Liloia.com

New Pictures of the House Project

Last weekend, we went up to the house to see how Bill was progressing on the project. So far he has ripped out all of the remaining heating, plumbing and electrical and demoed the downstairs bathroom, kitchen and living room floors and took out the 1/4 bathroom in the living room.

He also leveled and insulated the porch floor, relocated the front door, framed out the whole first floor, build the mudroom floor and was starting on the summer kitchen already. This week he is getting all of the electrical in, framing all of the second floor, installing some parts of the upstairs bathroom and working on the summer kitchen. He also relocated a window on the porch to even out the windows on the front of the house and is putting a new one in the place of an old single window. Lots happening at the house.

We are headed up there on Saturday morning to do some work of our own, take pictures and checkout the progress. Go see how things are going by clickin on our update link here: March Update

Why?

Why am I all of a sudden totally into updating my MySpace page?

Why is Seth Green so cool?

Why do some parents drag their kids by their arms or put leashes and harnesses on them?

Why can't I stop drinking coffee?

Why do they keep telling us that the Homeland Rainbow Security Threat Theatre Act Color Leveling Compound is Orange even though it hasn't changed in like 8 months?

Why is my pancreas so lazy?

Why is this so hard?

I am on the phone tonight with a ticketing agent at United Airlines. Let me preface the following comments with the fact that I actually like United and fly with them A LOT.

Ok, so I am desperately trying to get a flight home tomorrow night from San Francisco to Burlington, VT. I was supposed to go to San Diego for two days before heading home, but that got cancelled at the last minute. I have been on the phone now....(checking my time)...16 minutes and she has so far been successful in only pulling up my current records. Who knows how long it will take to make the changes, rebill them and collect the new information.

Do they want my money? Do they really want to spend this much time on each call? This isn't something complicated, it's this:
- Cancel one ticket
- Book another (plenty of flights to choose from)
- Bill me

I am frankly shocked that a company would run their business like this. Let's take this call as a baseline and assume that each call takes 30 minutes, because that's how long this looks like it will take. I know that some will be fast, but at this rate all of her complicated calls must take at least an hour so it balances out.

This means that she is only speaking to approximately 15-20 customers a day. It is costing United in her salary alone close to $10.00 to talk to me. It's no wonder they can't maintain a profitable bottom line. Not to mention my current satisfaction level. This is painful.

I always say that I trust a company more that makes mistakes and then fixes them well, as opposed to working with a company that never falters. With the first company, I know that they will stand behind me and get things fixed fast. With the second company the possibility of a catastrophe is looming around the corner and I have no idea how they will handle it. This seems to be no exception to this rule. Until now, ticketing (I emphasize ticketing because United has messed up other aspects of my flights in the past) has been fine. Now I know, if I need to rebook a ticket with United, then I should be prepared to sit for a long time.

22:16 she still hasn't booked the new ticket....

25:00 still waiting...

35:03...getting closer.....

37:04....done. So inefficient.

No Way San Jose

On Friday night I did in fact finally make it home. It ended up being 5:30 PM instead of 10:30 AM, but I did end up at Burlington Internation Airport. The upside of sitting in Chicago most of the day? I was able to get a ride home from Tara who was of course done with her entire day by that time.

After 40 wonderful hours at home, I headed back to the airport for my next trip, which is where I am now. I am spending three days in San Jose for a trade show then heading to San Francisco and San Diego to wrap up the week.

Over the last month, I have spent 3 out of the 4 weeks away from home. I won't be doing this much travel all at one time again. It's great to be out here, working with sales reps and customers but this much time on the road eats away at you a little bit at a time.

Thankfully the next "official" trip that I have isn't until the latter part of April, although I may have a day trip or so pop up between now and then. Between the house being assembled as we speak and lots of work initiative requiring my full attention, getting some time in the home office is going to be great.

Now to go find some food...

