Page 22 of A Light in the Dark
At two hundred, the checks and repairs likely took one or two employees an hour, which made it a fair rate. As any repairs were covered in the contract itself, I could accept a small maintenance fee in exchange for a lengthened contract.
Fifty years on my contract with those terms would transform my home into something I could sell for well over a million dollars if I decided to move.
I didn’t need to think long on it; two thousand a wall would save me a great deal of worry later. “That’s within my budget. How much will it be to shore the exterior walls?”
“As we’ll be working on the foundation anyway, it would be five hundred a wall. It’s fairly trivial to extend the protections up a connecting wall. If you wanted coverage on the roof, that would cost ten thousand. Roof coverage is a little trickier.”
“Wait, you can do my roof?” I hadn’t remembered anything about them offering roof coverage.
“We only offer roof coverage to those who have full wall coverage,” he informed me.
Oh. That made sense, and as I hadn’t invested in wall coverage when I’d initially made my contract, I could accept the employee I’d worked with saving herself time explaining coverage I wasn’t eligible to receive. Ten thousand would stretch my savings more than I liked, but I could afford it. “Is it a fifty percent deposit today and payment on completion for this?”
“We can offer you a payment plan as you have an existing contract with us.” Garth grabbed a calculator and began punching numbers in. “A home your size usually has at least twenty load bearing walls, so we’ll do the estimate based on that number. We’ll have to go into the property to get a count of the walls we need to protect. But for this, twenty is probably a tolerable guess.”
I nodded, counting rooms in my home in my head. “If it helps, I have five rooms upstairs, six rooms on the main level, and the basement is currently open space. There are three bathrooms, a laundry space, and a pantry as well.”
“For a small amount more, we could just shore every room individually. It’s not much difference in work, although if you want to do renovations, you’ll have to get the shoring adjusted. The protection is better, however.”
I did not foresee myself changing the room layout. “How much extra per room?”
“Five hundred plus any extra walls, but we tend to do a lump sum per number of rooms, so we’d use our chart for the size of your home and build our estimate from that.”
With a payment plan, I could afford it, and as long as I took care to monitor the weather, I’d be safe enough in my home.
With the shoring and additional protections, I could stay in Stonecreek despite my concerns regarding the refugee situation.
If I accepted compensation from the Hunters with them being aware I would use the funds to make my home safer, the finances would work out, I wouldn’t deal with quite as much guilt, and I could stick around longer to make certain no one else faced Gabriella’s fate.
The Hunters could afford the bill.
“Do you offer any services for yards? I am thinking about setting up a garden in my back, and I’d rather not lose it every flood season.”
Garth smiled, reached over, and plucked up a brochure, which he handed to me. “As a matter of fact, yes. If you have a drainage gully or similar, we can shore that for you and install a one way barrier. Water can get into the gully, but water cannot leave the gully. We can install those up to ten feet tall, after which you’ll have issues. That system costs fifty thousand to install, and we wouldn’t be able to handle the installation for three months.”
“Can I keep this?”
“Absolutely. If you decide you’re interested, give me a call, and I’ll get you booked. We can do the inspection to makecertain your space is suitable for the system, and we can show you what we can do with your specific yard when we’re doing the other shoring.”
“That’s perfect, thank you.” I slid the brochure into my purse. “What would be the total cost for the work, excluding the yard?”
Garth returned to his calculator, and after a few minutes, he said, “The shoring work will cost fifty-seven thousand including the roof and taxes. Your first payment would have to cover the entirety of the sales tax, which would be roughly twelve hundred. That would make your monthly payment a little under twelve hundred a month for roughly four years. We don’t charge interest on contracts like this, and you can opt to pay off the contract at any time. We try to be flexible for cases like this.”
I dug into the depths of my purse, retrieved my checkbook, and slapped it onto his desk. “I’ll put down five thousand today, if that’s all right.”
“Let me print out the contract, get all the line items sorted, and prepare it for signature. It’ll take about ten minutes. Can I interest you in a cup of coffee in the meantime?”
“Please.”
“I’ll show you the break room. You can make yourself comfortable while I handle the paperwork. I’ll have you out of here within the next twenty minutes.”
If only the rest of the world moved as fast as Garth when determined to close a deal. “Thank you, I appreciate that.”
“You look like you’re running errands tonight, so why keep you loitering longer than necessary? We appreciate your business and value your time.”
“If only we could convince the government of that,” I complained. “The last time I went in to deal with my property taxes, I lost two hours to the red tape.”
“I wish I could say we’re in the business of miracles, but alas, we are not.”
