Placerville Wedding (I)
Sep. 20th, 2014 10:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aWe are staying in the House on the Hill, and it is trying to kill us.
I suppose I should back up a moment. Yesterday morning, my dad and Mary picked up Kimberly and me and whisked us off to Placerville for my sister Melody's wedding. I enjoyed Californian landscapes and conversations with my dad on the ~2.5 hour trip while Mary and Kimberly mostly slept. We had some hijinks in Sacramento where I pointed out that the highway exits had finally started using the "Exit" numbers, and my dad thought I meant we should exit the highway right away, and so we ended up touring through some very nice areas of Sacramento west of the American River. Thanks to my iPhone, we nonetheless made it to a Denny's in Sacramento without too much trouble.
Finally arriving in Placerville just before 2pm, we found the house that my dad and Mary had rented for us four, Melody, and her fiancé Jared. It seemed immediately attractive from the outside, a relatively modern house in a brown California landscape with some nice windows high up showing off a master bedroom (for use by the bride & groom). Walking inside we were similarly impressed with a living room with twenty-foot high ceilings and nice windows at both floor level and loft level.
But we didn't know the house was going to try and kill us.
The main problem is neglect. It hasn't gone too far yet, but you can see the house has been on the rental market for a couple of years without receiving a lot of care. The coffee table is getting banged up, some of the blinds don't work right, and one of the toilet paper holders is broken. A fan wobbles dangerously if you turn it on. A zip line running down the hillside out back doesn't work, in part because it needs oil (or something) and in part because there's no way to get up on it anymore. We think a tree house might have once provided that path, as it's mentioned in the two-year-old hand-written house rules sheet, but we found the remnants of the treehouse in a pile of plywood and nails.
However, you can also see how the owners went cheap when they converted to rental. The living room, the master bedroom, and the sub master bedroom are built out nicely, but once you get to the other bedrooms, it looks they were decorated on a severe budget. For example, the bedroom that Kimberly and I chose has a stool instead of a bedside table and the two beds in it are just a mattress, (optional) bedspring, and metal frame. Worse (and this was the really horrible part) the two beds in the room both squeaked loudly if you moved the least bit. Kimberly and I actually slept on separate beds because I was pretty sure I'd be woken up when she shifted around. So, that was the first way the house tried to kill us.
It also looks to me like our bedroom was once an office or something; one of the beds abuts the window so that the curtains don't close right (which got me an eyeful of sun this morning), and the closet has also been converted so that there's no easy way to hang stuff (and especially not long stuff). What's up with that?
In addition, some of the work in the house has a do-it-yourself feel to it. The fairly new windows in the house, which look almost exactly like the new windows we've had installed in at home, are either super tight or else incorrectly counterweighted, so they're hard to open. However, the place the house tried to kill me this morning was in the shower. It has a handheld shower unit and the builders put it at exactly the level where if you bend over to adjust the water temperature BAM you smack yourself right in the eye. Which I did. Hard. Hoping I didn't bruise my face before the wedding.
Anywho, that's the killer house we're living in.
It's a pity, because the house has nice bones and is on some nice land. I suspect the people renting it thought they were going to make more money than they actually did, and have gone cheap as a result, which is unfortunately common in rental situations.
(And it was very nice of my dad and Mary to rent this space, and it's 100% better than staying in a hotel.)
Last night we had the pre-wedding dinner with family. We had 15 people, which also included Jared's mom, dad, sister, brother-in-law, and my dad's siblings. It was the first time I'd seen the more far-flung Appels in about a decade, and it was nice to see them. Kimberly and I sat between Uncle Don and Aunt Judy at the dinner. I had good talks with Uncle Don, and Kimberly enjoyed talking with Aunt Judy, so it was all good, and the dinner was quite good too.
The wedding is this afternoon. For the moment we're just casually sitting around our house. It's actually kind of cool, as it's the only time the six of us have ever shared a house.
Oh, and I neglected to talk about how Placerville is trying to kill us: there's a huge fire burning in the hills above us: the King Fire. It's maybe 15 or 20 miles from where we're staying, but it was only 5 or 10 miles from where we had the pre-wedding dinner last night. As we stepped out of the cars at that restaurant, we immediately noticed a helicopter bobbing up and down not far away, presumably loading water from a nearby lake. Then we discovered that our table had bits of ash on everything. We had the staff move it under covering and clean it up a bit.
Today the (outside) wedding is around the same place. It was apparently very smoky in the morning yesterday, but less so in the afternoon. Based on the wind patterns that Wunderground reports, we'll probably see the same today. Since the wedding is at 4.30, all should be well.
