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Locks & Doors, Doors & Locks

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Jeez. This door and security lock business is turning into a huge (and hugely expensive) project. Yesterday the locksmith was here. He wants to sell me four high-security locks, to the tune of something over a thousand bucks. Medeco is the brand he recommends. Says it’s more secure than the Schlage high-security locks that remain on the market. Consumer Reports seems to agree that one model of the Medeco is probably better than other deadbolts out there. Most deadbolts can easily be picked or drilled, and the Kwikset locks I bought the other day at Home Depot seem to be about the most vulnerable of the lot. Whether the Medeco is really worth the price remains to be seen: we have here this entertaining report, in which our intrepid hackers used keys fashioned from plastic credit cards to let themselves in the Medeco-armored door…in six seconds.

Not every burglar hangs out at DefCon listening to hackers report on their latest exploits. However. The fact is, it is a pin-tumbler lock, and it is vulnerable to attack. Possibly there are other ways to discourage the Perp.

This afternoon Chip Marvin, owner of my favorite skylight, door, and window retailer came by to check out the situation and give me an estimate on replacements for the sliding doors that no longer lock and the front door whose lockset has to be screwed back on every two or three weeks. He came up with several alternatives to replacement that could save a ton of money. To wit:

• Don’t replace the steel front door, which, though boringly generic, is a perfectly good door and can be refurbished. The old hole where the former lockset connected can be sealed with car body filler, and the new lockset I so unsuccessfully tried to install can be put on properly. There’s really nothing wrong with it that a little repair work and some paint won’t fix.

• The problem with the back door is the two layers of kitsch created by the plastic mullions that came with the cheapie HD kitchen door overlaid by the ridiculous fake wrought iron of the new ugly security door. I proposed to ameliorate that by replacing the door with a 32-inch single-pane entry door (to the locksmith’s dismay). Instead, he suggested, if what’s wanted is a clear pane, the cheesy mullions can be removed and the cheesy glass can be replaced with a single low-E pane.

• To his mind the sliding door is actually easier to secure than French doors. While the all-in-one lock does extend upward and downward into the sills, it’s simple to get them open.

Yes! The front door I’d seen at Home Depot was almost $800; by the time it was installed, the cost would have come to around a thousand bucks. The single-pane back door was a mere $288, but it was made by some outfit I’d never heard of and presumably fabricated in China or Bangladesh or Nigeria. Again, add a couple hundred bucks to install that thing—which because it only comes prehung would entail removing the new security door and reinstalling it—and we’re up around $500 or $600.

So. That’s a significant savings.

Savings, we might add, that can be thrown at the stuff I’d really like to have, to wit: upgraded Arcadia doors and replacement of the last of the tinfoil windows from the 1970s.

Chip showed me Milgard doors that match the excellent windows he installed shortly after I moved into this place. They’re low-E (none of the old sliding doors come under that heading), come in the wide-framed “French” style that I find very handsome, and they even come with the Frank Lloyd Wrightish mullions that I like in the windows I have.

When I moved in here, I didn’t change out the window in back, because there was only one of them and because I’m a cheapskate. Should’ve done that then. But as long as his crew is here installing doors, they might as well put in the one remaining bedroom window and maybe the little bathroom window, too. That will make all the doors and windows low-E, which I doubt will make a lot of difference but at least is…righteous. And it certainly will make the house look nice.

Arcadia doors can be fitted with sliding barrel bolts, which will back up the regular locks and require the Burglar to break the glass twice to get in. So with the standard lock plus one or two barrel bolts plus the traditional stick in the slider channel, the Burglar will at least have to earn his pay. And they really are very attractive doors.

 

DIY Paint Chips: How to Decide on a Color

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So as I was saying yesterday, among the several things the Funny Farm needs is a new paint job. Was feeling mighty proud of the Behr paint samples I got, and expected at least a couple of the colors to look swell and elegant on the walls.

