tetonrider

some of their stuff is cut slightly different for the US market, as they've explained to me.

Wesley36

The thing about that 5lbs tho - easy come, easy go. IME it disappears in less than a week when I stop supplementing.

Right now I am in the midst of roller season, and even though my current training block is focused on tempo/SST/subthreshold work, I have started with workouts that involve lots of surging above z5 (like shovelhd intervals). Hopefully the creatine will help with building explosive power, and the weight doesn’t matter much this point in the season.

gsteinb

oy

grolby

Since mikey is apparently still in bed and the team he joined happens to be mine, I can tell you it's custom. Mostly the "team" stuff, though the San Remo is available to those who want one.

From my own experience, I could probably get away with XS for shorts, though S is fine and what I'll stick to, I think S is small enough when it comes to the jersey. If I were buying a San Remo again (I'm not), I would probably go XS. Weirdly, I find I have the opposite problem cdr does with the shorts, at least on the San Remo - they're too long. The San Remo is clearly designed for a build like Ryder Hesjedal's or something like that. Small means skinny but tall. I found the shorts gapped a little down at the grippers. I am short, but my legs are not short for my height, so that was annoying.

mike868y

definitely not still in bed! i just don't check bf first thing in the morning. not ****** enough for the sanremo skinsuit, probably just going to order bibs, jersey, and windvest. i'm guessing it's the standard custom stuff, not any of the higher end models. guess i'll go with xs on both jersey and shorts!

bmcphx

mikey, order XS absolutely no question. I put on Castelli stuff in S and it fits ok on me, could get away with XS if I wanted to, and I'm much taller and slightly heavier than you, 5'10" 135lb.

mike868y

you're also probably skinnier than me, if that makes sense. i'm so short, but kind of stocky in build.

gsteinb

you're built like a pile of poo

caloso

Re Castelli shorts: make sure to get the thinnest pad available. I got the standard "KISS", I think. It's like a diaper.

Wesley36

Care to elaborate?

gsteinb

great googly moogly

Wesley36

ok

grolby

Had a scare on the house thing, inspection revealed that the boiler is a nasty cold snap away from total failure and we weren't sure for a couple days there if the sellers would agree to a price reduction and winterizing the house. But they did! This process is so crazy. Long way to go yet, but things are looking increasingly good for this house. One thing I've learned in the last couple weeks, holy hell are house things expensive.

shovelhd

My current house failed Title V septic inspection after I signed the P&S. The seller had to cough up $10K for a new leach field. Oh well. That was the only major issue so while I could have backed out I didnt. All part of the process.

grolby

From the experience that my parents had with their septic system when I was a kid, I am pretty happy to be buying a house on city sewer. But hey, if it's not one expensive thing, it's another. We probably have about $10k of work to do on this house, but on the other hand we're probably getting it for more than that below normal market rate for a house without the deferred maintenance and cosmetic issues this one has. And I'm kinda looking forward to getting my hands dirty.

himespau 

We had to back out of our first agreement to buy a house after the inspector found cracks in the foundation and that the house was settling (at which point the seller admitted it and said he'd contacted someone about putting in supports to stabilize part of the sinking - but we'd lost trust with the seller and decided it was worth the lost money to back out).

Be careful to make sure you get everything in writing. Our second attempt at buying the house, we'd put in that the seller would pay closing costs. He sent back a note signed with a counteroffer on the price saying all other terms ok (we'd asked for a couple of other things), so we went ahead as if he was covering closing costs, but apparently he thought that was part of the changed price (though didn't explicitly say that). In the end, we'd negotiated with him for some cost reductions to fix things and he was ok with that until he saw the contract saying he was on the hook for closing costs at the last minute, flipped his lid, and nixed all the other changes. Since we were on a time crunch (with a move from Boston to Kentucky and new jobs starting in less than a month at that point), we had to take it or lose the deal, so we took it. Ended up having to buy a new furnace and a few other things out of pocket right after arriving which sucked. So just make sure everyone is totally on the same page with everything and get it all in writing (we thought we had, and we'd had his concessions in e-mail but not on the signed final contract when he freaked out and I'm still kind of thinking it was a last minute negotiation strategy to get another $8k back).

topflightpro

I used to be that way. Now I just pay people who are experts in that area to do the work. I've learned that it's generally not worth the time and effort to save a few bucks. And believe me, it generally was only a few bucks saved once factoring in my time plus supplies and tools...

