Month: February 2013

Day Fifteen

Day Fifteen
(wire for under cabinet light)

The two contractor guys only stayed at the house for about 3 hours today and worked some more on covering seams in sheet rock and sealing up gaps in the wall in preparation for cabinet installation, whenever that might be.

The first hour of their time was spent helping me schlep the not needed cabinets and trim pieces back to Lowe’s so I could get the refund money. They carried the big 24″ square base cabinet and the two pieces of 96″ long trim for the side of the refrigerator in their pickup truck. I put the 2 small cabinets and a dishwasher return in the trunk and then back seat of the Purple Whale. Upon arrival we piled all the items in the corner of the returns area and they went back to the house, while I got in line behind the one person needing assistance besides me.

The receipt I had was for the entire 78 item cabinet order with descriptions of each item that were sometimes long and always cryptic. The item numbers were also listed and because we had gotten the $1300 discount back when we ordered them, there was the list price, the prorated discount price, and the final price on there too. The piece of paper was over 4? long. Oh, and by the way, it was slightly incomplete as the cash register had run out of tape as it printed it. The very first step in the refund process is to scan the bar code on the bottom of the receipt to call up the invoice number, oops, that didn’t get printed because of the short paper.

She looked the order up using my phone number and we commenced to searching our respective lists, my long receipt and her on her computer screen. This process was particularly vexing as my receipt was not printed in any kind of order. For her it was difficult because she was looking at a 40 row high by 80 column wide CRT with item number and description in one narrow column that truncated it after about 10 characters. I would find my item and call out the item number and its description and she would page down, page down, page down until she found something that might be my item. After about 20 minutes she had five items for refund and printed out the receipt for me to sign. When I looked at it, it had 5 items, but one was a repeat, but inexplicably it had a separate price of 1 cent. So now I had to compare those 4 items to those listed on my 4? long receipt to find the missing fifth item. I did find it and good thing too, as it was $120 for one of those 96? panels.

We still weren’t done. I had the 24?drawer base that I needed to return to the store so they could order the replacement. The girl helping me out didn’t know how to handle it, so she tried calling someone from the cabinet department to get an explanation, but no one answered. No one answered her page either, so she called someone in the office upstairs and she was told to do a refund and have me buy the cabinet again. Of course as soon as she hit the enter key to refund my charge card, someone from cabinets showed up and said, that isn’t how it is handled, it was supposed to be handled internally. So she then had to call a manger over to override the refund internally at the store level, but it was too late for Visa, so I had to buy back my broken cabinet only to leave it behind while they contacted the manufacturer for a new one.

By time I was finished there were about a dozen, probably internally fuming, people in line waiting to return something.

Day Fourteen

Day Fourteen

Not much is happening as we are in limbo because of the cabinet reshuffle. While we wait on our 3 new and 1 replacement unit little things are going on. Today there was some sheet rock mudding going on and a light switch was moved.

The moving of this switch is small potatoes in the grand scheme of the kitchen remodel, but it will be a big deal for Donna and I. The switch controlled the overhead light in the “computer room” which is between the kitchen and garage. Because at one point, before we lived there, the garage was a carport and the computer room was a screened porch, the switch was inside the house, in the kitchen not outside in the screened porch. Now it will be on the other side of the wall, so for the next couple of months we will probably slap the smooth wall in the kitchen as we walk into the computer room before remembering it has been relocated.

Best Buy Survey

As part of the remodeling I purchased an item online from Best Buy. I was informed that I would get a phone call the day before, sometime before 8:00 PM, to give me a 2 hour window for my delivery. They called at 7:45 PM. An omen perhaps?

The truck pulled up with 5 minutes left in the widow and the folks delivering the item were courteous and swift with getting my stuff in the house. Because there weren’t installing anything they were done and gone even before the 5 minutes left in the delivery window expired. This morning I got an email asking me to take a survey on my experience. They dangled the usual entery in a sweepstakes drawing as enticement to complete it, but I was going to do it anyway. It was only about 8 or 9 questions long and the largest time portion was spent writting the comments on the end:

They arrived at 2:55 PM, with just 5 minutes to spare in the 1:00 PM -3:00 PM delivery window I was given on the phone. The driver called 2 hours before to see if I was at home because he was passing thru on his way to another town and wanted to know if he could make the delivery then. I was at work, but he couldn’t wait the 15 minutes it would take me to get home, so he continued on.

The manifest they left behind with my purchase had a delivery time frame on it of 10:30 to 12:30 and an estimated Time of 11:19 AM – 11:34 AM (right around when he called.) If someone had called me earlier with the manifest time frame for delivery I could have received my item in the morning.

Your survey also needs some work and I would have rated it as completely unsatifactory if you aksed me about it. You cannot skip over the items on it that are not applicable, so I rated your delivery service as completely unsatisfactory in “Product Knowledge” and “In Store Experience” because it was an online purchase and all they had to do was put the box in my home.