As you know if you’ve ever painted a house, those tiny little paint chips you get at the Depot or the paint store are a cruel joke. There’s NO way you can estimate what the color really will look like, because the leap of imagination between the sample and a wallful of the paint is just too large for the human brain to traverse.

One strategy is to get paint samples in the coveted shades and paint splotches on the walls, in one- or two-square-foot patches. This works effectively, but it sure makes your house look funny until such time as you make up your mind. If you’re the finicky type, “until such time” can be a while. There’s a better way, though: Make your own paint chips.

Get a pad of low-end artist’s paper from someplace like Michael’s—don’t get the good stuff for this project—or, if you’d like sturdier samples, cut up a cardboard box into as many six-inch or foot-square pieces as you have sample colors. Then simply paint the sample colors onto the paper or cardboard. Allow to dry, and then you can tape the samples to the desired walls, leave them there, and watch how they look as the light changes throughout the day.

This is an effective way to see how a given paint color will actually look on your walls. It saved me a lot of time and probably some money. The shades I thought were gonna be just great turn out to be just ugly. Of the six I tried, the only one I really liked was “peach fade.” The other off-white, which judging by the Behr paint chip looked like an extremely pale beige, looks pink when a large enough sample is hung on the wall. A better name for “Adobe straw” might be “Necco candy chocolate.” The “flint smoke” is bluish-gray, a blah color—much duller than it appears above. “Blanket brown” has a grayish overtone that clashes with the kitchen cabinetry. And…a whole house full of off-white, beige, and brown? Bleyach! There’s a reason those brightly decorated houses in Mexico appeal to me.

After staring at the colorless “neutral” color scheme for awhile, I realized that dammit, I like the colors my friend and I put in the house when I moved in here, except that I’m mighty tired of the orange hall. That orange replaces a kind of tangerine orange that came with the Alexander Julian line we were working with, and I never liked that color. That’s why I put the terra cotta color in the hallway. All the other colors are just fine.

And the truth is, I know exactly where to get a much, much better shade to cover up that orange: at my son’s house. We painted his place a kind of…hmmm…what’s the word? It’s a mellow sort of beigey terra cotta—not a harsh orange like mine—that looks really, really pretty with the saltillo floors. He still has the paint can. All that’s needed is to trot over to Dunn Edwards, buy a pint of that, and test it on DIY paint chips. I’ll bet it would look really, really nice in that hallway.

See the teal in this image? That’s pretty close to swamp blue: the color of the accent wall in the living room, which has an archway through which one views the hallway. And that salmon color on the Mexican wall is a little brighter but not very far off from the color I have in mind.

If I’m right—that most of the walls can stay the same color they already are, with a little touch-up here and there—then those home-made paint chips saved me a great deal of money. Instead of repainting the entire interior, all that’s really needed is to repaint the hall (I can do that myself!), touch up the paint around the kitchen and front doors, paint the woodwork some shade of brown compatible with the cabinetry, and maybe repaint my office. Oh…and I do want that garage painted. Adobe straw would do just fine in there.

😉

 

 

Shoring Up the Barricades

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Okay, so assuming I’m not moving away from Crime Central anytime soon—because I can’t afford anything I want to live in anyplace where I want to live—then presumably it makes sense to shore up the defenses. This house’s barricades are easy to breach: three old sliding doors, all of them ugly, two of them installed by different previous owners, two of them with locks that don’t work, and none of them energy-efficient. The handle set on the front door is falling off; every now and again I have to screw it back on. Neither of the two wooden gates is very sturdy, and one is falling apart.

I can’t afford to fix all this stuff, either…but doing so would be one helluva lot cheaper than selling this place and moving. So, I suppose I’m just going to have to raid Survival Savings and get some work done.

Friday we made a start: a Home Depot subcontractor came by and installed a security door on the kitchen door. It’s not too ugly, and unlike the gate on the front door, its metal screen lets you see out.

