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The new house

Brad Linder · May 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment


As if my life hadn’t been busy enough, Farrah and I decided to buy a house recently. So on top of blogging for managing the fast-growing Liliputing, blogging for Download Squad, and anchoring newscasts a few days a week at WHYY-FM, we’ve been doing all sorts of housy stuff.

First there was the house hunting, mortgage applying, offer putting-in, negotiatin’ and so forth. About a month ago we closed the deal and we’ve been working to make the house habitable ever since.

We move in a few weeks from now. But the house was a bit more of a fixer upper than we’d expected. We knew we wanted to remodel the incredibly tiny kitchen and make it bigger. But we also had to have a leaky roof fixed, deal with some faulty plumbing in the house, and there’s still a fair amount of work to do. For instance, the laundry is on the third floor instead of the basement, which is nice. But the people who rehabbed the house a few years ago forgot to vent the dryer, so if you don’t want lint rolling around the third floor of the house (which happens to be the floor my home office will be on), we need to knock a hole in the wall to vent the dryer.

A few weeks ago we signed up for DSL service with Verizon. Since we only need internet service and not cable TV or land line telephone service, DSL was by far the cheapest option. And every major room in the house has multiple phone jacks. Unfortunally, they were all wired wrong.

So when the modem showed up, I plugged it in to each room with the same results: nothing. I went out and purchased a cheap telephone handset to test the lines. Again, nothing. But if you climbed a ladder and plugged the handset into the Verizon box outside the house, you could hear a busy signal. So we could either run a line out a window and into that box as a permanent solution or call Verizon for help.

We chose the latter option, and the story gets long and sordid. But the short version is that I waited at the house from 8:00am until 7:00pm last Tuesday and nobody from Verizon ever showed up. Over the span of two days I spent about two hours on the phone until I found a Verizon supervisor that was actually quite helpful, and today two friendly Verizon techs came to the house and fixed our wiring. It was all very exciting and I’m writing this blog post using our brand new internet connection.

You can find more updates about the progress of our new home at Farrah’s blog: Creative Neurosis.

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About me

Brad Linder is editor of mobile tech blog Liliputing.com, host of the LPX Show podcast, and an independent journalist whose work has appeared on public radio and the web.

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