Thanks to our stalwart neighbors I received a phone call at 5AM this morning and was able to snap this pic. I drove up to “the work site” and met a nice gentleman who was turning around on the street but misjudged something and ended up with (at least) a broken axel. The good news is we have renewed faith in the strength of our foundation!
We’ve been meeting with a draftsman and trying to get some process in motion for a rebuild. There’s an endless stream of issues.
In no particular order, here’s a rundown of what we’re tackling now so we can move to the next step:
1) The Foundation. This has turned into quite a complex issue. Due to the hillside right behind the house we can’t simply swap out the foundation. So instead we’re looking at ways of using parts of it so that we don’t have to get into the retaining wall song and dance. It seems every engineer we speak with has different ideas about different ways we could handle it–all of them making sense in their logical way–and I suppose they’re all right–to a degree–but it’s going to be up to us to decide what to do.
2) Financing. I’ve contacted a few lenders about construction loans and they’ve all said no, citing the economic downturn and the fact that our house will cost more to build than it would sell for. I guess they call that a bad investment.
3) Insurance. Allstate, god bless their black little heart, is being typically difficult to get straight answers out of. But even more so, they just won’t go to bat for us. We’re now on our fifth adjuster and all they can do is quote BS policy to me, rather than get involved in our situation and look out for our interests. They’re telling us now that since we’re under insured, our course of action will be to get a construction loan *in addition* to our mortgage, which is so out of the bounds of reality for us it’s laughable.
3) Rules and Regs. There’s a whole suite of rules and regs and hoops and permits and we’re beginning to familiarize ourselves with them so we can best prepare for whatever the city may throw at us.
What’s next. Once we get a handle on financing and our options for the foundation, we’ll know how to move forward. I’ve said before that this process is like turning the pages of a book that isn’t written. We can only hope that the story has a happy ending.
There is nothing better than having great friends. And we have a ton of them. Through the mayhem of the last seven months it’s easy for us to realize how many awesome people have been so helpful to all of us. We want to thank all of you, but aren’t quite sure how.
This guy is one example:
Not only did Clay give us the venerable tarp garage that covered our rescued items for the summer while we sifted through them, but he was there to help coordinate the demolition while I had to be out of town for work, and in general was an overall huge help.
Smell is a very strong sense. When we were sifting through things that came out of the house, many were only slightly damaged. But the smell would trigger all kinds of awful feelings. And the smell is nearly impossible to get out of most things. In many cases, the decision to toss items was based on their odor. So whether things actually burned up, or were just destroyed to us, we lost of lot of possessions in the fire.
Two of these items were Meadow’s favorite chair and Laura’s end table that her dad built when he was young. Both were blackened, cracked and up until now I assumed in the landfill with everything else.
But no, they weren’t. Little did we know that Super Clay had rescued them from the ashes and given them new life by disassembling, cleaning, sanding, finishing, staining, lovingly repainting, and reassembling. It’s hard to put in to words how much stuff like this means to us. What once were prized possessions are now priceless treasures. Here they are in all their refinished glory:
chair and end table (click to embiggen)
What a guy!
I should add that when Meadow saw her chair she said “it’s the most perfect chair that I always wanted!”
You’re in Good Hands
This marketing slogan pretty much makes me want to puke, because we’re not in good hands, we’re in cold robotic hands that want to make money and don’t really care about the humans on either end of the transaction.
Granted, much of my rage is irrational. Shit happens, right? No one can really halt the hand of Zeus as he rolls the dice.
But there are things that can mitigate disaster, to make it slightly less lame. Like insurance, for example. Now, truth be told, it’s my responsibility to watch out for me and mine. Only a fool would leave their fate in the hands of some unfeeling corporate bureaucracy whose profit margin is undoubtedly more important than the actual well being of their customers.
But I was lured in, not once, but twice. Because I wasn’t paranoid. Because I was in a hurry to buy a house and admittedly a bit naive. I trusted that they actually gave a rat’s ass about my family’s interests.