Well. It’s not too ugly when the kitchen door is open. With the cheapo door closed, it’s plug-hideous.

Also at the Depot, I picked up three sets of bump-resistant locks. Because these don’t have pins, they supposedly can’t be bumped. Of course, they can be drilled, but that means the Perp has to bring some equipment that can’t be carried in his pants pocket. While these KwikSet Smartkey locks can easily be picked or smashed, they’re much sturdier than the existing locks, and they’re actually quite handsome pieces of hardware.

Heh. I just learned how vulnerable they are while researching the present post, and so will return them to Home Depot and get something better (I hope) from the locksmith. Lissen up, folks: DON’T BUY KWIKSET SMARTKEY “BUMP-PROOF” LOCKS!

The door installer put these on the new security door, and while he was here took out the double-cylinder deadbolt I’d installed on the kitchen door by way of avoiding having to put a security door there and put the old single-cylinder deadbolt back on. With the security door making it harder for the Burglar to break out a light, reach in, and unlock the deadbolt, I no longer need a lock that’s keyed on the inside. That means in the event of a fire, I won’t have to grope around searching for the key to get out.

Couldn’t talk him into installing the other two lock sets on the side and front security doors, which is just as well, since I’ll have to have the locksmith come over with better locks, anyway.

Yes. The cheapo kitchen door combines with the mid-cheapo security door to hideous effect. Plus one of the unlockable sliding doors resides adjacent to the newly secured kitchen door.

So, what I’m thinking is to replace all three sliding doors with single-pane sliders, and to install a matching door in the kitchen—the kind that has just one large glass pane in it. Then all the Arcadia doors would match, they’d all have halfway decent factory-installed hardware, and once they’re supplemented with bars dropped in their tracks, screw-on locks, and door squealers, they should be relatively safe. The back door, then, would be mostly clear glass, so when you look out through it, you’d see the “decorative” (heh) ironwork of the security door: only one layer of kitsch instead of two.

These little gems are not cheap. Each will cost about $1500. On HD’s website, however, I found Anderson knockoffs by some outfit called “Masterpiece” for about  half the price. They’re probably junk—I’m having the company that installed the windows and skylights in this house give me a call, tho’ I don’t expect them to underprice anything at Home Depot, since they carry top-of-the-line products and do first-rate work. I’d rather not spend any money on this  kind of thing, but still…closing costs alone on my house would run over $12,000; and then we’d have the cost of moving my stuff across town, plus the usual mountain of bills that invariably accompanies possession of a new place. Clearly, making the place a little more perp-resistant trumps selling this house, finding a new one, and moving.

Meanwhile, as long as I’m spending money on the house, the interior really, really needs a paint job. The Alexander Julian color scheme my friend and I cooked up when I moved in here about six or seven years ago was very stylish at the time, but it’s pretty…uhm…idiosyncratic. I think I’d like to replace the surprising colors with more neutral shades, and also paint the white doors and trim brown. The color of dirt. I am tired of scouring dirt off the doors and woodwork!

Paint the woodwork the color of dirt, and the dirt won’t show. 😉

While visiting the Depot, I came across a gorgeous paint color, or so it appears in the chip. Behr is calling it “faded peach.” It’s really an off-white with just a tiny touch of peach in it. The effect is a very warm, rich neutral that picks up one of the subtle shades in the floor tiles. If someone didn’t tell you it had peach in it, you’d never know. My plan is to put this in the living room, dining room, and up the (presently orange terra-cotta) hallway. The accent wall in the living room, which is now swamp blue a kind of murky teal, will give way to “adobe straw” (a soft grayish brown) or “blanket” (brown brown, which is also going to be the color of the doors and trim). The gray in my bedroom will be covered with “adobe straw,” and the swamp blue accent wall in there repainted with “flint smoke,” a much lighter, subtler sort of misty teal. The master bathroom will be “Arabian sands,” another neutral brown that’s close to “adobe straw” but goes better with the travertine in the shower. The office and other two bedrooms: variants of “peach fade,” “adobe straw,” and “flint smoke.” Overall, the effect will be much more subtle; keeping the woodwork clean will require a lot less elbow grease, and should I decide to sell the house after all, the paint job will be neutral.

