On Friday morning, I mentioned that the electric may or may not be a problem to get turned on. It has now become a problem. I mentioned that I saw empty casings where electric meters used to live, but currently house nothing.
I also mentioned that, from the seller, I found some hopeful news that the meters may actually be in tact and in the basement. Armed with some hope, I visited the house to meet with an electrician and get the water turned back on.
When I arrived at the house, the first, and most obvious course of action was to go straight to the basement. I went straight to the room that housed the meters that the seller was talking about. Here is what I found:
Gas meters.
Crap.
These meters do not gauge how much electrical current the property is consuming, but the gas consumption instead. This is bad news. Very bad news. Now that I know for certain that there are, in fact no electrical meters hooked up to anything, here are the steps I need to take in order to return the power:
1. Hire an electrician
2. Have that electrician contact National Grid to obtain a work request number
3. Using that work request number, pull a permit for electrical work
4. Have the electrician bring electrical up to code
5. Have the City Line Inspector come out and make sure everything is OK
6. The City Line Inspector contacts National Grid to get the meters installed
7. I contact National Grid to schedule an appointment to have the meters installed
8. National Grid installs the meters
9. I contact National Grid, again, to have work inspected
10. National Grid approves the work and finally restores power
When getting all of this information from the National Grid folks, I asked how long this generally takes. The customer service rep let me know that it generally takes about two and a half weeks. There will be no power for at least two weeks at this stupid place.
Crap. Again.
In better news, a few people from Providence Water showed up and turned the water on. Hooray.
Once the water worked, I went home for the rest of the day, The evening brought the still kind of strange Water Fire in Providence. What's Water Fire? It's when weird artsy people set some bon-fires in the middle of the rivers downtown, Enya plays through speakers along the river and vendors sell glow in the dark necklaces in the streets. It's strange and crowded, but looks kind of cool. I took a few pictures:
On Saturday morning, Amanda and I headed over to the place to do some work. Not much, but some. one of the things that I set out to do was clean out the refrigerator on the first floor. It apparently had some stuff still in it, so the Sears delivery workers (from Friday) didn't take it away, like they did with some other appliances.
The fridge was foul. I wrote about some more fridge problems at the last place, but this one was worse. It not only had a freezer full of mystery and shelves containing who knows what, but it was also used by someone presumably addicted to opiates. The opiates make it worse.
That aside, I held my breath and cleaned it out.
I have no idea what was in this covered pot, but it smelled worse than anything you can imagine. People generally say something smells bad and exaggerate it. It did not smell worse than anything I can imagine, because I can still imagine what the shelves of the refrigerator smelled like. In the freezer, most things were in bags or covered (loosely) in plastic wrap; not the case in the bottom.
In the above pitcher, and absolutely disgusting Kool-Aid-esque liquid had a one inch thick floating hairy mold colony. It looked like a sponge used to clean the inside of a rusty oil tank that doubled as a hair container for busy barber shop floating on fruit punch. It looked horrific and the smell was debilitating. Truly gag inducing and stayed with you for minutes in the fresh air of the outdoors. Ugh.
Here's how I felt about the whole ordeal:
Amanda shared the sentiment for certain, as she was in the vicinity of the fridge snapping photographs.
Another thumbs down? To the piping. We cracked the main water valve after the fridge clean-out and ran all over the house checking for leaks. The last place we checked, Dan Guest House, was of course, the most-leakingest. See?
Awesome. The back house is not only unlivable because of the lack of electricity, but also because when you turn the water on, the pipes leak rusty water all over the place. Fantastic.
Once the water was checked, we dragged some stuff out of the basement and headed back to the Courtyard Marriott in Providence, which is, sadly, no longer our home. Since we won't have electricity for a few weeks, and since the plumbing is terrible in Dan's Guest House, we will be living in a hotel for a little while longer. because this is the case, we had to find a less expensive hotel. Ugh. We are now at the lovely Ramada Inn in Seekonk Massachusetts. It smells bad. We're both excited.
No we aren't.
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