) I would be a “member” in the sense that I would get their newsletter and could attend any of their events. Maybe I could start converting all my various accounts to that as my postal address now. In which case I would not have to change addresses twice — only move all my earthly goods twice.

With this possibility in mind I asked Chuck to get me a referral to his favorite estate sale manager. I’d like to get a handle on that situation. Anyway, it’s all very complicated. And so off to FOPAL with three boxes of books.

next day… forgot to hit “Publish” on this. Also, forgot to note that since the FOPAL book sale is coming up this weekend, the sorting room is really crowded, so the three boxes of books stayed in the back of the car for next time.

Day 93, paperwork, real estate

Tuesday, 3/5/2019

Because of light rain I drove to the Y instead of walking. Did a while on a treadmill and a couple of exercises but it was crowded and every apparatus I wanted was in use, so left.

Filled out the questionnaire the financial manager sends in preparation for my annual consultation, which is on the 19th. Added a list of questions we need to discuss. Put it all in the return mail envelope. Wrote a check for my annual membership in FOPAL. When the cleaning lady arrived I took both, and my computer, and went to the local coffee shop for lunch, mailing the two envelopes. Isn’t this interesting?

Back home I spent a couple of hours scanning slides, and lost track of time and forgot I was to meet with Chuck at 2pm. He called to remind me at 2:15, very embarrassing. He came down to the house. We went over some comparables he had collected. He wants to come back tomorrow with his staging contractor to talk about redoing the kitchen. He’s convinced it would make a big difference in selling to an owner-occupier. I remind him he was going to talk to a developer to get an idea of what a developer might pay. He sends a text to one he knows. Maybe we’ll have that tomorrow.

I’m conflicted on the marketing of the house. I would emotionally prefer to sell it to people who would live in it and remodel it. But I don’t like the idea of spending money and time (tens of thousands, and weeks if not months) on remodeling, on speculation that it will raise the price.

Do more slide scanning; I’m more than half done with that. Filled three boxes with books to take to tomorrow afternoon’s book-sorting session. There’s no more than three boxes’ worth left on the shelf.

Last night I deleted the SYTYCD episodes.

Day 87, blood and real estate

Monday, 2/25/2019

First priority this morning was to get to the PAMF Los Altos lab and get blood drawn so the results would be in for my physical on Wednesday. The car of course is still sitting in the driveway with a flat tire, so I took a Lyft instead. Cheerful young phlebotomist got the needle in with only a tiny sting, and soon I was Lyfted back. For the return trip I opted for the cheaper, shared-ride Lyft. There was another passenger, a young woman in the back seat who chattered at high speed to the driver the whole way. Pleasant, she wasn’t carping or bitching, but goodness, draw a breath, lady.

After some delayed breakfast I headed out to walk to Chuck’s office where I expected to meet him to talk about the sale of the house. I got there and he wasn’t in. After a while his assistant — also his son, Andrew, whom I had not recognized when I came in, to my embarrassment, sheesh I’ve only met him like four times before — called Chuck up and discovered that he had expected to meet at my house, not his office. Mis-communication all around. So he came and got me, only a five-minute drive, and finally we got together.

Then I, Chuck, and Amy, his “stager” (an interior decorator who specializes in getting houses ready to sell) walked around the house and talked about it. Amy was full of ideas about what could or might be done.

We all agreed that everything depended on whether it would marketed to owner-occupiers as a place to live, or to developers as a site to build on. That decision still hasn’t been made. Chuck will talk to a couple of developers he knows and look at more comparables.

Meanwhile I heard all about what Amy would do at a budget of around $30K or $40K to make it more desirable to, probably, a young professional couple with no children (which pretty much describes me and Marian when we bought the place). Gut the kitchen and redo it entirely. Strip out the bathroom tile (which Marian and I had selected with great care and much shopping, in 1975) and redo it. Maybe find a way to sandwich in a bath of some type for the master bedroom.

I tried to hold my tongue on most of this, reminding myself several times that, whatever they did to the house, I wouldn’t be living in it. So the details really didn’t affect me in any way, except by their possible effect on the net sale value.

Amy also spent ten minutes with a copy of the floor plan of the available studio unit at Channing House, giving me several good ideas on that. Soon after they left the mobile tire repairman arrived and fixed the Prius.

Then I sat down with Photoshop and made a better floor plan including a scale-accurate ruler. I printed that out and used the scale ruler to make little scale-size paper cutouts of furniture items so I could push around and arrange different ways. That took me to supper time and there we are.

Day 81, real estate and baseball

Tuesday, 2/19/2019

For no reason I can fathom this has been a hard day emotionally. I started with a brisk walk (brisk because the air was chilly, but the sun was bright which makes all the difference) to the Y and a little workout. Then I reviewed some more slide groups while waiting for Chuck to arrive to talk about selling this house. Maybe something in the slides? No, even before that I was just awash with, I don’t know, call it grief. I’m sure the Norwegians have a very precise term for it. Walking around the outside of the house with Chuck, I was going to point out Marian’s favorite azalea in mad bloom, and I couldn’t get the words out, my throat just locked up. Oh well.