While the painter’s here, I think I’ll have him paint the garage walls “adobe straw,” too. Same strategy: hide the dirt.

So, by the time these projects are done, the house will be a little more secure and a lot more attractive. I think.

 

Funniest Customer Disservice Eff-You Remark EVER!

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Okay, so today I’m wrestling with the pool—its filter pressure is running twice as high as normal, so I’ve backwashed it and now go to prime the pump. This is easy: just turn it on with the pressure release valve open to drain off the air; then when the pump is primed, shut the valve and go on about your business.

Well. No.

Turn the breaker switch to “on” and the system kicks in and looks like it’s gonna run OK…for about 10 seconds and then holeee gawd it’s suckin’ air out of the skimmer basket. A great water tornado has formed in the skimmer and it’s pumping air into the system. Shut it off. Cuss.

This is the second time that’s happened in a week. Last time after I fiddled around with it, I got it to stop. But don’t know what on earth I did to make it stop. This time no amount of fiddling makes the phenomenon quit. So…it’s on the phone to schedule a visit from Leslie’s repair service.

Since it’s been less than 90 days since there were out here expensively repairing the leaking pump, and since this started after the guy adjusted the drain valve (thereby changing the force with which water is sucked in through the skimmer basket weir), I figure they should give me a break.

No. Base price is $110. That’s just to show up out here.

Soonest the guy will schedule a trip is next Friday. That is a LONG time for a pool to just sit, in 100-degree weather. The upshot will be an algae infestation. The pump needs to circulate to keep the chemicals in balance and moving around.

So, I ask if he has any recommendation for how I can keep the pool from turning green while we’re waiting for a Leslie’s technician to show up. Get this…

Oh, this is too, toooo good!

He says (no joke!), “What you can do is add the chemicals and then sit on the edge of the pool and kick your legs in the water real hard!”

😆 🙄 😆

LOLOLOLOL!  I don’t think I’ve ever heard a funnier eff-you from a customer disservice representative, not in many years of trolling punch-a-button systems and putting up with rude, stupid, and uncaring reps. This guy truly takes the cake.

Tomorrow I’m calling Swimming Pool Repair and Service to set up a business relationship with them. When last heard from, they were still a locally owned company. They don’t answer the phones on Mother’s Day. But that may simply mean they don’t hire overseas and cross-country slaves.

Meanwhile, I tried to reach Phil, the manager of the Leslie’s shop nearest my house. He’s worked for that illustrious corporation forever, and before taking on a store job he was a field technician. He does know how to make a pool work. Interestingly, the guy who answered the phone said “Phil no longer works here.”

Telling.

Anyway, so I ask the new guy if he thinks he could give me a clue as to what might be the issue. He thinks backwashing drew the water level down too low. I say it’s only a quarter-inch below the middle grout line…not like it’s anywhere close to the weir. He thinks the pump could be drawing hard enough that it’s sucking so much water in through the weir that it’s pulling in air.

I adjust the drain valve, cutting the suction a little. He suggests filling the pool above the middle grout line (the “full” line, for those of us who are not pool aficionados) and then turning on the pump again. If it doesn’t suck air at that point, it means I should overfill the pool a bit to keep the thing from doing that.

This requires running the hose about 30 or 40 minutes at full blast.

A-n-n-n-d…yeah. Overfilling and fooling with the drain valve seems to have worked. Right now it’s running pretty well. Nice for swimming in, too: the water’s perfect!!

“Kick your legs.” Heeeeeeeeeeee!

Why Am I Here?

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Look at this. And this. Or maybe this.

