THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 20, 1996 TAG: 9604180285
SECTION: REAL ESTATE WEEKLY PAGE: 28 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: ABOUT THE OUTER BANKS
SOURCE: Chris Kidder
LENGTH: Long : 108 lines
If hell exists on earth, it's now in my new two-car garage. That's where I wisely instructed the movers to leave all my boxes of stuff. It took the movers more than 30 man-hours last week to empty my two-bedroom apartment and a storage room at my father's house.
I didn't have much furniture to move: it was mostly stuff. The garage is stacked three and four boxes high. I figure I'll have it all sorted and put away by the year 2000.
While the garage simmers in the sins of my past shopping life, my new house is heavenly. It's not quite finished but it's close enough to know that it's even better than I hoped it would be. The layout and the light are perfect, well worth the many tense times when the designer argued with me about changes. Somehow, we were lucky and managed to make the right compromises.
A friend who recently went through this new house process herself advised me not to move in until the house was absolutely, positively finished. If you move in and give the builder his final payment, she told me, you'll never get all the annoying little bugs worked out. She moved into her new home in late January and is still waiting for her builder to finish fixing things.
I moved in anyway. Even though the screened porch is still without screens. Even though the gutters aren't on the roof, the kitchen window is cracked and the drywall contractor hasn't come back to fix the dozen or more dings and holes left by other subcontractors. I have faith that my builder will get his job finished.
My biggest challenge now, beyond struggling with the storage demons in my garage, is water.
The ``big picture'' for island residents anywhere along the Outer Banks is that water is a precious commodity. In some places, it's already been in short supply. The small picture at my end of Raleigh Woods on Roanoke Island is that I have more water than I want. Every time it rains, several small lakes form on the front half on my lot.
The trick is to grade the lot to encourage the water to run off without running under the house. My landscaper also needs to develop a plan for plants that don't mind standing in a little water on a regular basis.
I should have inspected the lot more carefully during and after rainstorms. Then I could have anticipated the drainage problems. I assumed that because I was able to get a septic tank permit after adding only a foot of fill to the lot that the drainage was reasonably good.
In retrospect, I see that I should have added about three more feet of fill, allowing the house to be higher and the land to slope away from it. I hadn't taken the lay of the subdivision into account: The entire street runs downhill - toward my lot - with no drainage system.
Fortunately, my house sits high on the back half of the lot. And there are shrubs and ground covers that will thrive in soil that slogs from soggy to sand-dry in a matter of hours. Water on the ground isn't my only dilemma. I'm undecided about what to do with the water that's in the ground.
Property owners in my subdivision, part of unincorporated Dare County on Roanoke Island, rely on private wells and septic systems. Well water here isn't hard to come by: It's close to the surface and there seems to be an adequate supply.
It's the quality of the water that has me concerned. First of all, it's hard water, meaning that it contains enough calcium and magnesium to leave deposits in pipes and appliances, spots on dishes and hamper the sudsing and cleansing properties of some soaps and detergents.
Water hardness is measured in terms of grains per gallon. My water has 10 grains of mineral particles per gallon, which makes it a 4 on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the hardest water. This isn't unusual: according to the Council of Better Business Bureaus, water flowing to 85 percent of America's homes is a ``2'' or higher on the hardness scale.
(For those of you who love trivia, a grain is 1/7000 of a pound, the smallest unit in the avoirdupois system of weights used in the few English-speaking countries that have yet to make the switch to metric.)
The second strike against the water is iron. The water tastes strongly metallic although I've been told that isn't harmful. After seeing what the water does to a new toilet (red, rusty streaks down the bowls of every gleaming white fixture in the house), you have to wonder what it might do to the laundry.
The minerals and iron can be handled with a water conditioning (softener) unit and a charcoal filter. Purchasing such a system outright costs about $1,800 and I've convinced myself that its worth the money.
But what about the health hazards of drinking well water? The water softener and charcoal filter will not remove nitrates, arsenic, radium or coliform bacteria. My well water showed no unacceptable levels of bacteria or chemical pollutants now, but how will I know the water is safe
At what point does the ground become saturated beyond its capacity to cleanse chemicals from groundwater? How many septic tanks have to be functioning - or failing to function - in the neighborhood before the water becomes unsafe to drink?
I could buy a small reverse osmosis system that cleans drinking water by forcing it through a semipermeable membrane which separates the water molecules from the larger molecules of pollutants. Dare County uses a larger-scale reverse osmosis plant to process most of the water it sells to beach residents from Duck to Hatteras Island.
The water company will be happy to sell me its RO system and install it in my garage for $700. To their credit, they advised me that I didn't need it.
But I think I'll have to wait on reverse osmosis. With my garage full of boxes, finding room to install anything might require making a bargain with the devil himself. MEMO: Send comments and questions to Chris Kidder at P.O. Box 10, Nags Head,
N.C. 27959. Or e-mail her at realkidd(AT)aol.com
ILLUSTRATION: Staff photo by DREW C. WILSON
Chris Kidder gives contractor Don Pokelwaldt a tour of her new
Roanoke Island home.
by CNB