Let the general whining about being too busy to post commence: I’ve been too busy to post today.

But the whining is too boring even to me, and so I’ll just call a halt to it there.

Except to say that one of the things that I was also too busy to do was to take the twenty seconds necessary to plug my camera into the computer in the office and download this weekend’s pictures, so as to properly post once I got a little less busy. And while the camera’s home with me, the cable’s in the office. So no pictures tonight either.

I’ll hold the pictures for a later date, but give you only a tantalizing preview-in-text: light fixtures. A hot water heater. Paved walkways. And a driveway. And the absence of that construction-fencing surrounding the building. And the presence of actual locks on my doors. And railings on my balconies.

So there’s been substantive progress, but there’s a piece of condo news that far outstrips any of the above. I was unable to get ahold of the director of real property here at the college today (have I mentioned before that we have an astonishing college mortgage program? If not—well, we do. And that makes the director of real property my lender, which is why I need to talk to her about what follows. But was unable to, because [see whining above]) in order to discuss this with her, so I’m not at all sure what’s going to happen. But the builder on these condos is apparently looking to get as many of them off of their inventory by the end of the year as possible, I suppose so they don’t have to pay taxes on them. So they’re trying to close every sale that can possibly be closed by December 30. But because the properties won’t actually be inhabitable at that point—the final inspections won’t have happened yet, and some work may not yet be done—what they’re asking for is to have the closing at the end of December, and then actually turn over the keys when everything is done.

What makes this even remotely interesting to me is the following: a flat $1000 for the general inconvenience, plus $150 per day for each day between the closing and the turning over of the keys.

We’ll see what happens. Whether my lender objects to the whole handing over a huge pile of cash without the thing it’s being handed over for actually being ready scenario. But it’s intriguing to me, and not least because the builder actually thinks that it’s financially in their best interests to hand me this cash rather than keep the condo on their books. Which means it can really only be so far away from completion.

I walked down to check on the condo’s progress yesterday afternoon, and stumbled across a colleague, who came to check the place out with me. This was the first time that anyone other than R. has seen the joint, so I was pleased when I discovered that there was actually something to show off: the kitchen!

I found myself amazed, once again, by that whole optical illusion thing whereby a space that is completely devoid of furnishings looks smaller than one that’s actually got stuff in it; I’d been a little concerned over the last few weeks that the kitchen was seeming smaller than I remembered, but now that the cabinets are in, it actually seems much bigger.

This is also the first time I’ve gotten to see the cabinets and the countertops together, and though the granite is massively dusty here, you can nonetheless get a sense of how the whole thing will look.

The odd sheet of paper in the middle of the countertop is covering my lovely sink, which has been installed. (As have my toilets, and my showerheads, and my bathroom cabinets. I held off on taking pictures of those, not out of any sense of decorum, but only because the bathroom counters and sinks weren’t in yet, and I wanted to wait for those.)

My colleague was a bit surprised by the whole return to the kitchen-in-the-middle-of-the-living-area thing that the loft’s layout produces, but I have to say I’m just ecstatic about that—especially given the way that the fun part of any party always seems to segregate itself in the kitchen. Now, instead, one room, and we’re all in it.

You’ll notice that there’s a big empty spot on the far right-hand side of the kitchen, where it looks like a cabinet’s missing. Indeed it is; apparently there was an installation mishap with one cabinet, which sits broken in the living room. I assume they’re waiting for a replacement.

Anyhow, between the installed kitchen and the sense that my colleague has that the place looks like it’ll be ready in about a month—a month!—I’m beside myself with excitement. The baseboards have been installed, which I would have thought came after the flooring, but whatever. What remains, at this point, as far as I can tell, are electrical outlets and switches, some light fixtures, the bathroom sinks and counters, plumbing for the kitchen sink, the flooring, appliances, railings for the balconies, and a good coat of paint. I imagine there’s probably more, but I’m not thinking of it this morning.

Instead, this morning, I’m typing with numb fingers, as it’s positively freezing here—and by freezing, of course, I mean freezing for Southern California, where it’s gotten down to about 40 the last two nights. Saturday night, it poured, and so yesterday, looking out from my soon-to-be living room balcony, the mountains were simply glorious.

Alas, the glory didn’t quite get captured as fully as I’d like; I’m still wrestling with the new camera a bit. It’s got this Automatic White Balance “feature,” which makes many pictures taken in the glary, hazy SoCal light appear overexposed and washed-out. So I’m experimenting with stepping down the exposure, but… well, I’m experimenting.