A hundred and ninety-five grand for that first hacienda, and I’ll bet you can get it cheaper. Matter of fact, I’ll bet I could rent something like it for less than a 5% return on investment from the proceeds of sale of the house I’m living in right now.

Gardener in: clean up courtyard, plant flowers, plant una jacaranda. Owner’s furniture out. Local purchases in.

Aquí: all my furniture goes to my son. The junk, like the books and the piles of trash I never even look at, goes away. Dog gets a double dose of every vaccine known to veterinariankind.

I throw my clothes, a few favorite pots and pans, and the dog in the car and drive to San Miguel…never, with any luck, to return.

Why in the name of God am I still in this place?

Consider:

I don’t want to work anymore, but I can’t live here without working. I have to work like a horse to keep a roof over my head in an aging tract bordered on two sides by increasingly dank and violent slums, under siege by pistol-waving thugs pursued by legions of cops. The central part of the city, except for three or four small, elite, and expensive enclaves, is steadily deteriorating; it’s already reached the point where young adults say they would not live in a home south of the Loop 101…that’s nine miles to the north of here. If you covet middle-class neighbors and infrastructure, you have two choices: you can live in a sea of elbow-to-elbow cookie-cutter houses built so shabbily that by the time they’re ten years old they’re falling apart, or you can mortgage your first-born son to live in Scottsdale or Carefree. There really is surprisingly little in between.

The U.S. is turning into a third-world country. Why not move to a real third-world country and enjoy the amenities?

Amenity numero uno being that I could live like the Queen of Sheba on my Social Security in this place.

Amenity numero dos: For as little as half of what I would clear from my shack, a fun and original and downright unique place awaits.

 ← Go ahead. Just try to find a detail  like this in the US for $135,000…

How about a brand-new colonial-style hacienda? ↓

For just a few…

…thousand dollars more than I could get for my house…

Amenity numero tres: Hired help in Mexico comes even cheaper than the real estate. Much cheaper, as our industrialist friends know, the folks who have sent our jobs down there. You and I could own a place like this and afford to have someone come in and clean it and take care of the grounds. And still have enough left to go out to eat!

Just imagine: this for about what I can get for my dowdy little tract house…

Okay…whence this little frenzy?

Welp, in the aftermath of the most recent little drama, a strange blue funk settled over me. Weird, because there’s really little reason for it: I was not harmed, was not even especially alarmed…although I surely would have been had I not moved myself to go check the locks on the garage and back doors. The could’ve been, it develops, is more disturbing than one would expect. So, too, is the bizarre irony that as the most recent episode was coming down, I was cruising the Web looking for “better” places to live. Whatever those might be.

Know how long I’ve been looking for a “better” place to live?

Not weeks. Not months. Years.

Because the houses in this neighborhood are solidly built of masonry (unlike the standard stick-built Phoenix-area tract house, which is ticky and tacky), because they are well designed, because they’re a block from a very nice park, because they abut a tract of $500,000 to $1 million homes, because they’re centrally located, you can’t find a thing that’s a few blocks further from the Conduit of Blight for anything like what a normal person can pay. Yes. I could sell my house and apply the proceeds as a down payment for a comparable (but not as nice) house further from Crook Central. But for what looks like an even exchange but is not, I would end up owing about $60,0000, get a teensy little lot with about six feet between buildings, and drive halfway to Yuma, Prescott, or Tucson for the privilege.

In the unlikely event that I could get a 30-year loan for such a balance, I’d add $304/month to my already straitened budget; more likely, the best I could get would be a five-year loan, with a monthly payment of around $1100. Let’s say I netted $200,000 on the sale of my present home and invested that in instruments that return, on average, around 6% (as has been the case with retirement savings…with, alas, some notable exceptions). That would pay $1,000 a month…less 15% taxes, for a net of $850. A $200,000 loan at 4.5% would cost me $1,013 in principal & interest alone, meaning I’d have to come up with an extra $163 a month from someplace.