O'Hare Spray

Coming home from Seattle last night, United was kind enough to delay my flight in SeaTac just long enough to make us leave at 2 a.m. PST (5 a.m. EST!) and allow me to miss my connection home in Chicago.

O'Hare is ridiculous today. People are stacked on top of one another in the C gates areas due to many flights being delayed or cancelled.

At a certain point I had a critical decision to make. Sit down and have a seat, but then give up the chance to grab food at the Starbucks located here. Or, stand in line for SB's but lose out on having a seat at all (floor space included, it got bad here for a while).

I chose a seat. Not so bad, I'll just go grab a scone for lunch...

House Update coming...

This week has been a busy one for the new Liloia homestead. The first floor was completely torn out and reframed. Heating, electrical and the toilet (yes really) in the living room were all removed and a 26 foot engineered beam was hung across the length of the house. New plywood floors were installed over where the 4 layers of vinyl and completely destroyed hardwoods once were.

We are going up to the house on Saturday to take some pictures as well as nail down some details for the second floor. Check back in early next week to see the new updates pictures of the first floor.

Seattle

I have been traveling a lot the last few weeks, and as much as it is fun to see new places the road gets old really fast and being away from T&T gets old even faster.

This week I was in Portland, OR and Seattle, WA for some work with my buddy Chris J who is an awesome guy to hang out with. While I was here I got the chance to hang out with two people I really like; my cousin Janet and her SO Adam.

Both of them are self-proclaimed geeks (although Adam far more than Janet) and have almost the exact same tastes, interests and humor as I do. This makes getting together with them very much like meeting up with a long lost twin sibling that you haven't seen in 15 years.

All in all and awesome time and a great trip. Now if only my plane would land....

Owning a home so far sucks...literally.

This past Friday afternoon was the first time our contractor was at the house to start working. As his first project, he was going to jack up the house and begin straightening all the floors, adding new columns to support the floors and adding joist hangers to the first floor for extra support. The basement steps are falling apart as well so I assume that is on the short list too, but to start the project he had to go into the basement. Dave's phone rings...

"Dave, it's Bill. I hate to do this, but I have some bad news. There is two feet of water in the basement."

Crap.

Did I mention that the foundation is cracked severely in one corner, there are no gutters and a few spots where the previous owners intentionally channeled water into the basement? Oh and the basement steps don't have standard Bilco covers to keep the rain and snow out. All changing, but not yet, therefore water is not a surprise.

I know Bill could have done it, but leaving it to him would have meant leaving the water there all weekend and killing half a day of work for him before he could even start. So on Friday night I headed up there after work armed with a submersible pump and 50 feet of 2" industrial hose, along with warm clothes and snacks.

After fashioning a makeshift gutter to direct most of the water out to the drainage ditch, I setup shop inside the house and dropped the pump into the abyss that was formerly my basement. The water reached up above the third step (which was ok since the bottom two are broken anyhow) and I settled in to sit in the empty house watching the water pump out using only two shop lights and a flashlight to guide me. It ended up taking over four hours to remove most of the water, that I estimate was about 28 inches deep. The entire surface had frozen so there was creaking ice cracking along the walls of the basement the entire time I was there which did nothing to reduce the "creepy" factor of sitting in a flooded dark basement all Friday night.

In the end I was able to get out all but the last 1/2 inch before I gave up due to being hungry, tired and fed up with sitting there. It was a good thing I left when I did because while I was inside the house a snowstorm blew in and was dropping snow fast. By the next morning we had somewhere between 12-18 inches of new snow. Ugh.

Anyway, it will all be fine and we will get all the leaks repaired soon but it was definitely not how I wanted to spend my Friday night. :(

Construction Project

Just yesterday we received approval on our overall construction project for the new house. We should be finalizing details in the next 10 days and the contractor will be starting immediately afterwards.

What does that mean for you? Pictures, updates and lots more house talk over the next 10-14 weeks! :)