Elevating My Lifestyle?

2

October 6, 2017 by phicks2012

Years ago when I was building The Castle I wanted a dumb-waiter to use for hauling laundry up from the basement, and food down (and up) from the kitchen, and items up to the attic. My original contractor (Shifty Jim) talked me into going instead with an elevator, and I agreed because my mother had bad knees and I could dimly foresee a day when maybe climbing long staircases might not be something I would really want to do myself on a daily basis.

I’ve never used it much, but recently, for some reason, it started having issues, and suddenly (after calling in a technician who was supposed to get it going for $300) I was being told that it wasn’t properly installed in the first place. WONDERFUL. Shifty Jim really does need to wind up in a lower level of Hell somewhere. The elevator company that sold it to me via SJ is long out of business, and I’m being told that it needs all sorts of work before it will be “up to code” and working again.

People obviously assume that if you have an elevator you also have tons of money to spend on maintaining and servicing it, and that’s just not the case here. Now (because the service tech completely disabled it) I can’t even use it to send things (rather than people) up and down, and unfortunately an elevator is not something Jason and I can work on ourselves.

I was told to expect an estimate, and I asked them if I could possibly have the work done a little at a time rather than all at once. Nope, and the technician who came out rendered it non-functional — supposedly for safety reasons — so now I have a useless closet on one floor. I also never got that estimate until MONTHS later.

The question is one of priorities, right? Do I 1) take out a loan to finance an elevator repair or 2) take out a loan to afford a body-builder named Guido or Knuckles to haul stuff, or 3) just keep dragging things up and down long staircases? Hmmmmm.