Now back to grading.

Yes, that’s right: the cabinets are in!

In a big pile in the living room, that is:

There also begin to be doors, much like this one, which leads to the master bedroom:

What you can’t quite tell from these pictures is that the subflooring is now complete; we’ve gone from walking on plywood to walking on what’s supposed to be plywood topped by a layer of some kind of tightly coiled plastic insulation-type layer, topped by a layer of concrete. I can only vouch for the concrete.

Other small things have happened, none of which really show up here terribly well, so I’ll content myself with one last detail; it may well be that my garage is at this moment—“this moment” being a week ago Sunday—the cleanest it will ever be:

Next edition: a kitchen under construction. I hope.

Last time we popped by the soon-to-be homestead, we discovered that the stuccoing had begun.

In fact, the building was frozen in mid-stucco, chicken wire still visible, but barely, windows taped and visquined, the whole place seeming a bit sepulchral, but for that red tape.

There’s something deeply symbolic about that red tape, I think, and I suspect that most folks who’ve purchased homes in the past might agree—and perhaps none more than those who have purchased homes still in the process of being built. I got a letter last week from the development company projecting the anticipated date of our closing—which, of course, does not constitute anything resembling a promise!—as December 16, but this a mere ten days after, as I said in our last edition, the construction manager told me that there wasn’t a prayer of the place being released to me before February. So I passed this oddly conflicting set of data points on to the woman managing my mortgage, who told me that the escrow company seems to think that closing will be in November.

Sigh.

This past week we experienced three major developments in the land of condo construction. First, of course, the officially sanctioned walk-through with the construction manager; I’d expected all to be pretty much as I’d left it three days before, but things were, instead, terrifically spiffed-up. The wallboard job had been completed, and they’d begun finishing off the corners, which made things look less like a construction site and more like a room in the making:

The real beauty of this trip was that, instead of the overcast skies that covered our tracks during our earlier covert penetration, it was gloriously sunny out, and so I got a little bit of a sense of the light streaming through all those windows.

Because I’m a little slow, it took me a few minutes to realize that one of the reasons the place looked so great was that it had been cleaned up a bit in advance of my arrival. Witness the kitchen, which was pretty much cleaner than the kitchen of the place I now live in:

So where do you hide the dirt when there are no rugs to sweep it under and no closet doors behind which it can be concealed? On the balcony:

Over the pile of crap on the balcony, though, one could begin to get a sense of the view; directly across the street from me is the City Yard (that’s what everybody calls it; if it’s got a more particular name, nobody’s letting on), which is going to be cleared out in the next couple of months in order to make way for Phase 2 of Village Walk, which will include a few more buildings’ worth of townhouses and some single-family homes. Nothing going in across the street should be taller than two stories, though, so my view of the mountains should, with any luck, remain at least partially intact.

Oddly, the best view of the mountains currently available is from the window of the master bedroom closet:

Anyhow, it was a lovely and worthwhile walk-through; I got to make sure that all the electrical outlets were where I expected them to be, and finally got a sense of the rooms as rooms.

That same day, R. and I drove down to Anaheim to visit the granite yard. Now, I had entirely the wrong idea about what this trip to the granite yard would entail. I imagined trudging through the hot, dusty afternoon, surrounded by big piles of stone from which I would carefully select.

Instead, the place was much, much cleaner, and far more inside than I expected it to be. The young woman who helped us—imagine a younger, shorter Tina Fey—asked us to wait a few minutes while she went to get a forklift, and then disappeared into the warehouse. I now crave an excuse to say that to someone—“Wait here while I get a forklift.”

Anyhow, Tina pulled out three slabs of granite, from which I was assuming I would select. Instead, these were my three slabs, from which, pending my approval, the three sections of my countertop will be cut.

The granite we’ve selected was, in the sample, mostly black with some lighter green and gold flecking; in actuality, it’s a fair bit lighter than that, but in a good way. As Tina told us, “it’s coming out of the mountain pretty green.” And that just seems a bit hard to argue with; anything that comes out of the mountain ought, be definition, to be good.

The color, incidentally, is called Ubatuba. Which I half selected just because I like saying it.

Oh, yes, and the third development? Earlier that day, while on the walkthrough with the construction manager, I found out that there’s not a chance the place is going to be ready before February. Which leads me to suspect that the weekly condo-blogging may have to become bi-weekly, or even monthly, if the pictures are going to reveal any progress whatsoever.

