Fall update
Hi everyone!
We hope you had a great summer and that you’re enjoying the cooler fall temps. There are several updates to share, so please take a moment to catch up on Chastain Walk news below.
Email list
Notice the tab at the top of the page next to the Home tab? If you haven’t signed up already, please stop, and take a moment to register all the emails in your household that should receive email notifications with urgent notices and property news. We’re putting fewer and fewer notices on resident doors these days. If you don’t register, you run the risk of being surprised about the water being off or other issues that could be inconvenient for you because you weren’t aware.
Plumbing repairs and shutting off the water
We’re still having cases where the water is suddenly turned off without notice. If you schedule plumbing work, it is a good idea to ask the plumber ahead of time whether a shut off is required. If you have not provided 48 hours notice and your plumber needs to shut off the water, you’ll need to reschedule the work so that proper notice can be given. To give notice, please email the board at cwboard@chastainwalk.com and we’ll forward your notice to the entire CW email list. Please include your unit number and the date and time the work is scheduled.
For all plumbing work, the board highly recommends Georgia Plumbing, especially if there is any chance that the water will have to be shut off. There is a process to shutting down and restoring water to our buildings, including properly shutting down and restarting the recirculation pumps. It is not uncommon for owners to hire random plumbers and then get stuck with a $1500 bill to replace a pump that was destroyed by plumbers who don’t understand our systems and how the lines are connected between the buildings. When the association has a plumbing issue, this is who we call. You may find someone cheaper, but you won’t find anyone who knows our property better, especially when it comes to solving problems specific to our 50-year-old buildings.
New security light to be added
We are adding an additional security light to the side of building 2 that faces the dog walk that will point in the direction of the dog walk stairs and the left side of the Magnolia tree at the end of the drive. This will be done within a month.
New Mailboxes
We’re all ready for new mailboxes. It has been a project that we’ve talked about for a couple of years now. One stumbling block has been all the coordination required to modify the concrete pad, to coordinate with the post office, and all the neighbors to distribute new keys. JD, who served on the board last year (and for several years prior), and who’s mom joined the board this year, is still doing work on our behalf (thanks JD!) and found a company that will turnkey the entire project for less than what we were going to pay for the new mailboxes from Lowes. We’re still confirming details, but this project is one we hope to start in the next month to six weeks. We’ll let you know more as we firm up details.
Update to our capital improvement plan and a budget review
As we saw last year at the annual meeting, even modest increases in the fees tend to upset people, regardless of the reasons for increasing them. At a meeting earlier in the year, one board member wondered aloud whether the roofing assessment needed to remain at $500/year given the expected lifespan of our current roofs. Given this, and all the large projects we’ve taken on over the last eight years and the age of our last capital improvement plan, the board asked Ray Engineering to review the property and our budget, and to submit a new plan. Once this is complete, we’re going to share it with an accounting consultant who specializes in condominium budgets who will look at our current budget and reserves, and will give us a second opinion about the recommendations in the plan.
Each October, the board meets to review the current budget and set the new one for the coming year. Our goal is to have this report and second review completed by this meeting to help us plan for 2016 and beyond. Candidly, we don’t know what recommendations will come out of this, but we’ll share their findings and a copy of the plan with anyone who is interested. Look for more posts on this topic in October / November.
Door hardware – brushed nickel is the new standard color
The numbers and hardware on most doors are brass colored. Earlier in the year when we were considering maintenance projects, we talked about painting the front and back doors. During the discussion we also talked about the mix of number styles in use because our older number style (or typeface) isn’t available that we’ve been able to find.
We’re still looking at options on how to proceed, but we didn’t want to hold up on all the other maintenance we had planned, so we decided to skip the door project until sometime next year. During the discussion we did agree that, regardless, we were going to move away from the brass color to brushed nickel, so if you are thinking about replacing your hardware or adding a new digital lock, brushed nickel is the color you should look for. Please email the board with any questions about this.
Maintenance projects
As you read in an earlier post, several maintenance projects are underway around the property that should really freshen things up.
The metal rails at the front and back doors are all being repainted. The back stairs to all the flats are being repainted, along with the walls in these same areas. The bollards and bulletin board will get a fresh coat of paint as well. In addition, we power washed the sidewalks and siding. Other wood surfaces (excluding the doors) are getting repainted as well.
A few projects not mentioned earlier: (1) Tar cleanup – there are a few places where tar is leaking over the edge of the roof. Summers Roofing will be out to repair the roof in these spots and clean up the mess, (2) Concrete pads to be refinished – on the back side of building 2, next to the south exit drive, there are concrete pads which support the patios. The walls for these are cracking and look ugly. These will be fixed. (3) Parking lot resurfacing and striping – we’re looking into the possibility of resurfacing and restriping the parking lot before it gets too cold, probably after most of the other maintenance work has been done. We’ll share more details when we have them.
Parking decals and visitor passes
You may have noticed that our newest parking decals are fading badly in the sun. Some are so bad that only the black numbers are visible. In the coming weeks we’ll be distributing new decals and hang tags with UV-resistant inks. When reprinting these we also took into account your comments from the annual meeting: the new versions have no property name on them and no year designation.
Cables draped over the gutters and roof
A few residents have run unauthorized cables over the gutters and roof. From the ground it isn’t easy to determine the unit numbers these serve, so you may receive a notice about these even if you aren’t the culprit (we’ll send a note to a short range of units in the vicinity). In the next couple of weeks, we will have our maintenance people cut and remove these and we’ll ultimately back charge the appropriate unit for doing so and any repairs that have to be made to the building.
We understand that these buildings are older and that you don’t have cable access in each room. Before running any exterior cables, please contact the board with your plans. We strongly encourage you to consider wireless technologies that will allow you to view TV in any room without the need to run cables.
New windows and patio doors
In the summer we wrote about the possibility of upgrading your windows and doors (see our post on June 1). We heard from only a couple of people, so it probably makes sense to push this to the spring or next summer so that we can get more participation. In the meantime, we’ll follow up about the possibility of one-off installations and how this would affect the installation price, if at all. Our previous replacement rounds generally required several participants. If you have interest in replacing your windows or patio doors but did not send us an email earlier, please email the board.
Landscaping update
Mid September we did a walk around meeting with our landscaper to discuss improvement plans. In general, we told them that we wanted to take the lush look of the front and center drive (thanks Dimple!) and find ways to pull that look to the back and sides, paying special attention to the dog-walk side of buildings 2 and 3, the courtyard between 3 and 4, and the entire fence along the north exit drive. We just received their proposal and are reviewing it. More details to come in a future post.
Thanks for taking the time to read and catch up. As always, we’re here to help if you have any questions or concerns.
Your Chastain Walk Board
P.S. Don’t forget to sign up for our email list. As of today, only 28 emails are registered.
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