The Phantom Barn

I have no excuse (more like reasons) for not posting lately, but just a couple notes might keep the blog-dogs off my back!

So we got a mombo tax assessment, due to buying a house which in the processed became "uncapped" (that's a bad thing in tax lingo). I almost became uncapped too when they said as a consequence our taxes would increase as much as we paid all last year in our old home. So, I prepared a brilliant legal defense, consisting of a list of all the repairs we had to make and a handy spreadsheet showing how we were overassessed and hied over to the Board of Appeal. They listened politely and then explained how all those repairs would be classified "costs to cure" which would simply serve to maintain the value of the house to what they had jacked it up to (can anyone say, "backfired?").
To add insult to injury, they handed me a floorplan of our house that showed a covered porch on the back, which is no longer there, but has been converted into part of the inside living space. That factoid had not made it to their records, and guess what? It adds to the value of the house (read, higher taxes). This wasn't going well. I read from the pitying look in their eyes that they would throw me a bone of a few hundred $$, just for trying so hard.

I drove home with my tail dragging, but as I was explaining the defeat to MBW, it occurred to me to look more closely at their data sheet purportedly describing our house and noticed that, unbeknownst (there's a fun word) to me, we had a barn on the property! I took my one and only weapon back into battle at the board of appeal meeting, whose ritual sacrifice of unwitting homeowners was still in session. This time I did elicit some muted expressions of surprise, "Are you sure you don't have a barn?" Pretty sure, yeah. Well, that provoked a storm of action items - we'll pull out the arial photos, send someone by, see you in the summer to revamp the whole assessment, do something right now with the valuation... That part was more fun.

As for remodeling, cabinets came today and the whole apartment will change dramatically. As it is, MPM comes home from school and asks Dan T., "What have you accomplished today?"

Thanks for patient (or not so patient) waiting for a new blog entry.