It was a big weekend for condo picture-taking. R. and I wandered over Sunday morning after breakfast, camera at the ready, and found that the building next to ours has not only been fully stuccoed but is also mostly painted. Our building’s tar-paper-and-chicken-wire underskin is still showing, however:

And I’m really not kidding about the tar-paper-and-chicken-wire thing, though it’s a bit hard to see in the photos.

I took a billion—or maybe a dozen—more pictures of the exterior of the building, but I think you’ve got the basic sense of it. The important stuff came after these images, though, when R. and I executed a small covert maneuver called Operation Wallboard, a quick and dirty penetration of the condo’s heretofore unphotographed interior. I bring you word of the condo’s imminent liberation from the forces of chaos! The structures of democracy (or, at least, walls) are being erected everywhere!

I tire of this thoroughly silly metaphor. To the pictures: first, the second-floor landing. The entrance to the condo is on the ground floor, but the condo itself is on the third, so I’ve got two flights of stairs with a lovely landing inbetween, a landing large enough for a small workspace, or, alternately, a litter box:

Upon turning the corner from the stairs into the condo proper, the kitchen is on your left. The mysterious arm and shoulder at far right belong to R.:

Directly ahead is the living area:

And to the right is the dining area:

Between the kitchen and the living area is the entrance to the hallway, and dead ahead on that hallway is the master bedroom, which has perhaps the best walk-in closet ever:

The master bedroom itself isn’t too shabby, either:

The hallway takes a left turn at the master bedroom –

– and continues on to the spare bedroom –

– and the hall bath.

And that’s pretty much it. Except for the garage, which is enormous and lovely:

All that preparation for covert action turns out to have been unnecessary, however, as I got a call from the contractor this morning asking me to come in and do a walk-through to make sure they’ve got all the options right. I like to think, however, that our undercover operations laid the groundwork that has made such a turn to openness possible.

Ah, at last: the stars have aligned, the cables are plugged in, and my schedule has a free moment in it, allowing for a brief return to the subject of my obsession, real estate.

To begin, I’ll give you a few quick shots of the building as it appeared about two weeks ago; the scaffolding had gone up, preparatory to the addition of the building’s outer skin:

Here are two more images that may give you the sense that, yes, in fact, the scaffolding does go all the way around the building:

What you may notice at this point is that the place has begun to develop windows, meaning actual glass panes where mere holes used to be:

So I wandered around and admired my new windows for a bit, but the sun was going down, and I was hungry, so I headed for home. But on the way, I thought I’d take a few shots of what passes for the neighborhood, at this point.

I say “what passes for the neighborhood” because the whole area where the condo is going in is in the process of being redeveloped into what will be henceforth known as the Village Expansion. The Village is a lovely area on the east side of Indian Hill Boulevard with odd little mom-and-pop shops and restaurants that are usually not terrible. It’s nice, and quaint, but notably lacking some key amenities. Like a bookstore (caveat here: there’s one great used bookstore, but nothing with recent releases, and I’m all about the recent releases). Or a movie theater. Or, say, a cool place for me to live.

But voilà: the Village Expansion, on the west side of Indian Hill. You know it’s an expansion, because the rocks tell you so:

No, really. They do.

The “last packing house” referred to on the plaque is still referred to as the Citrus Packing House. It’s still standing, though in a bit of disrepair; the plan, apparently, is to renovate it into a mixed-use space combining artists’ lofts and shop/gallery features. I’m mighty curious what that’s going to wind up looking like, because this is what it looks like now:

Through the trees, you can spot a smidge of the first building in my complex. I’m in the fifth building, about a block and a half down.

R. and I passed back by the place on Sunday, and were amazed by the progress: the building’s outer skin has begun going up, and so the place was coated in what appeared to me to be tar paper and chicken wire, in preparation for stuccoing, which is supposed to begin imminently.

We also managed to get inside the building, and inside our very unit, because of a somewhat complex story about the rear balcony looking like it was much smaller than it was supposed to be, a story about nervous new homeowners in which neither of us comes off terribly well, so I’m just going to leave that part out. But the interior of the place is looking pretty nifty, if a bit filled with big stacks of wallboard at the moment.

Of course, I didn’t bring my camera with me, because I AM AN IDIOT. But having gotten in once, I assume that I’ll be able to do so again. Next up: interiors. Come hell or high water.

