The Family Sideways: Now we're talking.

Now we're talking. 4/11/2007 01:22:00 PM

Wow.

I just spoke to 5 different utility companies in a total of 30 minutes. At lunch time. If that's not incentive enough to move to Colorado, how about this: they were all real people, and they understood me (well, that second point will be more clear on May 1st).

The phone company (Qwest)
I write their company name and link to the URL because, holy crap, they were so freaking easy to deal with. Long gone are the hours of waiting on hold with Comcast to set up an appointment you know they won't keep. I told the PERSON I got on the phone that we're moving, but want to have service (at the same number) at both locations at once, overlapping for a couple months (so when you call our home phone number, it will ring at both houses). Problem? Hell no.
Can I save money by switching from my third-party DSL ISP to the Qwest ISP? You bet. Done. Can I still get 5Mbps service? No problem. How do I notify them that I want to switch the DSL service from one location to the other? Unplug it and bring it to the new house.

This conversation was over in 6 minutes. Un-freaking-believable. Eat your heart out Chicago (and Houston, for that matter).

Water/Sewer:
Again, no problem. The seller had just talked with the city water lady so she already had all the info handy. Done.

Gas:
Again again, no problem. We'll have service at both locations, just call to cancel when we want to shut it off to our current location.

Garbage/recycling:
Ditto above.

The only real hassle is printing out a connect/disconnect form for the (local, co-op) power company. No real surprise there.

In addition to this, we have our flood insurance in place now as well, and because the seller is a stickler for paperwork (he actually lobbied FEMA to get the home reclassified outside a flood zone, no joy), they gave us the FEMA Elevation Certificate which knocked off almost 90% of our flood insurance premium every year. In five years, we'll save almost $10,000 because of that. Holy awesome.

Anyway, we're ramped up (and amped up - that original flood quote meant no fireplace for me downstairs, which is now back on the drawing board), and ready to go. We're set for closing (show up and sign) and it would be tough to be more psyched right about now.

The only hitch: Remember when we first moved to Steamboat and we had that weird mailing address issue? No local mail-delivery (only delivery to a cluster box)? Well, since we're moving to the old part of town (aptly referred to as "Old Town"), we don't even have a cluster box. Which means, we need a PO box. I stopped by the PO the other day to see what it takes to get a box, and unfortunately they are OUT. That's right, the post office is OUT of PO Boxes. I'm going to drop off an application anyway so we can be next on the list (and I was told they expect cancellations soon), but if we don't get one it means we have to get a PO Box at the post office on the other side of town. Yuck.

That's it for now! Since things are beginning to really ramp up, I'll start to post my plan for the downstairs soon.

Later!

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2 Comments:

B.J. said...

Sounds good, I am uber excited about the video showing improvements.

posted at 4:22 PM

Pablo said...

If Mark is going to be at both locations, won't they both already have a sufficient gas supply?!

BJ is so Uber.

posted at 4:52 PM