Chuck is an old friend and, as I think I wrote on Day 78? he was also our agent in two prior real estate transactions. Today he looked over the house and the neighborhood, considered the size of the lot, and so on. I have to say, looking over the house with a third-party’s eye, its age really shows. But no matter: ISMISEP, baby. That’s our mantra.

Chuck went away to research comparables and think about whether the house will most likely sell to a developer who’d scrape it (always my and Marian’s assumption), or someone who’d want to remodel it and live in it. What depends on this is whether, or to what degree, the house should be “staged” before being shown. If the owner/occupant option is what to aim for, “staging” might go as far as remodeling the kitchen and bath, expensive stuff. A developer, however, only cares about the size of the lot, the location, and any impediments to construction — take for example, the two protected oak trees that they would have to work around.

Chuck also mentioned he works with a designer who plans his staging. I sat up at that, because a designer is exactly who I’d like to consult with, in planning the layout of a hypothetical unit at Channing House. Later in the day I obtained the floor plan for the one available unit there, the jumbo studio, and emailed to Chuck with the request that his designer give a ballpark idea on whether it could be made a livable unit with spaces for working, reading, watching TV and sleeping. Maybe nothing will come of that, but.

I started scanning some slides and was surprised and disappointed with a couple of the ones I’d selected for their pictorial quality, as I saw it looking into a hand-held slide viewer. When actually scanned and on the big monitor, however, both these turned out to be soft, not properly focused. One is a lovely composition of a water bird (a male Smew, actually) moving through the water. The light was perfect, it made the water look like liquid glass and the bird is posed just right. Except, damn it, the bird’s head and eye are not in focus. The sharp focus was just past the bird, on his tail and the water. Looked fabulous in the hand viewer, but in detail it’s a complete miss. I’m sure when we projected that slide back in ’95 we jointly lamented the bad focus. But still we kept it. Sentiment.

In the afternoon something reminded me of baseball, which reminded me I’d been talking (to myself) about getting a Stanford Baseball season ticket. Well, why not now? And I did. It was only $220 for a 35-game season and what I know is a good seat at Sunken Diamond. I compared their schedule to mine and printed out the tickets for the games I think I’ll be able to attend (about half of them).

Then I sat down to watch Gene Kelly in An American in Paris.

Day 78, busy Saturday

Saturday, 2/16/2019

A busier Saturday than it had to be, as it turned out. The Museum is preparing to open its new Education Center, and I am signed up for two events related to that. The first was for docents only, today, from 11:30 to 2pm. And I was signed up to lead a tour at 2pm. The other event is for the public, next Saturday, starting with a brunch at 10am. Somehow I had mixed up these two events and thought today’s started at 10, so I arrived at the Museum at 10, and spent a while searching all the conference rooms etc. for the meeting until I got myself straightened out and had an hour to kill. Anyway…

The Education Center is going to be a very interesting experiment. It’s a cleverly designed space that can be put to all sorts of uses. We’ll see how it goes.

There was a biggish crowd — probably 35 or so — for the 2pm tour, and I managed to keep at least 25 of them to the end. I’m getting better at ending my talk cleanly, so the audience knows it was the end, and will start clapping. Often before I just kind of wound down and nobody realized I was finished; they would kind of stand around waiting for what I’ll say next, and I don’t have anything. Today there was a definite end and a nice hand.

Then home for a one-hour turnaround before heading out to Chuck and Suzanne’s place for a concert. They are music teachers and I expected student work, but in fact the star was Hanna Huang whom Suzanne introduced as “a professional musician who happens to still be in high school” and this was not overstatement. She ripped through a Beethoven Sonata with the skill and authority of a much older musician. After that I wanted to jump up and yell “Brava” but the rest of the audience of 40 or so — mostly parents and relatives, I would guess — didn’t stand, so I didn’t. Hanna also accompanied a young baritone, Austin Thompson, singing two Schubert leider, and then she was joined by a high-school-age cellist and violinist to do a Brahms trio. They played that very competently but I kind of lost the thread in that long and complex piece and my mind was wandering. Kudos to the kids for just being able to play it.

During the snacking and hospitality period after the music I managed to get some time with Chuck, to ask him if he would represent me in selling the house, and was glad when he said he’d love to. He was our agent back in the 80s, first selling an apartment house in Menlo Park, and then buying a rental complex in Seattle. Those deals were the real foundation of our fortune, such as it is. We came back from our years in England with a surplus of cash, which we put into the Menlo Park place; then (with Chuck’s help) did a tax-deferred trade-up for a larger place North of Seattle. I’m trying now to remember when we sold that; it must have been late in the 90s. Anyway the appreciation on those properties left us comfortably fixed. So I am confident Chuck can help getting the best value out of the house here.