The tent was on for about 24 hours, and the house off-limits for an extra 48 hours - time to let the last vapors of Vikane to leave the premises.

I had been warned that it was best to leave repairs to someone else than the pest control company. This was good advice, and I had declined most of the proposed repairs. But I wanted to have one eave, affected by some dry-rot, repaired before the start of the roof work. And since I had no carpenter yet, I decided to just let the pest control handle it. Well, that was really not a great idea. Work was sub-par, and expensive too. In addition, this would have been much easier to repair while the roof was off - not before! Oh well. I guess that means some extra work for me down the road (I will have to apply some putty in one place, caulk in others and sand before painting).

You’re visiting an Eichler during an open-house and the agent is bragging about the
“wall-to-wall brand new carpet”? I hope you will give her/him a piece of your mind.

New carpet in an Eichler is bad mojo. At best, the agent and seller are clueless and are genuinely unaware of the non-sense of having carpet in an Eichler (note that this makes the agent an incompetent one). More likely, they’re trying to hide something…

Why are carpet and Eichler a non-sense combination? Because carpeting your slab means that your living space will be better insulated from your heating source (your radiant heat, either the original one or the electrical alternative) than it is from the outside (through your single-pane glass wall)! Think about the overhead costs in your winter heating bill. And I am not even talking about aesthetic considerations or inherent qualities of other types of flooring.

In the house we bought, the carpet was there to hide the ugly truth. And I missed it. I had pulled the carpet in one spot during the visit, and exposed bare concrete (oh joy!). Well, that was just bad luck: this spot was an exception. The rest of the house was covered with badly brittle vynil tiles…

It’s official now: I hate carpets. And especially the standard-issue brown one. I wish to never put my eyes on one of these ever again.

More details on the flooring effort in a subsequent post.