The only advice I can give you is make sure you start any home repair project in the morning and never on a holiday when stores are closed. That way you have plenty of time to make multiple trips to the hardware store for parts or tools you didn't know you would need.

valygrl

Don't forget that getting it below market rate doesn't mean that 10K you need to spend will appear out of thin air. You won't get an equity loan in the first few years of home ownership, so you'll need cash to pay for those expenses.

I'm 5 years into owning a deferred-maintenance/cosmetic issues/cheap house, and have so far done zero cosmetic renovations and spent $7K on sewer repair and $5K on associated revision of the front landscaping (that was ruined by the sewer repair). It still has the exact same ugly carpet and tiny kitchen it started with, that I thought we were going to fix pretty quick.

himespau 

+1
Added a second kid 3 months ago and the increase in daycare means we're still waiting to do what's looking like it will be a very expensive repair to a cosmetic fence before we can do crucial things like fixing drafty windows that won't open let alone kitchen/bathroom remodels we thought we'd have done by now. And that's after spending countless hours getting rid of English Ivy that the previous owner had let crawl up the house, damage windows, and screw up the landscaping (something else that wasn't cheap to replace). Stupid HOA rules about external looks of the place coming before stuff that actually matters.

carpediemracing 

We replaced our furnace and hot water heater (both oil) I think a couple weeks after moving in. $8k off the bat, and this is in a condo association house, so no exterior maintenance (roof, paint, gutters, driveway have been redone since 2008).

We backed away from a house where the seller's agent told us that, no, the town doesn't require permits for finishing basements (add a bathroom, heating, electrical, heat and air, really, no permit?). The agent also tried to get us to use their "inspection". Our inspection revealed contaminated well water, the lack of permits on the basement work (and correspondingly inaccurate property taxes), some other stuff. Then the agent demanded the inspection that we paid for, saying that anything related to the house was theirs, and threatened to withhold our deposit if we didn't give them a copy. We told them to pay us the $1600 or $1800 the inspection cost and they could have it, else we wanted our deposit and we'd gladly go to court over the deposit. That particular agent is the best selling agent in that town. An absolute nutcase but apparently the agent moves a lot of houses using these tactics.

island rider

What makes you say that? With good credit and sufficient equity I would be surprised if you couldn't. (The real issue is that your down payment is what effectively creates that equity absent a large discount off appraised value.) In fact I seem to recall that actually being pitched as way to keep mortgages below the jumbo threshold. But that was a few years ago and my recollection could be completely flawed.

valygrl

I found I needed more than 20% equity to get an equity loan in the amount I was looking for (pretty big). This was a while ago and I didn't try very hard, so i could be wrong about that.

big john

What happened with your broken Juliana? Did you get to go mtbing on your trip?

grolby

Thanks for the advice, everyone. We're being careful. And our agent is really good, which helps.

Yeah, we're doing those repairs out of our cash reserves. We're fortunate in that we have quite a bit more in savings than we need to make the downpayment. Fortunately, the cosmetic stuff is almost entirely interior painting, the house has intact hardwood floors throughout - roughed up in a couple places but otherwise good.

Yeah, I've heard the story about furnace replacement right off before. When it comes right down to it, we're getting lucky in a way - put in a brand new boiler, get annual inspections and pretty much just don't worry about it for many years.

That agent sounds like the cartoon villain of real estate agents. Wow.

bmcphx

I finally got the call that my evo is fixed, the shop replaced the bottom bracket with something "without a wave washer and more reliable in our experience" but also said the rear tire is already destroyed.

So I used my $50 competitive cyclist credit on a Schwabe one that was already on sale, got it for $15 including shipping.