So now that I’m back in the land of connectivity –

– well, I have to qualify that. Not long ago, we moved office, and when we arrived in our newly-refurbished, fabulously modern and yet not characterless renovated building, there was a small hitch. You’ll best grasp this through a bit of illustration, I think. Here’s a lovely picture of my office, from the vantage point of my door:

And here’s a reverse shot, from the vantage point of my desk. You’ll notice something a bit odd at the extreme right of the image:

That odd little protrusion in the wall behind my filing cabinet is the phone/ethernet jack for my office. Which, as you may have gathered, is nowhere near my desk. I’ve spent the last three months with cables trailing across the office, which were only really an issue when I wanted to access the built-in shelves behind and to the left of my desk. As I was pretty convinced that I was one day going to trip and kill myself, and as I frankly just found the exposed wires ugly, I asked campus maintenance if they could do something about it.

Which they did.

I came in to the office one day week before last to discover that somebody had installed mouldings most of the way along my floorboards, intended to channel the cables “invisibly” along the wall:

However, because of this, the tripping-problem actually became worse, as my ethernet cable was simply too short to make it all the way across the room along the edge of the wall. One call to my trusty tech-support folks, and –

Well, while I was gone, she apparently brought by a longer cable, but couldn’t figure out how to get it through the moulding. So campus maintenance came back, ran the new cable through the existing moulding, and then finished running the molding the rest of the way around the side of my desk.

There’s only one problem: I had the PowerBook with me at the conference, and so the maintenance guys couldn’t conceivably have known where on the desk I usually kept the computer—except that there was ONE BIG EMPTY SPACE on the desk, where a bunch of other unplugged cables were lingering. That might have been a clue. Nonetheless, the new, longer ethernet cable remains at least three feet too short to reach any actually working spot on my desk, unless, say, one were to pry open the moulding and pull the cable out through the edge of it, stretching it toward a reasonable plug-in spot:

And that’s why I’m out of time to post any actual pictures of the condo-in-process (now with windows!) today.

That, and that I haven’t yet prepared for the class that I have to teach in ten minutes.

But more pictures, and windows, soon.

This has not been the greatest morning in the history of conference attendance. I woke up late today, had to rush through my shower—which turns out to have been a blessing in disguise, like really really in disguise, as I ran out of hot water about two minutes into the shower. I’m annoyed enough that I’m almost afraid to complain to someone, lest they say something to me about short showers and water conservation and I wind up getting all “I live in a desert, don’t talk to me about water conservation” on their ass.

The good part of this morning was that I was allowed to eat breakfast even though I arrived five minutes after the putative close of breakfast service. I’m annoyed enough, however, that I keep forgetting that, in fact, no one even mentioned my lateness or hinted that I might not be able to eat. In my very jet-lagged, quite perturbed brain, it’s as though they tried to stop me eating, and I had to argue my way into it. I had the argument in my head, which was apparently sufficient to produce the annoyance.

Okay, right, this was intended to be about the condo. Yes. I have more pictures, taken with the new camera, but they’re alas trapped on both the camera and the PowerBook, and I have no way of getting them from either of those devices to the internet right now. And perhaps that’s the greatest annoyance of all: it’s my webgod-given right to condo-blog—not to mention, to conference-blog—and I’m being stymied at every turn.

Grrr. I’m off to a panel on collaborative writing and the like, and I’m hoping that some serious intellectual stimulation might help improve my attitude, PDQ.

You’d think I’d forgotten about this lovely feature, the way I’ve been not posting about the imminent condo. But two things serve to remind me to post something real-estate oriented today: first, my new digital camera arrived today. Thanks for all your recommendations; I ended up going with the Canon PowerShot A85, with which I’m pretty happy so far. Today’s pics don’t come from that camera, but some will, darned soon.

The second reminder was a voice mail message from my sales office telling me that it’s time to go pick my granite. Not as in which color or style granite I want, but as in which slab. I get to go poke around a yard full of granite. It’s almost worth being in escrow for that.

On to today’s pictures:

These pictures date from August 15, a week after the previous images of the framed-up building I posted. On the one hand, it’s hard to see much in the way of progress.

On the other hand, the building is gradually becoming not see-through.

I’m popping by momentarily with the new camera, and so will have fresh images for you shortly.

—–

*Actually, it’s only two weeks late. I expected not to get the entry finished today, but instead to post it tomorrow, and forgot to change the title when I decided to go ahead and hit publish.