Day Thirteen

Day Twelve

The contractor was a no show today, so nothing happened again. He wrote last night to say that he wouldn’t be able to make it until the afternoon as he had volunteered to be thrown in “jail” for the MDA and he had to raise $2500 “bail” to get out. I guess he never made bail. I just sent him this email:

Ed,

The delivery window from Best Buy was from 1:00 to 3:00PM. They showed up at 2:55… If they hadn’t made it by three I was locking the door and driving off to work where I was going to cancel the order and get my money back. That’s what kind of mood I’m in.

I am hoping your absence today from our house does not mean you are as discouraged with this project as we are. Donna was kind of discussing renting a U-Haul and loading all of the cabinets and stuff in it and returning everything to Lowe’s to start over at Home Depot. I remain only slightly more up beat.

We have decided to keep the 3 cent cabinet and use it as one leg of the counter on the back wall. This way we can take back one of the 15″ drawer bases and get a more respectable $346 back. We got the wet box for it out of the dumpster and it is drying in the back room.

As for replacement and additional cabinets I have good news and bad news. Good news is that the order will completed at the factory on the 28th. The bad news is that the truck to our area stores only delivers on Tuesday, meaning they won’t be available to pick up there until the 5th. On the 24″drawer base, they will not ship out a replacement until we get the bad one to the store, but if we get it there on Thursday, we may get lucky and it too will be ready at the store on the 5th.

Let me know if we can count on you for a truck to take the unneeded and unusable stuff back.

Thanks,
Brian

Day Twelve

Day Twelve

Some backwards progress today, the to be returned 12″ cabinet was pulled down along with the adjoining 30″ over stove cabinet. The wall units that were in the middle of the floor in the Day 11 photo have been moved back out to the staging room next door. The only good news we got today was that the tentative ship date for our new correct cabinets is going to be this Thursday the 28th. They are going to be shipped to the store, so they might be in hand by this Saturday. I say might, because on Saturday we are getting on an airplane to Texas. Hopefully I can get the people at Lowe’s to turn them loose to our contractor.

In a sort of related note we finally watched the Red Envelope movie that has been on our coffee table since last week, Flight. Nice, five days before boarding one, Brian watches a plane crash movie…

130,000 Bad Thoughts

After looking at what we had and where we could go with our (bigger than the cabinet guy thought) kitchen this morning, Donna and I devised a plan that we thought was great. We took the 15″ wastebasket base cabinet that we were going to return and put it on the wall where we had 15″ more room. As a bonus it was a perfect fit to cover up the awkward heating vent to the adjacent room that couldn’t be moved and it placed the trash can in a sweet spot between the sink and the dishwasher. To make the top cabinets match we would then need to buy an additional 15″ wall unit. On the stove side we would take down the 12″ inch cabinet off the wall, return it, along with the 12″ base cabinet and replace them with 21″ cabinets to fill up nearly all of the “extra” 12 inches on the that wall.

The contractor arrived and pitched his idea, buy 4 new 12″ cabinets and add them to the ends on both walls of what we now had. This would work to his best advantage as he could finish installing what we had on hand and then add the new stuff when it showed up. We shot him down for a couple reasons, the main one was something that Donna has been against from the git go, she didn’t want anything to the left of the stove, between it and the door. The cabinet guy originally wanted to put a 9″ thing there and now here was the contractor proposing something 12 inches wide there. Another one is that we didn’t want any more 12″ cabinets or any at all now that we’ve seen one and realized there isn’t much you can put it in one of them.

After the confab with our contractor we went over to Lowe’s in North Augusta and chatted with our cabinet guy. He was apologetic and we kept it civil. He ordered up the 3 new needed cabinets and also ordered a no cost replacement for one of the ones we received where the doors didn’t look straight and wouldn’t close completely. He is going to expedite them, so hopefully we will get them in a week to 10 days instead of the 4 weeks the original order took. Now because of the configuration changes we will get to return some of the already ordered stuff and that will cover about 60% of the cost of the three new cabinets, so it is not a staggering expenditure.

The contractor and some friends thought that we shouldn’t have to pay any more money to make things right, but Donna and I are more pragmatic than that. Sure cabinet guy mis-measured, but the contractor himself should have caught it if he had actually measured instead of just eyeballing the cabinet guy’s print outs and signing off on them. Heck, I should have noticed the difference myself because I had measured the kitchen when I drew up plans for the granite people to use to quote the counter tops with. We figured had the cabinet guy measured right, or someone noticed the difference in the lengths somewhere along the line, we would have been spending that much more on the right sized cabinets anyway. The only real harm done is we will be without a kitchen for a couple weeks longer which when all is said and done will seem like nothing.

Almost about the time we got back home from North Augusta the Emperor hit the 130,000 mile mark.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1201

Day Eleven

Day Eleven

They didn’t get very far with the cabinet install. Apparently when the Lowe’s cabinet guy came out and measured our kitchen he was a foot off, so everything on the stove wall is 12″ from the door. And if Donna and my quick measurement of the opposite wall is correct he missed that side by 15″. So now the contractor, who was supposed to sign off the measurements with the cabinet guy, can’t figure out how things need to go to fit the room.

We are all somewhat at fault here to some degree because Donna and I didn’t check to see if the measurements were right either. The contractor is coming over at 12:30 tomorrow to talk and we may make a run over to the North Augusta Lowe’s in the morning and see if the cabinet guy is working to see what our options are now.