This means I don’t have much choice but to buy a house for no more than what I can net on the sale of this house. After closing costs, the best I could do would be around $190,000. Right now, not counting foreclosures (which are problematic), there are 12 houses in that price range in one North Central zip code, none of them in good areas (one does not want to be in Sunnyslope; one does not want to be east of Seventh Street or west of Seventh Avenue); thirteen in another (including a house in my neighborhood but closer to the Conduit); in another, one kinda cute little patio home that backs onto a shopping center; and in two in the last—one of them a decrepit patio home and the other one-bedroom apartment in a high-rise. I’ve looked at the latter; if claustrophobia is your preferred state of mind, it’s perfect.

Following the white flight, we find one, count it (1), house in the $150,000 to $200,000 range north of the Loop 101; several in Scottsdale but most are apartments and most overlook the freeway; quite a few in the cookie-cutter tracts in Mesa, Chandler, and Gilbert (invest in oil futures to fund your driving habit!). On the west side, where you have to go past mile on mile on mile of blight to get to middle-class tracts, there are about three trillion vacancies in Sun City; several new tracts are (still…) under construction on the far, far, far west side (more oil futures!), and KJG and I saw some gorgeous new houses going up on large lots for around $265,000…plus.

Moving to these distant suburbs requires you to invest in a reliable vehicle and resign yourself to spending half your waking hours on the road. I could no doubt afford a tract house sitting on top of five adjacent neighbors’ houses out there. But it would mean I would have to give up seeing all my friends, give up choir, give up teaching at Paradise Valley… For heaven’s sake! If you’re going to move away from your entire life, why move into a tract where the houses will be “old” and need renovation in ten years? Why not move to Mexico?

* * *

A day or two ago it occurred to me that my paradigm is wrong. Something is wrong with the search paradigm. But what?

• Could I be searching for the wrong thing (should I be looking for an apartment, not a house? How about a big RV?).

• Or maybe I’m looking in the wrong place (somewhere other than Phoenix, for example? Like…say, Mexico, the south of France, Yarnell?).

• Or…maybe the search should not be for new-to-me housing but for better ways to secure this house and for more accuracy with a pistol.

Maybe the reason I can’t find anything I care to live in and that I can afford in an area where I want to live is that I really don’t want to move. Possibly I’m complacent. Or possibly I actually have found housing that’s as ideal as it’s going to get at this time in my life: paid off, relatively low in maintenance, centrally located, and except for the occasional moment of drama, mostly pleasant to live in.

On the other hand…in Mexico, one could live reasonably well on one’s Social Security benefit alone.

Proud to Be Laid Off… A job to feel well rid of

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Every now and again, Lady Karma smirks. While we already know that the state of Arizona, with its wacko politicians and bizarre customs, is the perennial laughing-stock of the nation and steady supplier of Supreme Court cases, we occasionally forget how ludicrous its “educational” system is. Could the Great Desert University possibly out-do its administration’s pronouncement that the first African-American President of the United States did not have a “body of work” deserving of an honorary degree, unlike, say, Steve Allen (1982), Eddie Basha (1999), and the renowned Delbert Ray Lewis (2001)?

Well.

Yes.

Once again GDU makes its hundreds of laid-off former employees proud to be…former. Emphasis on former.

One of the university’s many teapot tempests, one that’s been brewing for quite a while, recently came to the attention of local news media, whose avatars were amazed to discover not only that a distinguished historian allegedly plagiarized with élan in his spoken as well as his published works, but that the administration overrode his tenure committee’s decision to deny a promotion to full on the basis of their view that his treatment of his unacknowledged sources (among them, we’re told, Wikipedia) amounted to plagiarism.

There’s a backstory that I’m not going to detail here, because I haven’t been directly privy to it and doubt that I could get faculty to confirm it on the record. However, the hilarity has begun. Now, if someone would please let Jon Stewart know about this…?

GDU: Defining Ugly

 

Image: Wells Fargo Arena. YF12s. Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.