Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 10:37:48 -0400
To: bovik@cs.cmu.edu
From: Eric Tilton <tilt+@cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: various house recommendation stuff
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I promised a while ago to send in info about my house-buying experiences,
and failed to. Here it is.

First, we had a good experience with Jo Freedman at Northwood Realty
(412/361-6500 x225). She was our agent, and was extremely helpful and honest.

We had to get some things fixed in order to close. There was some exterior
painting which needed to be done: we used Henry Weber (his company is
Masterbrush Painting, 412/481-2155). He was good, was very helpful (we had
a tight schedule, and he was able to accomodate us), and had reasonable
prices. He also managed to do a great job of fixing a water-damaged
interior wall.

The water damage was from an adjoining chimney. At first, we believed this
was because the flashings were bad on the chimney. After we got a few
roofing guys up there, it became apparent that the flashing, while not
completely perfect, were not the cause of the problem. Instead, it was
condensation of water exhaust from our high-efficiency boiler. The exhaust
wasn't making it up all three stories in the winter; it would condense at
around the third floor. There are two solutions to this. The first is a
lining for the chimney; in our case, the chimney was too long to do this
for. The second is to vent the exhaust out the side of the house. We went
with this route. We used Schultheis Brothers to install the venting and a
fan (412/793-8000), and had a fairly pleasant experience with them.

We had two roofing guys give us estimates, before we discovered that the
flashing wasn't the problem. The first guy, Joe Didiano, seemed more
interested in charging us a lot for things we didn't need, and took forever
to get around to giving us an estimate (412/731-6896). We didn't use him.
In fact, we called the second guy about a week after calling the first, and
the second guy got back to us sooner. The second guy was Paul Hoolahan
(412/521-0191), who gave us a straight answer, even though it meant that we
didn't get any roof work done. Needless to say, when we do need roof work
done, we'll be calling him.

Finally, we needed a structural engineer to convince the bank that the
garage was in good shape (because the rassenfrassen FHA inspector made a
comment about how "the garage looked ok, but he wasn't qualified to judge."
grrr. grrr.). We used Jerry Valenti (412/782-3153) who was fair and
reasonable.

Hope this is useful.

Eric