Single-Family

Plumbing nightmares… pumpkin pulp!

Should I be flattered to be considered a voice for plumbers across America?

Well here is this week’s tip from Roto-Rooter Plumbing and Drain Service:

~ watch the pumpkin pulp and seeds ~

It seems that while we are enjoying pumpkin pies upstairs in the dining room with the family,  the pulp that we shoved down the garbage disposal is coating our sewer laterals waiting for more debris to catch. And then, typically on a weekend, clogging up and causing a dreaded back up in the basement. Yes, a plumbing nightmare!

Here are Roto-Rooter’s tips:

	Never put pumpkin pulp or seeds down the toilet, sink drain or in the garbage disposer. The stringy, sticky gunk hardens and clogs drains and disposers. Carve pumpkins on a thick bed of newspaper. Wrap up pumpkin-related materials and throw away in the garbage can or compost pile. Separate the seeds, then roast for a tasty treat. Or grow your own pumpkins by planting this year’s seeds early next spring.

Single-Family

New Infill Homes in Vienna, Virginia

Infill development has been going on in Vienna real estate for a long time. But infill development typically happens in communities where vacant lots exist, and there really aren’t any vacant lots left around Vienna, Virginia.

In the past decade Vienna builders have actively acquired homes built in the 1950’s to tear down, and I have been the agent involved in some of these transactions. These 1,450 square foot homes typically have three small bedrooms and one bath, and ideally sit on quarter to third-acre lots. Many of them have basements, but with seven foot ceilings and no natural light, they are unappealing to many of today’s home buyers. In essence, these older homes are functionally obsolete.

Originally, many of the home owners in Vienna were Federal employees living on government salaries. Today, the local economy is much more diversified and Fairfax County enjoys one of the highest average income levels in the country. And the land has become under utilized.

As a result, the property lots have become far more valuable than the structures on them and builders have bought these homes to tear down and build new homes. The Town of Vienna has a zoning restriction of 25% maximum lot coverage, and this restriction has kept new homes to a reasonable size, preserved more of the mature tree canopy, and helped fuel demand for more new homes in established neighborhoods.

And the builders have continued to push into new projects although most have scaled back on speculative building. Buyers are now entering contracts before construction begins which also allows them the benefit of further customizing the home to suit their needs. Of course, like in all real estate sales, location remains the key and prices for these new homes vary considerably. For example, when you see pricing it is usually for two finished levels only unless the home is already finished (a spec home).

A project across the street… from me.

As I am sitting here in my home office, I am looking out at one of these tear down projects which is just getting underway across the street from my home on MacArthur Avenue. The past owners kept to themselves and I really only gave the neighborly wave as they pulled out of their driveway. Why they sold out is unknown to me, but the future of the property seemed the perfect theme for an ongoing blog.

The current home was built in the late 1950’s, is built on a hillside and features a snappy garage. The lot is 16,982 square feet or 0.389 of an acre perfect for a tear down), and backs up to mature oak trees on the rectangular lot. It is a narrow, but deep lot so any home is going to be narrow and deep too.

This week has been the start of the project with the plumber digging up the yard to cut the water and sewer lines and capped them off. Both of these lines are likely original, 1957, and replacing them now makes sense even though it is a requirement. The new sewer line should last 50 years too, and the new water service line will be a modern one-inch pipe.

Many readers may remember when I remodeled my house. It too was a1957 model but had a different, deeper layout, walk-out basement, and room to expand. We weren’t the first home on the block to remodel but have certainly witnessed a neighborhood in transition. Location was very important for a number of reasons, but the actual location or position of the house was superior because the sun filters through the main level from sunrise to sunset. It is these little details that many people don’t see when they decide to buy any home, let along a custom new home on an infill lot in Vienna, McLean or Arlington.

When they start the tear down of this house then we will all follow along.

Single-Family

Installing a real estate “for-sale” sign in Virginia?

Better call Miss Utility first!