When you file a house fire claim, the first thing you notice is how cordial the adjusters are on the phone. They’re people, and they’re in it with you, helping you to navigate the complexities and make the best of an unfortunate situation.
But in reality they’re just people doing a job. And they’re expendable. And they keep a distance between us and them, because deep down they know they’re working for some big money devouring gnasher, and if the going gets tough, they’ll always have the option of gettin’ gone.
Already in the process of our house claim, in less that six months, we’ve worked with five adjusters and two agents. During our short tenure, one of the adjusters was reassigned, and another retired. The one who retired didn’t mention anything to us, even though we were waiting a reply from him on a couple matters. Instead, my emails to him simply started bouncing back.
So why aren’t we in good hands? First of all, a robot has no feeling. They can try to program it to display attributes of feeling, but it’s still a robot.
Secondly, we trusted the agents that sold us the policy. You know those Progressive commercials where people are in what looks like a grocery store, picking policies off the shelf? Well that’s pretty much what’s it like in reality. The agent is just the outlet that sells the canned policies. For some this may be fine, but not for home policies. In our case, the agents didn’t ask us anything about our lifestyle. They didn’t know I’m a huge computer guy, and they didn’t know my wife is a huge jewelry girl. They sold us the off the shelf policy and were happy to take our business.
They knew we were planning to do a bunch of work on the house. Did they check on us after a year to help us increase our coverage? Nah. Did they remind us that the cost for new construction in Alaska is far above the amount of our policy? Nah. When I called five years later, a week after my house burned down, and asked them WHY we were so under insured, were they even able to find a copy of our original sale or notes on the transaction? No.
Had they done any of these things, our situation today would be much different. It wouldn’t have cost us much more than another $100/year to have doubled our dwelling coverage. And those computers and jewelry, well we only discovered two weeks ago that inside the grand policy limit there are individual limits. Here’s what they look like for the Allstate Deluxe policy:
I had much more than $5000 worth of computers, and my wife had far more than $1000 in jewelry and furs. Most Alaskan hunters I know have more than $2000 in guns. So beware, those of you that think you have enough coverage, head on back to your agent and get a special endorsement for any items of significant value.
And lastly, the third reason why we feel like we’re not in good hands: the Contents List from Hell. At one point I said to our personal property adjuster: “I’m paying you for a service, and that service is $118,815 of personal property coverage. Well, my house burned up, with all our personal property, so now I need that service I’ve been paying you for. Why can’t you just write me a check?” Of course it isn’t that simple. In order to get the coverage we’ve been paying for, we have to nit, and pick, and jump through myriad hoops, and put values on priceless meaningful trinkets, and accept paltry sums for highly valuable items. Once we’ve listed *everything* we owned, then in order to get the money we have to go out and replace those items, first. Then we have to send in the receipts. Then they send us the check. If we want to get reimbursed for a can of beans that burned, we have to send them the receipt once we’ve bought that same can of beans again. That’s why it’s called “replacement” coverage. They’ll replace what we had, and they’re anal about it, as only a robot can be.
We’ve been clinging to the hopes that we’ll be able to rebuild a new house on the old foundation, but yesterday got a healthy dose of reality. We met with a structural engineer who gave us the low down on the foundation.
Even though it wasn’t significantly damaged from the fire, and is fundamentally possible to put the same house back on it, we’re not convinced it’s the smart thing to do. It’s not up to current building codes, so we’d have to do a lot of fancy footwork to get it approved. We’d also have to do some patching, thickening, and re-pouring in places to make it plumb and sound enough for the new house. But more than the physical stuff, what swayed me in the end is the fact that it may cost us even more in the long term if we keep it.
We imagined having a nice new house, on a 60 year old foundation. We imagined what that would do to the resale value, house upkeep, and the overall nightmare that would come in 10 years if we had to jack up our new house to fix the old foundation.
So, where does that leave us?
Well, since our budget previously was pretty much impossible, this just makes it a bit more impossible. So really not much has changed. It does, though change our tack as far as the type of house we can build, the usable footprint, and the building codes that apply to us.
