5/14/16
It’s been six weeks since the fire. I have been mourning the loss of the 1977 Targa for the entire time. In addition, I have been half heartedly looking for a replacement car. Well that is not exactly true. My heart has been fully committed to looking for a replacement, but Pam’s hasn’t. Pam has a couple of reasons for her reticence. First, I did fail miserably on the first one, even though it could have happened to anyone. Second, she says we need a place to put it, like a garage……and we do not have a functional one at the moment.
Before the firemen left on the day the 1977 Targa burned, I asked the firemen if they thought the garage was damaged enough to need to be rebuilt. They said they didn’t think so. I was happy to hear that. The next day John and Kris drove back from Mammoth and came over. Ostensibly to see the burned car, but I think he just wanted to show us the ridiculously large bruise on his arm as a result of his broken arm/shoulder from his skiing accident. In either case, Kris said we should report the fire to our insurance company. I told her that I didn’t think I needed to, and then we changed the subject back to John’s arm.
The next week Pam asked me to check if th
e electricity worked in the garage. I thought it would, but I was not sure. The light fixture had been destroyed in the fire nd the wiring was just dangling from the ceiling. But I thought the circuit could still work. Well, it didn’t. This posed a problem. The contractor who remodeled our house about 15 years ago put in a new electical panel, but never identified which breakers were attached to which circuits, so I had no idea which one related to the garage. That didn’t matter, as none of them looked thrown anyway. This did get me thinking, though. If I needed an electician, maybe, just maybe, I should report this to the insurance company. So I did. Let me restate that and thank Kris at the same time. Thankfully, I did. The adjuster came out and said I need to do a lot of work on the garage. All the beams I thought had a little bit of charring needed replacing, he said. Then he went on to say that given the age of the garage, it was built in the 1930’s, that once they started redoing the beams there would be a lot of code upgrades required. So now we are restoring the garage, which is why it is not functional now, and will not be for three to four months.
My first task was to pick a contractor. I talked to one recommended by the insurance company, but, as luck (?) would have it, one of my neighbors was rebuilding a garage after an electical fire, so i met with his contactor and decided to use his contractor because he was dealing with the vagaries of building something in Beverly Hills, which is not for the faint of heart. At he moment, the time to restore the garage just keeps lengthening, as we get more information about the garage and more and more issues appear. It started with an engineer identifying all the ode upgrades required. I have to thank Kris again and again. If I had not dealt with this properly and tried to sell my house without doing so, I can only imaging how much of a haircut on price I would have had to take.
So Pam is 100% right. I have no place to put another car.