Just saw a baby deer bound through the back yard. Beautiful!
I suppose I should back up a moment. Yesterday morning, my dad and Mary picked up Kimberly and me and whisked us off to Placerville for my sister Melody's wedding. I enjoyed Californian landscapes and conversations with my dad on the ~2.5 hour trip while Mary and Kimberly mostly slept. We had some hijinks in Sacramento where I pointed out that the highway exits had finally started using the "Exit" numbers, and my dad thought I meant we should exit the highway right away, and so we ended up touring through some very nice areas of Sacramento west of the American River. Thanks to my iPhone, we nonetheless made it to a Denny's in Sacramento without too much trouble.
Finally arriving in Placerville just before 2pm, we found the house that my dad and Mary had rented for us four, Melody, and her fiancé Jared. It seemed immediately attractive from the outside, a relatively modern house in a brown California landscape with some nice windows high up showing off a master bedroom (for use by the bride & groom). Walking inside we were similarly impressed with a living room with twenty-foot high ceilings and nice windows at both floor level and loft level.
But we didn't know the house was going to try and kill us.
The main problem is neglect. It hasn't gone too far yet, but you can see the house has been on the rental market for a couple of years without receiving a lot of care. The coffee table is getting banged up, some of the blinds don't work right, and one of the toilet paper holders is broken. A fan wobbles dangerously if you turn it on. A zip line running down the hillside out back doesn't work, in part because it needs oil (or something) and in part because there's no way to get up on it anymore. We think a tree house might have once provided that path, as it's mentioned in the two-year-old hand-written house rules sheet, but we found the remnants of the treehouse in a pile of plywood and nails.
However, you can also see how the owners went cheap when they converted to rental. The living room, the master bedroom, and the sub master bedroom are built out nicely, but once you get to the other bedrooms, it looks they were decorated on a severe budget. For example, the bedroom that Kimberly and I chose has a stool instead of a bedside table and the two beds in it are just a mattress, (optional) bedspring, and metal frame. Worse (and this was the really horrible part) the two beds in the room both squeaked loudly if you moved the least bit. Kimberly and I actually slept on separate beds because I was pretty sure I'd be woken up when she shifted around. So, that was the first way the house tried to kill us.
It also looks to me like our bedroom was once an office or something; one of the beds abuts the window so that the curtains don't close right (which got me an eyeful of sun this morning), and the closet has also been converted so that there's no easy way to hang stuff (and especially not long stuff). What's up with that?
In addition, some of the work in the house has a do-it-yourself feel to it. The fairly new windows in the house, which look almost exactly like the new windows we've had installed in at home, are either super tight or else incorrectly counterweighted, so they're hard to open. However, the place the house tried to kill me this morning was in the shower. It has a handheld shower unit and the builders put it at exactly the level where if you bend over to adjust the water temperature BAM you smack yourself right in the eye. Which I did. Hard. Hoping I didn't bruise my face before the wedding.
Anywho, that's the killer house we're living in.
It's a pity, because the house has nice bones and is on some nice land. I suspect the people renting it thought they were going to make more money than they actually did, and have gone cheap as a result, which is unfortunately common in rental situations.
(And it was very nice of my dad and Mary to rent this space, and it's 100% better than staying in a hotel.)
Last night we had the pre-wedding dinner with family. We had 15 people, which also included Jared's mom, dad, sister, brother-in-law, and my dad's siblings. It was the first time I'd seen the more far-flung Appels in about a decade, and it was nice to see them. Kimberly and I sat between Uncle Don and Aunt Judy at the dinner. I had good talks with Uncle Don, and Kimberly enjoyed talking with Aunt Judy, so it was all good, and the dinner was quite good too.
The wedding is this afternoon. For the moment we're just casually sitting around our house. It's actually kind of cool, as it's the only time the six of us have ever shared a house.
Oh, and I neglected to talk about how Placerville is trying to kill us: there's a huge fire burning in the hills above us: the King Fire. It's maybe 15 or 20 miles from where we're staying, but it was only 5 or 10 miles from where we had the pre-wedding dinner last night. As we stepped out of the cars at that restaurant, we immediately noticed a helicopter bobbing up and down not far away, presumably loading water from a nearby lake. Then we discovered that our table had bits of ash on everything. We had the staff move it under covering and clean it up a bit.
Today the (outside) wedding is around the same place. It was apparently very smoky in the morning yesterday, but less so in the afternoon. Based on the wind patterns that Wunderground reports, we'll probably see the same today. Since the wedding is at 4.30, all should be well.
Just saw a baby deer bound through the back yard. Beautiful!