For That, You Need to Live in a Society

Have you heard Rob moved into a house? Besides the normal disruption that comes with moving, especially with something pretty permanent, it causes all sorts of micro disruptions with a small group like ours.

Take, for example, Thursday stream. Plan A was a Wheel of GeForce NOW stream—but Nvidia's servers were wonky. Plan B was checking in on with Rob's obviously safe and normal beavers in Timberborn, except when Rob turned the game on, the power went off. Why? Hard to say.

Which is what brings us to this week's letter series.

Part of being in a place—rent, own, whatever—is inviting others in and trusting they will treat it with respect. It's trusting they will charge a fair amount of any work that needs to be done. It's realizing trust can easily be misplaced to a frustrating degree, because you don't know better.

Patrick: There was a moment during a stream last night where someone in chat asked when we should expect you back and my response was “Well, I haven’t received any concerning DMs from Rob, so I’m choosing to be optimistic!” Which, of course, was not something I should have said out loud, because in the days after I would receive several semi-alarming DMs from you.

One of the most concerning elements of owning a house is the first few years of not knowing what you don’t know. What do you need to look out for? What yearly maintenance is something you should absolutely keep up with versus something you can get away with overlooking a bit? 

It’s a bit like a Metroidvania, if you think about it.

Too often, those answers come when something goes wrong and you go “Oh.” Then, the concern becomes the level of wrong and the amount of zeroes you attach to fixing it. My rule of thumb is that anytime I’m calling someone to help, I mentally budget $500 disappearing from my bank account and come away relieved when it’s anything below. Then, I’ve saved some money.

Some years back, I had a chimney company come out to do some routine cleaning. They also inspected the chimney and asked if I knew that the chimney wasn’t up to code. At one point, the city required chimneys to be a few feet higher. Thing is, that change happened before we bought the house, so why didn’t I know to ask the owners to knock some money off the cost of the house? (This is a common tactic to avoid actually paying a new buyer money to cover a repair; they just take that proposed money off the cost of the home. It saves money eventually?)

So, I did like I said: I got an answer and went “Oh.”

Why, exactly, didn’t the house inspector tell us about this? Because apparently we should have hired a separate inspector who specializes in chimneys, or something to that effect. Why didn’t our realtor tell us about that? Good question. Why didn’t reddit answer that when I was casually browsing some threads about buying a home and what to look out for? Another good question.

The next steps are what prompted my philosophy of getting three quotes before you approve non-emergency work on your house. I had three companies come out to propose the cost to raise the chimney by a few feet and they varied wildly. We’re talking thousands and thousands of dollars apart from one another. One felt way too expensive. One felt too cheap. The other was right in the middle. During the third inspection, I leveled with the guy and asked him why.

The answer, it turns out, was that the job I wanted done was too little work to take on without jacking up the price. The estimates I’m getting simply reflect the different ways the companies view taking on a small, boring job that won’t result in the company making all that much money.

Once again, I got an answer and went “Oh.” And then I chose the middle option. It went fine.

This is a long preamble to set you up for the past two weeks of your life. What are the things you didn’t know that you needed to know, and how much stress has it already caused you?

Rob: Can we walk about the complete nonsense that “quoting” is? A business comes along and guesses at what they are going to charge you, but they’re not bidding on the job. If anything goes wrong or, more importantly, if their guesses about what the job will entail prove to be wildly inaccurate, the risk is entirely on you. So what incentive is there for anyone to give you a good quote rather than lowballing it?

Our move to the new place went badly.