Yes, that familiar RE/MAX Presidential sign in your front yard is going to require a bit more effort (and spray paint) to install. The Virginia State Corporation Commission (SCC) is turning up the heat on enforcement of the Virginia Underground Utility Damage Prevention Act which was enacted thirty years ago, and the lowly real estate sign is a prime suspect.

At the heart of the Act is that natural gas lines into homes have been installed without a minimum depth requirement. To make matters worse, older lines may not be as deep due to settlement of the ground over the years allowing some lines to be only 4”to 6” below the surface of the lawn. And, since most utility easements are in the front of a home coming in from the street, they are in the exact spot that most agents stick their signs in the ground.

Anytime there are incidents of damage to underground lines they are photographed and used as examples. Some of the lines are so shallow that your average homeowner could easily put a shovel into the line when digging up a new spring flower garden. As you can see in this photo, the gas line is next to the front porch pillar and marked as a line found just 2 inches deep… heck, my kids could have found this one!

In my 18 years of selling homes in Northern Virginia, I have not heard of anyone hitting an underground utility line when placing a real estate sign in someone’s front yard. But on the other hand, I have not thought about hitting anything other than rocks as I have pushed my sign into the lawn of a client’s home. So maybe this raised awareness of this issue is a good idea before anyone else gets really injured.

The consequence of non-compliance may be a gas explosion or a $2,500 fine, whichever you consider to be worse. To add to my listing activity checklist or sequence of events, I am now going to call Miss Utility at 811 to come out and mark your property before I place a for-sale sign in your yard. The guidelines say that I need to call at least 48 hours, excluding weekends, before doing any sign placement so they can do their work marking up your yard with yellow and orange spray paint .

Single-Family

My Vienna VA home FiOS upgrade! From 5/2 to 15/5…

In the late 1990’s, I was seeing many new homes being built with Cat5 cable and a network hub from Bell Atlantic (soon to be Verizon) so that buyers could have the best available communications network. The box was branded with the Bell Atlantic logo but it was up to the new owner to either pick them, a cable company or satellite TV.

In the mid 2000’s, Verizon started to offer FiOS. According to Wikipedia,”noted in Verizon’s trademark, fios is a Gaelic word, translated into English as “knowledge.” Simply put, FiOS is fiber optics direct to your house and provides high speed internet, TV and a land-line phone line.

My story begins a little over two years ago when I had FiOS installed in my Vienna home replacing the basic COX cable service. It was a nice upgrade since there were a ton of channels, on-demand movies, and much faster internet. I had been using Verizon DSL but having the “bundled package” gave me better service at a lower monthly cost.

This summer the two year agreement ended and my monthly charge increased – bummer! And in early July I came home to hear my son tell me that “something” happened to the internet connection. Of course I know some tricks to try, but discovered that the FiOS router was out, and no re-boot or re-set seemed to engage the device.

And yes, it was plugged in!

Verizon tech-support quickly understood that the router was “fried” and put in an order to send a replacement via UPS. It arrived a few days later and I quickly installed it… up and running!

Like any seasoned geek, I logged onto “speakeasy.com” to perform a speed test on the line only to see that my numbers were low compared to what Verizon is now advertising on the radio (yes I still listen, except to WJFK for canning Mike O’Meara). Let’s just say that the slow results bummed me out since it probably meant that I must have done the installation wrong.

Why was I only getting a download rate at 4.9mb and upload rate at 1.9mb?

I stopped by my local Verizon Wireless store in Tyson’s Corner yesterday for a mobile phone issue, when a nice Verizon CS guy named Scott asked me about my FiOS service. Scott deserves the highest honors here because he listened to me, understood my numbers, asked a few excellent questions and had a solution that would make my day.

When I had FiOS installed, home service was at 5/2 which matched the numbers in my line test. In 2009 that basic service has been upgraded to 15/5 but the change needed to be made by the Verizon tech people… and now my upgrade is scheduled to be done next Tuesday at no cost to me.

So, if you had Verizon FiOS installed two years ago, you may have the 5/2 service too, and all you need to do is contact Verizon to change to 15/5 and agree to keep the service for a year or two just like a mobile phone contract. Good luck!

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